Una écfrasis memorable de un óleo de Giorgio Morandi

Óleo de Giorgio Morandi que forma parte de una serie

de seis óleos pintados en 1952

Hacía mucho tiempo que no había leído una écfrasis literaria escrita con la sensibilidad con la que Siri Hustvedt lo hace en su ensayo titulado: Not Just Bottles.

Este ensayo lo escribió Siri Hustvedt después de visitar la galería  Peggy Guggenheim en Venecia; fue el verano de 1998 cuando visitó aquella exposición temporal The Later Morandi, Still Lifes: 1950 - 1964 que estuvo abierta del 30 de abril al 13 de septiembre de 1998. He destacado de este ensayo un párrafo que me parece antológico.

When I looked at the series of six paintings from 1952, which all include a yellow cloth and were hung together in one room in the gallery, I felt as if the canvases were having a mute conversation with one another. The white fluted bottle, its ridges less evident in this series than in some of the other paintings, remains as an anchor on the right in all of them. The striking yellow cloth remains front and center. The cup and cylindrical vase are constant anchors on the left. What changes is the object between the flanking white bottle and vase. A brown form, described as a basket, is substituted by a green bowl in others, the hue of which changes dramatically between two canvases, from dark green in one to a much yellower tone in the other. In these two canvases, there is an additional object, an extendes cylindrical white form that appears behind the white bottle. In the series, the shifting happens in the space between white objects, from one brown to another, from one green to another. It made me think that Morandi was exploring between-ness itself, asking what constitutes a border. In the canvas with the paler green bowl, the bowl seems to tip upward. Its edge behind the white cylinder is outlined in a deep gray, which continues downward to divide the yellow cloth and white cup, a fine dark line of distinction that is nearly erotic in its closeness. After looking for a while, I found this darkness between cup and cloth obsessively interesting, more interesting than the objects themselves. (La negrita es mía)

Siri Hustvedt va desde la écfrasis a la hipotiposis a través de un puente que construye literariamente y que sirve para salvar el abismo que separa a las palabras de los objetos, y lo hace dejando una huella vívida en el/la lector/a.

Es ese viaje de lo visible a lo legible el que realiza Siri Hustvedt de manera magistral. Siete años después de publicar Mysteries of the Rectangle, New York: Princeton Architectural Press (2005), (en el cual está el ensayo Not Just Bottles) publicó un segundo ensayo sobre Morandi en este libro Living, Thinking, Looking, London: Sceptre (2012) con el título The Drama of Perception (Looking at Morandi). Recomiendo la lectura de ambos.

Termino con una frase de este segundo ensayo que muestra la extraordinaria perspicacia de Siri Hustvedt: "He [Morandi] knew he wanted to paint the unknowable".