Paolo Ventura, War Souvenir #10

#somereallygoodones, #paoloventura, #collectedstories

There is a vintage khaki green woolen Army jacket hanging from the branch of a tree, it flaps quietly in the sun and wind and rain all summer long. It stands as a witness, outside Paolo Ventura’s farm house studio, a mute sentinel surveying the surrounding Tuscan hills.

The jacket is part of some past story and will be part of another, a costume. Also it belongs to a collection: photographs, helmets, bayonets - the stuff of wars.

Both elements describe the artist.

Storytellers and collectors try to bring order to their lives, to life.

The story teller imagines, recounts, instructs. His tales show us ways to behave, to do things. He delights us. He transforms.

The collector gathers. He selects and arranges the things that attract him. That action creates order. The stones on the table picked up while walking then emptied out of pockets mean something. Our understanding of why we have done this may be inchoate, but it feels necessary and instinctive.

In the most mythic or existential terms, the story teller and the collector are both trying to wring some understanding out of the madness. it is our way of coping, or, on a grander scale, slaying the beasts (then having them taxidermied).

We repeat the stories of the great spirit force making a man out of clay, then, with a Promethean breath of life, waking him. We wonder where we come from. Both the answer and the story comfort us.

We pick up shells at the beach for no apparent reason, but with some seemingly received and specific criteria - only the whole ones, no partials, or just white or black ones, no color - then take them home and set them on the table.

Why? Order.

Paolo Ventura lives in a unique but well ordered universe. He is an inventive artist who tells stories and who collects. Call this book his “Collected Stories”.

Paolo Ventura, War Souvenir #10 (The body of Count Morsini, lovesick suicide victim, found by his mother the night of 10 March 1942. The Count was well known for his stormy affair with AB, chorus girl in Stefani’s troupe.), 2005

Ventura likes a story of an automaton. He has published one, but there is another much earlier version from the artist with a boy as the protagonist, instead of an older man. It is a bitter shaggy dog story, full of detail with an astonishingly abrupt ending. A young Jewish boy in the Venetian ghetto during the Occupation in World War II has an automaton as a playmate. At 4 PM each afternoon with its clockwork mechanics, it chimes out with a lyrical “It’s time for tea”, and they sit down for tea. The storm troopers come one afternoon, the boy hides with his treasured mechanical friend. 4 PM comes and miraculously there is not a sound from his companion. The boy is saved.

What to do?

When the coast is clear, the boy goes to the canal and throws the automaton into it.

The End.

Another. A rabbit loses his magician. Funny idea. What does the rabbit do? He tries to make it as a “single” in show business, but his heart is not in it. He doesn’t want fame or acclaim. We wants to find a lady rabbit and settle down and have a completely bourgeois and unremarkable life surrounded by other rabbits.

The End.

Ventura likes sharpness in a story. It isn’t necessary for there to be a beginning, middle and end. The two above do, but it can be enough to simply suggest a narrative, a moment of something happening. A man in a hat standing by a wall, that’s a story, as is the cluster of people hidden under their umbrellas. The harlequin on the bed, musing, he has a story; he is a story. The book, “Winter Stories”, may be all of the clown’s stories remembered in a flash before death or sleep.

For these places, these characters, what’s the story? What’s their story?

Ventura likes the odd kick in the tale. Consider the many suicides: the artist hanging in his studio, the girl in the tub, the dandy in evening dress slumped backwards on the divan alternatively with a gun or drink in his hand, possibly the man on the roof or the one in a heap in the snow.

What of the violinist in glasses staring at us? He seems to be importuning us with a matter of gravity, but what? He must have a weighty secret, a story to relate. What is it?

My understanding of a story may be different from yours. Same protagonists, different twist. They are enigmas. But we literally collect the information and want it to make sense, to lead us somewhere.

We need very few clues, visual or otherwise to make the story unfold in our imaginations. The man with balloons hovers above, the clown on the chair beckons us, and we don’t need to know how or why. We can construct our own story.

In a similar fashion, collections don’t always make immediate sense. The good ones do. Not the shells and rock but the obsessive ones, the ones with lots of ... stuff, stuff gathered with personal investment and odd coherence on the collector’s part. It may be their unconscious at work, like the storyteller’s imagination.

The need to tell the story comes from the same place as the urgency to collect.

People know about Paolo Ventura, the artist - photographer, illustrator, model and book maker, but they may not know about him as a collector.

He scours flea markets for old photos, particularly press prints and old architectural drawings or images. He can and has supported himself as an artist by selling online, works on paper and military memorabilia like that jacket hanging from the tree. His studio/atelier is a private museum with shelves and old vitrines of his objets or bibelots, a personal cabinet of curiosities, his Wunderkammer, literally his "wonder-room". These are his talismans, his referents.

This is where Ventura is both story teller and collector. One begets the other.

He seems to seek out histories, real and imagined, in objects and old photographs, in his mind and in people. He is intent and curious. He likes the war photos, from other people’s wars; they mean something to him. These are to be honored, to be treasured. Not only Italian wars, he seeks out memories of the other conflicts, like tintypes of the US Civil War.

It may be apocryphal but the story goes that his very first photograph was an image of his twin, Andrea, lying on the ground, covered with leaves, playing a fallen, dead or dying soldier. It is surprising how many times Ventura has returned to this trope with his toy soldiers, fetal and fatal. They have appeared as a 19th Century Union soldier, an early 20th Century Italian partisan, a US Marine in Iraq, and as skeletons, slowly decomposing, absorbed into the earth.

He collects the stories, real, imagined, guessed at. He wants to hear your stories. He is always capable of seeming amazed and astonished. “No way! Really?”, he says. He isn’t being incredulous, but rather, excited, by your story.

Ventura grew up with stories, other people’s histories told to him. He talks about his grandmother. That seems to be his greatest legacy, his collection of her stories.

What kind of kid avoids school for weeks, for months, to sit in the woods recounting stories to himself? Famously he would play truant to go into the woods accompanied by his imagination. He did this for months.

Fortunately his twin brother never ratted him out. Being an identical twin is assuredly a complicated business. They look alike, and to boot, Andrea is also an artist. They can draw identically too. When Paolo used his brother as the model, he was most assuredly positioning himself there.

Andrea is best known as a painter, another kind of story teller. Paolo is a photographer and a maker of things.

He works like this: There is the idea, the story. Then a sketch, and illustration. His skill as an illustrator, India ink on white paper, is formidable. There seems literally to be animation in Ventura’s work, when he applies a water color wash, filling in the white spaces, the work becomes photographic in an instant. Promethean.

He makes the model, a diorama, part of the cityscape or a room for the photograph. It doesn’t have to be complete, just enough to fill the frame. Then he fabricates or finds the objects: the tiny books, the wine bottle, the leaves. Then there is the fitting out of the figures or models, decommissioned “GI Joe” dolls as the players in these elliptical dramas, the reconsidering of their faces and costuming.

We almost never get much sense of their identity. The only faces we see much detail of are masked, even the violinist wears glasses, the old man with the automaton is heavily bearded.

If the illustration is the idea manifest, the photograph is the record of that.

By Freudian extension, these figures are, of course, the artist. Even when there are several males in a scene, they seem characterless, interchangeable dopplegängers or stand ins for the artist.

In Ventura’s recent figures, mustachioed in his “Lo Zuova Scomparso” and bare faced in his “Behind the Walls” work - this may be a possible “spoiler alert” - it is the artist himself, manipulated digitally into the image. At last. You can argue that the figures have been the artist all along, that it was only a matter of time before he actually showed up in the images.

A transitional image is a portrait of the artist in a coat with a fur collar stepping out of a cafe, small bird delicately perched on his finger. Ventura looks completely out of character in that he has given himself license to appear as a suave nobleman. It is also amusing that his “Pittore Futurista” portraits are all recognizable incarnations of the artist.

These stories are mythic: Ventura is Narcissus looking at himself, and he is Pygmalion orchestrating the dramas,. As the viewer we are aware of the artist’s sleight of hand. He is the compere who creates the mise en scene, and he is the watcher. He can put us in the scene, empathically with one of the models, or muscularly he sets us down in the middle of it.

We are always conscious that we are being shown the story. The point of view is not arbitrary. The story teller is in charge. Ventura talks about this in his process, setting up the shot, adjusting, making lots of Polaroids then waiting for a couple of days to consider how he has framed the shot.

But even when there are no characters in the frame, the empty bookstore or town square or artist’s studio, we are sensitive to the presence of the artist, fixing our gaze for us, looking on with us.

There is an unusual balance too. Scale isn’t always precise, and perspective is sometimes slightly skewed. Walls can be too large, or the horse isn’t quite right. There are mad angles crisscrossing, leading our eye around the frame. The artist creates a visual labyrinth our eye travels through. The oddness holds us.

The scenes are theatrical like a puppet stage, framed like a proscenium. The prints even seem fit to that scale. The palette is pleasant. There are lots of rough surfaces.

And a couple of images in “Winter Stories” blow us apart, “The Tightrope Walker” and “The Fire Eater” are staged in a limitless white void, an infinite limbo, slashed by the matrix of diagonals or fireball, mutely attended to by some onlookers.

Things are different here. In Duane Michals iconic series “Things Are Queer”, we see a bathroom in a photograph, the camera pulls back and we see that it is a small model of the bathroom, then further we see a giant human invade the room, then the camera pulls back all the way and a photograph in the scene over the toilet turns out to be the first image. It is a cycle where micro becomes macro becomes micro, and things are definitely queer.

Michals and Ventura have the same subversive storytelling bent. It is no surprise that they admire each other. There are other contemporary artists who have done a similar kind of story telling with photographs and small scale: David Levinthal, Laurie Simmons, James Casebere, even František Drtikol. But staged photographs are a common trope in 20th Century photography. There is an overlap of sorts with these artists but not much.

For sources you can look at the Italian painter Antonio Donghi whose work in the 1920’s Ventura would seem to have in his mind’s eye and directly referenced in his white faced, deadpan clown character, Pedrolino from the commedia dell arte, like the more familiar Pierrot in his simple black and white costume.

Another Italian painter alluded to is apparently Mario Sironi, a Futurist. The angular landscape and figure modeling are similar. Ventura has collected his art historical references and used them respectively

Maybe we should include Piero della Francesca, the celebrated Renaissance artist who came from Arezzo near Ventura’s home and studio in Anghiri. This is certainly true in the coloration, although anyone working in the Tuscan hills would be hard pressed to work outside that distinctive palette of pastels, sunlight and shades of ochre. Ventura’s work is sometimes very, very lightly colored, almost monochromatic.

But as influences go, look closer to home, at the artist’s home itself. Everyone in his family seems to be an artist. There is his older brother Marco, twin brother Andrea and father Piero Ventura, a highly regarded and well published illustrator, painter and designer.

It is remarkable to trace the arc of Ventura’s work to his first “War Souvenir” and “Winter Stories” from his apprenticeship and decade of work (unseen in this volume) in fashion to his “Dress for Eternity” series, macabre portraits of mummies richly costumed in strikingly colored velvets, silks, laces in the catacombs of Palermo. These were a striking dress rehearsal for tableaus of smaller fully costumed figures, players in the peculiar repertory theatre in Ventura’s head (and studio).

“I use photography because what people see in photographs they believe is real - even if they know it is a model. When you go to a film, you know it’s a setup, but you cry, you get excited, you are deeply touched. People want to believe what they see on film.”

What Paolo Ventura offers us is playful, ambiguous and mysterious. For him, it is all very real, these collected stories.

*1 Aperture: Issue 203, Spring 2011

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