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25/11/2004

Corrado Zeni

Galerie Voss, Dusseldorf

Six degrees of separation

Between us all
Remarks on the paintings of Corrado Zeni
By Gerhard Charles Rump

Penetration, partial penetration, closeness, distance. With these four words one can describe what proxemics is about, a psychological discipline of investigation into our behaviour of keeping distance or not. We humans, as territorial animals, are usually bent on keeping our distance towards others. In certain situations we allow the breach of such barriers, which are based on innate and culturally acquired sets of norms. Sometimes, like in an elevator, we feel uncomfortable; sometimes it is very much the opposite, if only for a relatively short period of time.

Between us all, usually, there is space. In the hustle and bustle of a modern metropolis, this space is reduced. We are too many. We need not hang ourselves because of that like the children did in Thomas Hardy’s novel “Jude the Obscure (1895), but we, trusting in the systems for the upkeep of public safety, comply with the bare necessities and join the rat race, allowing the space between us and the others to shrink.

Maybe it is this great big white open space between the isolated figures in the paintings of Corrado Zeni which make them so attractive, giving us this aesthetic breathing space. The figures are on the move, we can define the situation as taken from everyday city life, although there is so much white space between the dramatis personae, and we feel very much at ease. Some figures, though, stand or walk pretty close to each other. This may, in some cases, be motivated by their being “together” in some way or other, but aesthetically they all seem to float freely in Zeni’s pictorial world.

Corrado Zeni has described this in his own words: “As humans we live and interact across a wildly diverse set of physical spaces. We each formulate our own personal meaning of place using a myriad of observable cues such as public – private, large – small, daytime – nighttime, loud – quiet, and crowded – empty. Unsurprisingly, it is the people with which we share such spaces that dominate our perception of place. … particularly in public urban spaces we inhabit, the individuals who affect us are ones that we repeatedly observe and yet do not interact with our familiar strangers.”

Zeni, in his own words, paints “people I search and follow at the bus stop, subway or train station; I take hundreds of pictures of subjects that interest me, then I build a digital layout.” That means that Zeni takes photographs of urban situations, and that he, with a little electronic helper, isolates the figures, erases the beackgroung and sometimes even some of the accessories of the figures, and then turns the result into painting. He merges people in the paintings that have, in reality, not been at the same place at the same time, and by erasing both the public and, as it were, also the private background, he rebuilds identities by painting.

And painting is what we are really dealing with. However “photographic” the rendering may strike us, painting is what we see and get. A photographic view in painting has been with us at least since the famous painting of the Comte Lepic with his daughters on the Place de la Concorde in Paris by Edgar Degas, which, seemingly lost, came up in Russia a few years ago. And we owe it to the skills of the late art historian Max Imdahl to learn that, in the Comte Lepic, we are confronted with a thoroughly composed picture nevertheless.

This is also true for Corrado Zeni. Yes, his men wearing casual and sporting sunglasses, hands in their pockets, and his women in Blue Jeans and stiletto heels, often carrying a handbag plus a shopping bag, are rendered in photographical manner, complete with getting out of focus by movement and all the rest of it. Still the grouping refers to classical and universal aesthetic models, like the golden section, for instance. And we do stand in front of a thoroughly composed painting, too.

The higher level of unification is painting. The figures, on looking at them a second time, quickly loose their photographic appearance, exchanging it for a painterly one. An identity once “real”, dissolves and recomposes in a different world, embracing a different kind of reality, the reality of art. What once had been a fleeting moment, like the wind blowing by a window, is arrested, comes to a halt in a pictorial situation which is a dynamic one nevertheless. A glittering show of possibilities and of potential. And the “space between us all” supports this by showing itself as painted as possible: It is a white coat of painting, with the traces of the brush and little rolls of paint pointing out of the essentially flat surface.

Still there is more to it. Corrado Zeni explicitly refers to a psychological experiment by the American sociologist Stanley Milgram, conducted in 1967. Milgram tried to find evidence for the hypothesis that, as Zeni put it, “members of any large social network would be connected to each other though short chains of intermediate acquaintances.” Milgram’s few hundred randomly selected human guinea-pigs came from Kansas and Nebraska and were sent “passport-like packets”, which they, in turn had to send to on or two “target” persons unknown to them in the Boston (Mass.) area. Milgram’s persons had to record demographic details about themselves and were only allowed to send the packets to someone whom they knew on a first-name basis and who they thought was more likely to know the unknown but described target person better than they themselves. Each of the packets was traced and so Milgram was able to establish his famous “six degrees of separation” (the title of Zeni’s show, also, in 1990, of a play by John Quare), meaning that the length of the acquaintance chain was roughly six. And that strangers, in some way, were familiar (“familiar strangers” has become a kind of catchword).

In the age of e-mail and internet we think that Milgram’s “small world” (reminiscent of McLuhan’s “global village”) is a fact. But Corrado Zeni cautions us: “The small world phenomenon … rests on extremely tenuous empirical foundations. The evidence … in support of this hypothesis leads to a considerably more restricted claim than is usually attributed to his work … only a few dozen chains were ever completed … Furthermore, according to unpublished research by Judith Kleinfeld, based on her survey of Milgram’s original notes … data that Milgram did not publish … did not support his hypothesis … It is perhaps surprising that no large-scale subsequent follow-up studies were ever completed.”

Zeni’s painted people obviously want to contradict the Milgram findings. Maybe there are six separations, six graduations of distance. Maybe seven or a dozen or even more. But this isn’t of real importance, as Zeni shows that there are as many as there are situations. The static character of a psycho-sociological hypothesis is turned into a dynamic artistic and aesthetic insight. Didn’t we know it all before? No, we did not, definitely. Aesthetic experience leads us to new frontiers of knowledge, enabling us to challenge the world. At least in some respect. This is one of the many functions of art.

Opening 26 November 7pm

Galerie Voss
Muhlengasse 3, Dusseldorf

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