Alessandro Fogo: To the elsewhere, and back
亚历山大·弗戈：别处，是归途
作者/ Federico Campagna
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亚历山大·弗戈 Alessandro Fogo
由Paola Angelini拍摄
无论在何处驻足，站在亚历山大·弗戈的画作前，总让人产生身在别处之感。
你的一部分仿佛来到了特耶内市，弗戈的家乡。置身于威尼斯乡间，阿尔卑斯山区的绿色山麓，现代与过去之间的界限变得模糊。意大利正是这样的所在，过去和现在共存于同一空间，往往是同一栋建筑，当然，也共存于人们的心中。工业区与红砖教堂毗邻而建；在有数百年传统的游行队列中，亦能看到最新时尚潮流。同样，在弗戈的作品中，过去与现在、传统的象征和当代的象征，如兄弟姐妹般共处。
不过，他的画作绝非对童年小镇的复刻。他的作品将你带往意大利各处，尤其是南部地区，在那里，不同的历史时期更是交织交汇。圣母是弗戈作品中经常出现的形象，在圣母像的环绕下，你会发现自己似乎更接近意大利南部的那不勒斯或巴勒莫，而非北部的工业重镇。沐浴在地中海阳光下，或笼罩在海滨柔和的夜色中，你能看到各种大众信仰形式，让人几乎分不清今夕何年。意大利南部的街头依然回荡着延绵几个世纪的呼喊与祈祷声。圣人肖像随处可见，既出现在每个街角，也出现在人们钱包里的圣卡上，诉说着远古的绵延传承，至今从未中断，彼时，多神论尚未让位于至高无上的唯一真神上帝。
而当你站在展厅中，距离意大利或有几十英里之远，你依然会感觉自己正在抬着圣象的游行队列中，随着人群行走于地中海小镇。
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Perla nera，2023，木板油画，24 x 30 公分，9 1/2 x 11 3/4 英寸Perla nera, 2023, Oil on panel, 24 x 30 cm, 9 1/2 x 11 3/4 in 图片致谢艺术家及Palazzo Buonaccorsi，马切拉塔，意大利。由Roberto Balestrini拍摄Courtesy of the Artist and Palazzo Buonaccorsi, Macerata MC, Italy. Photography: Roberto Balestrini
但事实上，你与他们之间比实际距离更远。弗戈画面中的空间无法在地图上找到对应。他笔下的形象漂浮于陌生的景观之中，仿佛更多是由色彩构成，而无实质。建筑物淡淡的痕迹暗示了真实的所在地，以及观者旅程的最终目的地。它们将你带去的地方，某种程度上，也是乔治·德·基里科画中“形而上”城市所在地——那里的居住者并非人类，而是永恒的象征和原型。在这片想象之域，时间停滞。不仅现在和过去糅杂在一起，而且未来也迷失于无尽的永恒之中。时间的区隔在忙碌的日常中如此明显，但在这里却不过是某种约定俗成的社会概念：“过去”、“现在”、“未来”就像不同河流的名称，被强加于实则不可分割的星球水体之上。
Visione，2023，布面油画，210 x 160 公分，82 5/8 x 63 英寸Visione, 2023, Oil on linen, 210 x 160 cm, 82 5/8 x 63 in
图片致谢艺术家及Palazzo Buonaccorsi，马切拉塔，意大利，由Roberto Balestrini拍摄
Courtesy of the Artist and Palazzo Buonaccorsi, Macerata MC, Italy. Photography: Roberto Balestrini这里是梦与愿景的温床，处于理性世界和超越人类理解极限的无限寂静之间，“要达到那崇高的幻想,我力不胜任”[1]。哲学家亨利·科宾（Henry Corbin）将这种阈限空间称为“意象世界”（Mundus Imaginalis），是大众想象与只有神秘主义者才能看到的强光区域交汇之处。对亚历山大·弗戈而言——他的艺术正源自这种交汇处，是一种天职，而不仅仅是一种职业——这是一片神圣之域。从圣域的边界，即人类理解力的外缘，各个时代的人们获得超越可见界限的、当下的直觉。宛如站在面朝大海的海岸上，圣域引领人们的目光投向前方的浩渺，投向天边外某处可能存在、但我们未曾见过的土地。
数千年来，对海岸线的这种遐想孕育了各种象征形式，人们试图通过这些形式来捕捉难以企及但又真实存在的“别处”的形状。原始偶像、远古诸神、恶魔、圣人和圣母、以及对唯一真神上帝的拟人化想象，都源于对这一存在边缘的相同体验，笼罩于永不可知的迷雾中。这些不同的图像系出同源，总带有一种深深的熟稔感：一个图像是另一个图像在时间洗礼下的幸存；或曰，是对不同文化语境的适应。因而，保存在意大利南部圣殿中的黑色圣母雕像，以及弗戈画作中的黑色圣母像，无疑是古埃及女神伊西斯（Isis）、或者更为久远的曾下界到美索不达米亚冥界（Mesopotamian underworld）的女神伊南娜（Inanna）等黑色女神雕像的“姐妹”。
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黑色圣母像，2023，布面油画，50 x 40 公分，19 3/4 × 15 3/4 英寸
Black Madonna, 2023, Oil on linen, 50 x 40 cm, 19 3/4 × 15 3/4 in
伊南娜深入冥界后重返阳世；你也可以像她一样，沿着这些符号从圣域追溯到人类学家研究大众信仰的各个历史时期。回到熙熙攘攘的游行队列中，现在你会发现信徒们的呼喊和祈祷就像来自遥远的、想象中的海岸线的声音，仿佛在永恒寂静之地与当下物质现实之间架起的无形之桥。抬头望向他们肩上扛着的雕像，你会看到，在圣人令人心安的脸庞之外，还有名字已被时光遗忘的男女天神们恶魔般的笑容。直到你迈步离开人群，他们的声音渐行渐远，你重回灯光泛白的展厅空间。表面上，一切都未改变。弗戈的画作依然挂于墙上，展厅中行走的依然是同一批观众。手表上的时间如故，似乎只过了一分钟而已。或许，只有你感觉到了异样。即使离开展厅回到街上，这感觉依然如影随形。再度回归日常，关于那段旅程中的点点滴滴会在每一件物品中重新浮现。就像归家的旅人，曾经熟悉的一切现在都会显得些许陌生，而曾经觉得遥远而陌生的东西则会带来新的暖意。如何重新走入一个房间，而不怀疑它随时可能消逝在色彩的景观中？如何重新审视一幅画像，而不去寻找将其与远古起源相联系的无形之绳？表象之下或许蕴含着更多，这是一种挥之不去的感觉。对于圣域，你有着奇特的怀旧之情，尽管你只短暂一瞥。这便是你这段旅程的见证。情感的花火，能够引燃一生的蜕变。Tritone e satiressa，2023，布面油画，145 x 170 公分，57 1/8 x 66 7/8 英寸
Tritone e sairessa, 2023, oil on linen, 145 x 170 cm, 57 1/8 x 66 7/8 in
图片致谢艺术家及Palazzo Buonaccorsi，马切拉塔，意大利，由Roberto Balestrini拍摄
Courtesy of the Artist and Palazzo Buonaccorsi, Macerata MC, Italy. Photography: Roberto Balestrini
Wherever you are resting your feet, standing in front of Alessandro Fogo’s paintings, you are not fully there.Partly, you are in Thiene, Fogo's hometown. Immersed in the Venetian countryside, at the green foothills of the Alps, you are in a place where the boundary between modernity and bygone eras is at times indiscernible. As so often in Italy, the past and the present coexist in the same space, often in the same building, certainly in the heart of the people. Industrial zones rise close to red-brick churches, and the latest fashion trends can be spotted among the participants to centuries-old processions. Likewise, in the works of Fogo, what has been and what still is, the symbols of tradition and those of our own present, live together like siblings.His paintings, however, are not a replica of the town of his childhood. His works transport you all over Italy, especially to the South, where the mash of historical eras is even more inextricable. Surrounded by the Madonnas that populate Fogo’s paintings, you find yourself closer to Naples, or to Palermo, than to the industrial poles of the Italian North. Basking under the Mediterranean sun, or shrouded by the mild nights of the coast, you can see forms of popular devotion that defy the years marked on the calendars. Southern Italian streets still resound with cries and prayers that have echoed through the centuries. The images of the Saints, appearing at every street corner as on the holy cards held in people’s wallets, speak of an unbroken continuity with the remote antiquity, when polytheism had not yet given way to the supremacy of the only God.![]()
向日葵面具，2023，布面油画，50 x 40 公分，19 3/4 × 15 3/4 英寸Sunflower Mask, 2023, Oil on linen, 50 x 40 cm, 19 3/4 × 15 3/4 inWhile you are standing in an art gallery, perhaps tens of miles from Italy, you are also among the crowds carrying the Saints on a procession through a Mediterranean town.But you are, in fact, much further away than there. The space of Fogo’s paintings is not one that can be found on the geographical maps. The figures that emerge from his brushstrokes are floating in an alien landscape, made of colours more than of matter. Faint traces of architecture give a hint of their real location, and of the ultimate destination of their viewers’ journey. The place where they have taken you is, to an extent, the one in which also the “metaphysical” cities painted by Giorgio de Chirico arise – whose inhabitants are not humans, but eternal symbols and archetypes. In that region of the imagination, time is at a standstill. Not only the present mixes its flow with that of the past, but also the future loses itself into the boundless expanse of eternity. The distinctions of time, so apparently clear in the busy routine of everyday life, are revealed here as nothing more than societal conventions: “past”, “present” and “future” are like the names of different rivers, imposed over what is, in fact, one undivided body of planetary water.![]()
信仰欲云飞，文明尽朝晖，2023，布面油画，160 x 210 公分，63 × 82 5/8 英寸Sunset of culture and sunrise of belief, 2023, Oil on linen, 160 x 210 cm, 63 × 82 5/8 inHere is the breeding ground of dreams and visions, on the threshold between the world of rationality and the infinite silence that stretches beyond the limits of human understanding, where “power fail[s] the lofty phantasy.” [2] Mundus Imaginalis, was the name assigned to this liminal space by philosopher Henry Corbin, who saw it as the point where the common imagination touches the regions of blinding light seen only by the mystics. For Alessandro Fogo – whose art comes from this same region as a vocation, rather than as a mere profession – this is the realm of the Sacred. From the borderland of the Sacred, at the outer edge of human understanding, people from every era have drawn the intuition of something being present, beyond the limits of the visible. Like a shore facing an ocean, the Sacred leads the gaze towards the immensity ahead, towards the possibility that there might exist, somewhere beyond the horizon, a land unlike anything we have ever seen.Over the course of the millennia, such reveries on the shoreline have given birth to the symbolic forms through which humans have tried to capture the shape of this unreachable-yet-present “elsewhere”. Primeval idols, ancient gods, daemons, saints and Madonnas, but also anthropomorphic visions of the one God, have all emerged from the same experience of this existential edge, enveloped by the mist of the forever-unknown. Hailing from the same source, these different images have always shared a deep familiarity. The one is the survival of the other through time, or its adaptation to a different cultural context. Thus, the statuettes of the Black Madonnas preserved in the Southern Italian sanctuaries, as in Fogo’s paintings, can be rightfully called “sisters” of the black statues of the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis, or, looking even further in time, of the ancient goddess Inanna, the divine adventurer in the Mesopotamian underworld.![]()
展览现场，“圣显”，Gallery Vacancy, 2023Installation view, Hierophany, Gallery Vacancy, 2023Like Inanna, who travelled beyond the world and then returned, you too, following these symbols, might trace your steps back from the realm of the Sacred, to the historical time where the anthropologists study the examples of popular devotion. Back in the tumult of a crowd assembled in a procession, you will now recognise the cries and prayers of the faithful as voices that come from that remote shoreline of the imagination, like impalpable bridges thrown between the realm of eternal silence and the material reality of the present. Looking up, towards the statues that they are carrying on their shoulders, you will see, beyond the reassuring faces of the saints, the demonic grin of gods and goddesses whose name has been lost in time. ![]()
念在永恒，2023，布面油画，65 x 50 公分，25 5/8 x 19 3/4 英寸Attempt to maintain the essence of a gift forever, 2023, Oil on linen, 65 x 50 cm, 25 5/8 x 19 3/4 inUntil, with another step out of the crowds, the sound of their voices fading in the distance, you will return to the space of the art gallery, under the bleaching gleam of the electric lights. On the surface, nothing will have changed. Fogo’s paintings will still be on the walls, the same visitors will still be walking through the rooms. The same time will be marked on your watch, as if only a minute had passed. Only you, perhaps, might feel somewhat different. And this feeling might accompany you back on the street, after leaving the gallery. Surrounded by your everyday sights, flashes from your journey will resurface from every object. Like a traveller upon returning home, what used to feel familiar will now reveal its weirdness, while a new warmth will come from what once felt far and alien. How to walk again inside a room, without suspecting that at any instant it might fade into a landscape of colours? How to look again at an image, without searching for the invisible strings that connect it to its ancient origins?The lingering feeling that there might be more to what appears. A strange nostalgia for the Sacred, even though you’ve only glimpsed at it for a moment. This is what will remain to testify of your journey. Sparks of emotion, but capable of igniting a lifelong transformation.神谕与错祭，2023，布面油画，95 × 75 公分，37 3/8 × 29 1/2 英寸
Wrong offer to the oracle, 2023, Oil on linen, 95 × 75 cm, 37 3/8 × 29 1/2 in
注释
[1] 意大利语原文为“A l'alta fantasia qui mancò possa”，出自阿利盖利·但丁长诗《天堂》最后一篇最后一节，《神曲·天堂》第33篇，142行 —— 英文为作者译。
[2] “A l'alta fantasia qui mancò possa”, from the last stanza of the last canto of Paradiso. Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, Paradiso, Canto XXXIII, 142 – Federico Campagna's translation.
亚历山大·弗戈，1992年出生于特耶內市，意大利。现生活和工作在于圣贝内代托-德尔特龙托。弗戈在获得威尼斯建筑大学（IUAV）视觉艺术学院的学士学位后，于 2017年在比利时安特卫普皇家美术学院获得绘画专业的硕士学位。弗戈的绘画实践探索了神话的这一历史功能，意在解析其对当代生活的启示性。他的绘画主要取材于古老的意大利民间神话以及历史上人们对信仰的外在表现形式。他融合神话的幻想与现代生活中的形象，通过独特的叙述方式进行改变和再创造，使画面富有灵见和逸事的特质。弗戈的个展包括：“圣显”，Gallery Vacancy，上海，2023；“Hang a crocodile outside for the unbelievers”，Cassina Projects，米兰，2023；“Black Morning”，双人展Alessandro Fogo & Paola Angelini，Lyles & King Gallery，纽约，2022；“Skins and leathers”，PM/AM Gallery，伦敦，2022；“Alla luce del sole，un attimo prima di spegnersi”，Galleria Annarumma，那不勒斯，2021。过往群展：“Pittura Italiana Oggi” 米兰三年展，米兰，2023；“Dreamcatcher”，beacon，慕尼黑，2022；“Domani Qui Oggi”，Quadriennale di Roma，罗马，2021；“If on a winter’s night a traveller”，MAMOTH，伦敦，2020，“Immersione Libera”，Bagni Misteriosi，Galleria Continua，米兰，2019。近期获奖及驻留包括：Nordisk Kunstnarsenter Dale艺术驻留，挪威，2021；2019年意大利Combat Prize绘画一等奖；及2018年意大利拉古纳国际艺术奖绘画一等奖。Alessandro Fogo, born in 1992 in Thiene, Italy, now lives and works in San Benedetto del Tronto. In 2017, he obtained a Master in painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, Belgium after graduating with BA at IUAV Visual Arts in Venice. Fogo approaches through his painting practice, how the idea of mythical reasoning remains poignant to the revelation of our contemporary reality. Sourcing the myths around Italian mythological tales and the multifarious forms of idols throughout history, Fogo weaves personal narratives with mystical symbology to conjure visionary and allegorical qualities to his paintings. Like sensate lullabies, each scene speaks a mystical idiolect of their own, a language of lamentation for mystical lost to avant-garde practises throughout the present. Fogo’s solo exhibitions include: Hierophany, Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai, 2023; Hang a crocodile outside for the unbelievers, Cassina Projects, Milan, 2023; Black Morning, Alessandro Fogo & Paola Angelini, Lyles & King Gallery, New York, 2022; Skins and leathers, PM/AM Gallery, London, 2022; Alla luce del sole, un attimo prima di spegnersi, Galleria Annarumma, Naples, 2021. Selected group exhibitions include: Pittura Italiana Oggi, Triennale Milano, Milan, 2023; Dreamcatcher, beacon, Munich, 2022; Domani Qui Oggi, Quadriennale di Roma, Rome, 2021; If on a winter’s night a traveller, MAMOTH, London, 2020; Immersione Libera, Bagni Misteriosi, Galleria Continua, Milano, 2019. Fogo was the recipient of the Nordisk Kunstnarsenter Dale Residency, Dale, 2021; the Combat Prize, first painting prize, Livorno, 2019; and the Arte Laguna Prize, first painting prize, Venice, 2018.更多关于艺术家
More about the artist
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V A C A N C Y
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周二–周六
Tuesday to Saturday | 10:00–18:00
200021 上海市黄浦区云南南路261号6楼
6F, No.261 S. Yunnan Rd., Shanghai 200021
+86-(0)21-62411239
info@galleryvacancy.com
www.galleryvacancy.com
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