Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [141]
—Fragment of Nag Hammadi 6, 2
Lorenza Pellegrini entered. Belbo looked up at the ceiling and ordered a final martini. There was tension in the air, and I got up to leave, but Lorenza stopped me. “No. All of you come with me. Tonight’s the opening of Riccardo’s show; he’s inaugurating a new style! He’s great! You know him, Jacopo.”
I knew who Riccardo was; he was always hanging around Pilade’s. But at that moment I didn’t understand why Belbo’s eyes were fixed so intensely on the ceiling. Having read the files, I realize now that Riccardo was the man with the scar, the man with whom Belbo had lacked the courage to start a fight.
The gallery wasn’t far from Pilade’s, Lorenza insisted. They had organized a real party—or, rather, an orgy. Diotallevi became nervous at this and immediately said he had to go home. I hesitated, but it was obvious Lorenza wanted me along, and this, too, made Belbo suffer, since he saw the possibility of a tete-a-tete slipping farther and farther away. But I couldn’t refuse; so we set out.
I didn’t care that much for Riccardo. In the early sixties he turned out very boring paintings, small canvases in blacks and grays, very geometric, slightly optical, the sort of stuff that made your eyes swim. They bore titles like Composition 15, Parallax 17, Euclid X. But in 1968 he started showing in squats, he changed his palette; now there were only violent blacks and whites, no grays, the strokes were bolder, and the titles were like Ce n’est qu’un debut, Molotov, A Hundred Flowers. When I got back to Milan, I saw a show of his in a club where Dr. Wagner was worshiped. Riccardo had eliminated black, was working in white only, the contrasts provided by the texture and relief of the paint on porous Fabriano paper, so that the pictures—as he explained—would reveal different figures in different lightings. Their titles were In Praise of Ambiguity, A/Travers, fa, Berggasse, and Denegation 15.
That evening, as soon as we entered the new gallery, I saw that Riccardo’s poetics had undergone a profound change. The show was entitled Megale Apophasis. Riccardo had turned figurative with a dazzling palette. He played with quotations, and, since I don’t believe he knew how to draw, I guess he worked by projecting onto the canvas the slide of a famous painting. His choices hovered between the turn-of-the-century pompiers and the early-twentieth-century Symbolists. Over the projected image he worked with a pointillist technique, using infinitesimal gradations of color, covering the whole spectrum dot by dot, so that he always began from a blindingly bright nucleus and ended at absolute black, or vice versa, depending on the mystical or cosmological concept he wanted to express. There were mountains that shot rays of light, which were broken up into a fine powder of pale spheres, and there were concentric skies with hints of angels with transparent wings, something like the Paradise of Dore”. The titles were Beatrix, Mystica Rosa, Dante Gabriels 33, Fedeli d’Amore, Atanor, Homunculus 666. This is the source of Lorenza’s passion for homunculi, I said to myself. The largest picture was entitled Sophia, and it showed a rain of black angels, which faded at the ground and created a white creature caressed by great livid hands, the creature a copy of the one you see held up against the sky in Guernica. The juxtaposition was dubious, and, seen close up, the execution proved crude, but at a distance of two or three meters the effect was quite lyrical.
“I’m a realist of the old school,” Belbo whispered to me. “I understand only Mondrian. What does a nongeometric picture say?”
“He was geometric before,” I said.
“That wasn’t geometry, that was bathroom tiles.”
Meanwhile, Lorenza rushed to embrace Riccardo. He and Belbo exchanged a nod of greeting. There was a crowd; the gallery was trying to look like a New York loft, all white, with heating or water pipes exposed on the ceiling. God knows what it had cost them to backdate the place