Fragments, remnants, relics: the paintings of Antonio Bellotti feel like they have been taken from another context, detached from a wall, or cut away from a larger piece of canvas. The artist's skilful use of gesso evokes the texture of fresco painting, and his application of pigment seems magically to drain colour from the surface, as in those ancient frescoes where only the ghost of colour remains attached to the plaster. The imagery is reduced to a few lingering archetypes: a bowl here, a tree or shrub there, or a boat in the middle of a disappearing ocean. Objects and natural features become icons of entire cultural environments where everything else has melted from view.
Some of these images are obscurely familiar, conjuring up details from the paintings of Giotto, Fra Angelico or Piero della Francesca. And yet they are not simply alluding to these works so axiomatic to the history of art, they are also imagining them as part of an alternative history, one in which their meaning has been obscured, and even erased; an alternative history that we might even now be allowing to materialise. We have reduced to a truism the Latin formula 'ars longa vita brevis' without perhaps realising that it is partly mistranslated from Hippocrates' original phrase in which 'art' means 'craft', rather than fine art. Bellotti forces us to realise that great works of art have no physical permanence and that the value assigned to them by art history is based upon the material vestiges of a series of fleeting thoughts and actions. The insights of the art of the past should not be taken for granted, but re-made and re-experienced through the craft that restores them to the often oblivious cultural environments of the present day.
The leitmotif of this whole project is the boat, propelled more often than not by simple oars; it is the kind of vessel still in use all over the world, but is virtually indistinguishable from the very earliest representations of sea-going vessels.. Archaeologists have just recovered the earliest known depiction of a boat from the British Isles, in St Agnes, Scilly (it dates from around 900 BC); it reminds me of a Bellotti. Although Bellotti's images often seem suspended in unbounded space (his pictures have boundaries that always act like truncations of something vaster), they come towards us from another dimension: lost time. Like starlight, they pulse with the energy of a distant past that binds us to the rhythm of the present moment. Both more remote and more immediate than the ambient light of much contemporary art, they seem to collapse the distance between post-modern and prehistoric in the twinkling of an eye.
–Rod Mengham
Further Works
