|
Augustine Dall'Ava
Geoffrey Edwards
2008
In some respects, works in this recent Dialogues series by Augustine Dall’Ava put us in mind of celebrated 14th century frescoes in Siena such as those known as The equestrian portrait of Guidoriccio da Fogliano and Good and Bad Government – the first attributed (if doubtfully) to Simone Martini with the second and larger cycle being the work of Ambrogio Lorenzetti.
That is to say, these feats of early Renaissance fresco painting – magnificent, sweeping vistas the both of them – are recalled by Dall'Ava’s comparably panoramic Dialogues on account of various shared attributes including a singularity and intensity of vision, a sparkling clarity of prospect, precision of execution, and a finely-judged unity of composition that nonetheless permits a procession of distinct and separate elements to offer visual satisfaction in their own right. Albeit in a comparison made across several centuries and a considerable cultural divide (not to mention different media), we respond also to a shared sense of vivid allusion. To be sure, Dall’Ava’s collective title, Dialogues, gives very little away in terms of any specific allegorical intent, and is plainly at odds in this respect with the manner in which Martini and Lorenzetti address clear concepts of patrician and civic aspiration.
Martini’s representation of the soldier of fortune, Guidoriccio da Fogliano – quite some testament to martial accomplishment and conquest – has the central figure of Guidoriccio resplendent in diamond-patterned robes matching the caparison of his high-stepping mount. He canters in triumph through the Sienese countryside, moving purposefully between fortified towns represented on the scale of a doll’s house – all picturesque crenellation, tidy ramparts and flapping banners. This austere and dark-skied vista contrasts with the greater atmospheric complexity of Lorenzetti’s famous allegory with its impressively regimented crowd scenes, city squares and naturalistic landscapes. Arguably, it is Lorenzetti’s fresco that offers the more fruitful of the two comparisons with Dall’Ava’s sculptural tableaux that are similarly steeped in fine and gloriously conceived details and motifs that might be construed as stylised conifers, schematic piazzas, lofty columns surmounted by an assortment of organic and other eccentric finials and with the whole rising above colourful mosaic grids or wide, white marble bases with shallow indentations and stepped detail.
Top
|
The essentially architectural character of the Dialogues is evocative of the form of an ideal cityscape or perhaps of those haunting, empty and mysterious piazzas associated with the Metaphysical painter, Giorgio de Chirico – if one may conscript yet another but modern Italian painter for the discussion. As such the Dialogues represent a definite break away from the more wholly organic, fluid, and primarily vertical compositions of the preceding decades of Dall’Ava’s practice. The latter being the focus, in fact, of the artist’s last major survey exhibition held at the Geelong Gallery in 2003.
If those earlier works revealed more explicitly (than does the current work) the important influences on Dall’Ava of the works of French surrealist painter Yves Tanguy, the relief sculpture of Jean Arp, and of the early assemblages of Alberto Giacometti, they were works that spoke also of Dall’Ava’s great empathy with the realm of natural history and organic form. Then as now, Dall’Ava’s sculpture dealt in a buoyant currency of crisp, spatial dynamics but it did so – and still does – with an underlying sensibility that is keenly conscious of much more than the requisites of a coolly objective or purely formal transaction. Rather, these are works of an incisive but sensuous imagination and they read as timeless and beautifully realised articulations of form – or rather processions of forms – that are as quite as vocal on matters of allegory and human enterprise (or foible) as are those aforementioned allegories on the walls of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena.
|
|
