Contributed by David Carrier / Alessandro Twombly’s twelve large new paintings, now on view at Amanita Gallery, all employ one basic, immensely fruitful motif: knots of color resembling enlarged floral forms, depicted in high-pitched, gesturally painted oranges, pinks, reds, and blacks on bright turquoise backgrounds. An artist friend nicknamed these pictures ‘Tiepolo in the Sky,” which accurately describes them. Twombly’s abstract images look like drastically enlarged figures you might find in a work by the eighteenth-century Italian painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. They are strikingly original yet richly allusive.
Born in 1959, Twombly is from Rome. This is the first show he’s had in America in almost two decades. The American movements of Pop Art, Conceptual Art, and Minimalism appear to mean very little to him. His paintings do relate at least indirectly to Morris Louis’ famous “Unfurleds.” Whereas they open up the center of the canvas to afford viewers the illusion of looking into a void, Twombly’s paintings conversely focus attention on a center filled with color. But nineteenth-century aesthetics are perhaps his firmest influence.
Nature, as critic and poet Charles Baudelaire influentially wrote in Flowers of Evil (1857), “is a temple in which living pillars / sometimes give voice to confused words.” Viewing Delacroix’s figurative art, Baudelaire thought of a “lake of blood haunted by bad angels / shaded by a wood of fir-trees, ever green.” He associates these subjects with a “stifled sigh from Weber,” an early Romantic composer. Twombly extends that synesthesia, conjuring high-pitched musical dissonances from Leoš Janáček or kindred composers. While Baudelaire looked backwards to the synesthesia found in old masters like Delacroix, he also looked forward to the painting of modern life – clothing, carriages, café life, wars – exemplified by Édouard Manet.
Baudelaire’s explicit ambition was to promote an aesthetic in which “all is order and beauty / luxury, peace, and pleasure.” This worldview also arises in some of Henri Matisse’s works. For Baudelaire, the ideal was elusive: his flowers were flowers of evil. Twombly is a gifted painter who establishes lyrical – and less ominous – correspondences. His paintings may be Etruscan in their provenance and basic their view of nature, which resembles that in Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin’s Roman landscapes, but they also constitute a real alternative to mainstream contemporary American painting.
“Alessandro Twombly: Etruscan Painting,” Amanita Gallery, 313 Bowery, New York, NY. Through June 14, 2024.
About the author: David Carrier is a former professor at Carnegie Mellon University; Getty Scholar; and Clark Fellow. He has published art criticism for Apollo, artcritical, Artforum, Artus, and Burlington Magazine, and has been a guest editor for The Brooklyn Rail. He is a regular contributor to Two Coats of Paint.
