Fragments of an anatomical landscape
by Marco Rinaldi
The artistic, intellectual and moral development of Gastone Novelli has undeniably been underpinned by his lasting, intimate attachment to the contemporary. In the many different phases his poetic expression has gone through, this artist has unfailingly deployed strategies for investigating and understanding the universe around him.
From early on in his career, in Brazil, Novelli nurtured his belief in a social progress brought about by culture and art. His painting language evolved rapidly, feverishly assimilating the experiences of the modernist tradition (Expressionism, Cubism, Concrete Art, the lyricism of Paul Klee). Over time, these inspirations stratified into increasingly complex layers (Gestalt, Primitivism and instinctive anthropological approaches). Novelli’s early political engagement at just eighteen, when he joined the partisan ranks, accompanied him for his entire life and culminated in his involvement in the 1968 uprisings. Along the way, variables came in the form of encounters, changing moods, travel – after Brazil came Rome, Paris, Greece, New York, Venice, Milan, each place a new development.
When he was in Rome, between late-1959 and early-1960, Novelli discovered the short-circuit of word and image on the canvas, after which the path of his solitary poetic became clear. He found greater affinity and understanding in the company of poets and writers than among painters: Alfredo Giuliani, Nanni Balestrini, Elio Pagliarani, Giorgio Manganelli, Germano Lombardi, but also Edouard Jaguer, Pierre Klossowski, Georges Bataille and two future Nobel prize-winners such as Samuel Beckett and Claude Simon. Within the milieu of late-Surrealism and the Nouveau Roman, Novelli perceived early hints of linguistic disintegration, which coincided with the emergence of the new mass media society.
He began systematically collecting and archiving fragments of language from a broad assortment of different worlds: poetry, contemporary literature, jazz, Buddhism, mythology, the psychology of the unconscious, ancient cosmography, the Kabbalah, Islamic history and religion, medical texts. From this process, and through his reading of Claude Lévi-Strauss, he arrived at his characteristic “magical language” founded on the practice of bricolage. His selection of “residue and fragments” conveyed a reorganised world in which the laws were developed and adapted according to the moment, one in which cultural separation (in terms of space and time) rendered these scattered tracks both evocative and mysterious, perennially open to fresh interpretations.
In the late-1950s, the female body manifested itself in the form of breasts hanging out of the canvas in an accumulation of pigments, an echo of the famous catalogue cover with the foam rubber breast designed by Marcel Duchamp for the Le Surréalisme en 1947 exhibition. Following the theme of eroticism, which for the surrealists had been a vast realm to explore, Novelli subsequently placed sections of bodies within landscapes, evocative of the almost cartographical survey carried out by Leopold Bloom on the body of Molly in James Joyce’s Ulysses.
In a painting from 1962, emblematically entitled Abbigliamento del corpo (Clothing of the Body), breasts, torsos and entire female bodies overwhelm a large central area crossed by lines. A closer look slowly reveals details of a nipple and a female organ with arrows pointing at them. As the eye gradually attempts to make sense of the lines around them, reconstructing like in an enigmatic game, suddenly the beloved body makes its appearance: “on December 2nd, 1962, at 2.27 in the morning in Rome”, reads the inscription running lengthwise, and the sentence “ALMOST SEEMS LIKE THE CHANCE OF A LIFETIME”. It would seem to be attaching a sentimental value to that reclining body, an inaccessible terrain.
Novelli’s works also feature the body’s interior, as anatomical fragments. Anatomy by definition is a taxonomical discipline and, once the human body is dissected and represented in illustrations, the accompanying descriptions are linguistic fragments. The anatomical treatises of the Seventeenth Century adopted an experimental method for understanding the functions of the various organs by associating morphology with physiology. Novelli found their cataloguing structure perfectly suited to his process of poetical decomposition and reinvention. In 1963 this reasoning resulted in the two works Corpus humani anatomiae and Supplementum anatomicum. The titles were taken respectively from the Corporis humani anatomia, in qua omnia tam veterum, quam recentiorum anatomicorum inventa Methodo novâ & intellectu facillimâ describuntur, ac Tabulis æneis repræsentantur, published in 1693 in Leuven, and from the Supplementum anatomicum sive Anatomiae corporis humani liber secundus, published in Brussels in 1710, both celebrated treatises by the Flemish surgeon Philip Verheyen, reprinted in numerous revised and extended editions.
The first of the two paintings, which erroneously alters the title of the volume, presents a catalogue of anatomical texts – not all of which are recognisable – arranged around a large, white, empty area: sections of muscle tissue, of a marrow, a spinal column, blood vessels and membranes. Some of these fragments can be identified as those in the illustrations of the original book, such as the spinal marrow and the vertebral artery from plate XXVI of a 1734 Neapolitan edition, considerably richer than the original in terms of sections and illustrations, and which is the most appropriate reference. In the upper left it is possible to discern painted renditions of two human torsos showing sections of muscles, of the rib cage, the pleura and blood vessels, as in plates III and IV. A little to the right, a section of the intestine taken from plate VII is recognisable. The inscription “FIGURARUM EXPLICATIO” (above a depiction of a heart) is the title of the legend preceding every plate. In the right-hand section there are representations of sections of the female reproductive apparatus, including the neck of a uterus. This area of the painting is an explicit quotation from plate XV of Verheyen’s volume, entitled Prostans Partes genitales Mulieris, which Novelli transcribes with an erroneous Latin declination (“PARTES GENITALES MULIEBRES” [sic!]). Elsewhere he constructs an ironical caption with the oxymoron “UTERUS VIRGINIS MATRONAE”, possibly a parody of the legend for plate XVII, which shows parts of the female genitalia “in Virgine matura”. Lastly, above these inscriptions, are visible two breasts and part of the torso taken from plate XVIII.
Like Verheven’s second volume, which was published with the idea of clarifying certain notions contained in its predecessor, Supplementum anatomicum stands as a form of completion of the first painting. The right half of the painting contains a schematic description of the various positions of the diaphragm, taken from plate I of Verheven’s volume in a Neapolitan edition from the same year as the first book. This is in fact the only detail taken from the second book, the others being further reworkings of plates contained in Corporis humani anatomia. This is the case, for instance, of the two breasts which recur also in the other painting, taken from plate XVIII. The sectioned breast has the captions “MAMMA INTEGRA”, “AREOLA”, “NEXUS”. The central area of the composition is occupied by a female torso displaying the vertebrae, a lung and the reproductive apparatus. In the upper left corner there are blood vessels, a barely outlined torso and other elements, not all of which are recognisable, above once again the inscription “FIGURARUM EXPLICATIO” in Novelli’s typical system of superimposing the letters which often makes them hard to decipher or completely incomprehensible.
Following its analysis and fragmentation by anatomical science, the body is here further broken down by Novelli, who reduces it to a residue, something ambiguous and mysterious just like the ambiguous, enigmatical and mysterious words scattered across the canvas.
Ours is the arduous task of piecing these fragments together into a new narrative.