On the Luminous Opacity of the SignsBorromini - Kounellis
Juan Muñoz
The courageous poet Valente, left in an unintelligible handwriting a mathematical treatise on colours, whose title was: "On the obstinate possibility of light."
March 1663
Sunday, in the Church of sant'Agnese in the plaza Navona. Immense in its intensity, the Italian peasant+s walk early on a sunny morning. It is possible to imagine him crossing the portal, going down the naves, under the barrel vaults, up to the altar. There, before him, the splendour. The volutes, the adornments everywhere. Everything is ornamentation, because that is the way Baroque theatre requires it. However, something in this river of effects, apparently contradicts its original intention. Your attention is not led to recollection, veneration or the sacred. It rather seems that the spectacle is a metaphor of itself. Each arris and promontory is its architectural contradiction. Bronze, stucco, glass follow one another as parts that simply do not add up. The left side piles up on the top section and before reaching the bottom, the right side bumps into the corner. Everything seems to be in continuous movement.
The Church of Borromini owes its being-in-the-world to its being in the very space it theatrically invents.
In fact, the column neither rapports anything nor does anything rest on it. The highest part finishes in decoration, and pleasure is to be taken in that. The eye that moves from effect to effect without any sense of continuity, finds no rest. The Barrominesque church, as well as the Merzbau by Schwitters, demonstrates that it could have kept on growing. Immobile in an ever-changing world, the baroque building is, to the eye, a place in perpetuum mobile (like the earth itself, the only reason for the existence of the never represented God). If I were to make a modern simile, it might easily be walking fast on an airport conveyor belt.
In baroque scenography, the onlooker should stand in the shadows so that the epiphany should appear illuminated. For that reason, Borromini centres the compass of the church in the skylight. And let me add: What circle would a compass in movement describe, if not a winding staircase, slanting walls, concave forms, convex cornices, different levels. The line of light is broken on the ledges, to become a mask and therefore be twice as luminous on those entering. Let me affirm then, that the epiphany that is represented here, is light itself.
Borromini must have known that there was no face beneath the mask. The Baroque spectacle, propitiated by the Council of Trent, fascinating the machinery that dazzled the faithful, was conceived by its creator in the image and likeness of mystery period.
The centre of the Borrominian church, the skylight, is always elliptical. It has two centres. The beam of light descending from it looks like a slow ascending elicoidal movement. The winding staircase seems to go up and down at the same time, while rotating on its geometric zero.
There is no indoctrination in Borromini. There is no Holy Church. Since there is nothing beyond the luminous effect, there is not even God. It is all epiphany, through itself a representation of everything, of the mystery of light in space, of mystery, of light, of space. All those volutes, broken lines, and barely supporting columns, waiting for the light that comes from the cupola, recall the poem of the great writer, Lezama Lima: +...like galloping clouds but the beam of grace come after them+. What beam of light is it that emerges from the ellipse and works on the form to make it credible? Is it possibly the same one that makes concave complice to convex, and shadow coincide with volume?
Something similar is felt before the Kounillian object. Let+s say it once and for all. The sculpture of the lucid Greek, beyond its evident epiphany of mystery, is strangeness in itself.
If the truly surprising (the operating grace) is being and, therefore, being in space, let us add that the locus itself turns into son and setting of the incomprehensible.
The emphasis in the work of both artists is to make something take place in that context, and that something is the act of generating light.
In 1971, Jannis Kounellis builds a truly complex image. The image of what we move toward, without ever. A sculpture or metaphor of a landscape of tributaries with no river to flow into, it shows several butane gas cylinders with their rubber tubes and the blowlamps that terminate in flames. Light has taken over the locus, the room. One of them moves towards some point of flight, but where? Just like the cornices of Sant+Andrea delle Frate, the lines have a direction, but what is it? Space has castled itself. Here there is no centre, yet the drawing on the floor seems to respond to some other order. It is possible to hazard the theory that Kounellis, as Borromini has so obsessively done, has opted for the geometric form of the ellipse. Two centres, yet none. Attention goes from one to the other. The eye moves, but now it is off-centre.
Both of them citizens of Rome, weighed down with the tools of their trade, placed themselves before space, aware they cannot transgress it, and at the same time, amazed. More than that; they both admire the properties Martin Heidegger comments on. Because +in front of him there is no reference point and behind him no sign that leads us to anything else+. It is worth continuing the comparison with the German philosopher to explain that both the torsion in Borromini as well as the profundization of myth in Kounellis takes place in spaces +where a god is about to appear of where the gods have just flown or where the appearance of the divine takes too long.+ But what are these tools of the trade they work with and manage to invest space with their otherness? To the Italian architect the building is a machine for the global effect of chiaroscuros signalling over and over again the strangeness of illuminated space. Perhaps I should add to this capricious argument doubtful relationships the symmetry of the Kounellian incision in its conflictive occupation as an object between the light it emits and the shadow that allows it to be? Isn+t it true that the bluish light of butane, almost tenebresque places the onlooker in the shadows? A subtle paradox that of the Greek craftsman since it seeks from the position of object that which belongs only to the act of looking. The immobile presented to the eye as centrifuge.
There are plenty of reasons to justify genealogical proximity with greater authority. More superficial reasons such as the recurring scenography in both, but we have already correctly risked using the word capricious, and nothing, or almost nothing, can escape the arrival of night, except its light.
Epilogue
Let's publicly acknowledge a certain distance from the opportune pictorial concerns of the Greek artist, while at the same time recalling that obsessive slanting wall of Borrominian execution.
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