signs - keane - Barga (LU) Italy

The journey, as metaphor, is as old as Homer’s Odyssey and the Book of Exodus, as rich in meaning as the Chinese Dao, “the Path.” From the moment that homo sapiens began sketching on the wall of a cave – antelope thundering across a plain, hunters in pursuit – motion and change have been among the universal obsessions of art, pondered as though they held the very meaning of life.

This is the animating bond between two Barga artists who never met, Bruno Cordati and Keane. “Signs Along the Path,” Keane’s exposition at Casa Cordati, is at once an hommage to the man who lived and worked there, and a meditation on the journeys that formed them both.

Keane set off from his native London in 1971 at the age of 15, on a quest whose itinerary to the Province of Lucca included passages as a street performer and fire-eater in Spain and France, and eventually ranged as far as the remote Sicilian island of Pantelleria, the Finnish woodlands and the Yangtze Valley in China. His travels are recorded in a wanderer’s curriculum vitae, resistant always to fixed categories: Keane the painter has been Keane the conceptual artist, Keane the sculptor, and more recently, Keane the Internet webmaster.

Cordati, who was born in Barga in 1890 and buried there 89 years later, is at first glance more hermit than wanderer. He was nearly 40 before his works were exhibited outside of Tuscany, and in his early fifties when he spent four years in the war-torn Balkans (1939-1943) that were to transform his work.
The conventional wisdom is that Cordati’s most important statements were made before and during his Balkan sojourn, in portraits and character studies that ignored the abstract mode of his contemporaries in favor of a psychologically intense realism. In Keane’s view, however, Cordati’s decisive journey as an artist began after his return to Italy and continued unabated to his death in 1979: “He painted over his own earlier work, searching for new meaning in composition and structure, a new language to describe the world as he had seen and experienced it.”

They are, for the most part, dark voyages, in which shadows of Cordati figures from the twenties and thirties haunt an enigmatic abstract landscape.
On a number of Cordati’s unused canvases, provided by his grandson Giordano, Keane began exploring this landscape in oil and acrylic in 2002. Recognizable Cordati motifs and subjects gyrate, like restless ghosts, on the paintings’ margins. Motion is an inescapable theme, but so too is language – and more specifically, what Keane refers to as the “coded language that defines a community.”

Community and the journey, the native and the wanderer: On the surface, they are the definitions of paradox. Yet like so many paradoxes, their very contradictions hold a powerful logic. As any wanderer can tell you, the journey is, above all, a search for community, for the language of human connection.

Mysterious symbols are the signposts of Keane’s paintings, references to arcane communal languages. One language borrows its vocabulary from the literal signposts that direct travelers along rural trails in the Barga countryside; another conducts its adepts into the virtual environment – the virtual community – of 21st century communications; a third plunges the viewer into an investigation of composition and perspective that discovers logic amidst apparent chaos in the final three decades of Bruno Cordati’s long artistic life.

“ He was on a mission throughout those years, pursuing a thought, an idea,” Keane says of Cordati. Like those distant ancestors sketching an endless hunt. Like Keane himself.

Frank Viviano
Barga, May 2003