Return to the Garden

New Paintings and Objects by Eric Finzi

Robert C. Morgan

While preparing to write on the current exhibition by Eric Finzi, I came upon a memoire by the French author Alain Robbe- Grillet where he argues that true writers are those who write without coming to any conclusions. His concern is: How does the absence of a conclusion constitute the true nature of writing?

Rather than answer for himself, he refers to the work of the late Roland Barthes who focused not on making definitive statements, but on the actual process of writing. He goes on to describe Barthes as less an author (in the traditional sense) than a writer who understood the act of putting down words as an extension of his personal life. His writing was not about the finality of thought but about the process of thought transformed through feeling.

Apparently Barthes had a rather extraordinary ability to articulate a memory-flow where thoughts simply happened without reaching a conclusion. The evidence of this memory-flow through language was more important and vital than imposing a definitive result.

Suddenly it occurred to me that what Eric Finzi strives to create in his current series of work is distinctly similar to Robbe- Grillet’s analysis of Barthes. Finzi appears focused on projecting a memory-flow where thinking is transformed into feeling, and where feeling enters into the process of his work as an artist. In order to grasp form within memory is to take it beyond the frame of a commonplace narrative. Borrowing largely from the film

by the Italian director, Vittorio de Sica, titled Il Giardino di Finzi Contini (1967), Finzi selected a semiotic ensemble of images that offered meaning, pregnant images with feelings of doubt, betrayal, and guilt. Here it is important to know that Finzi is not only related to the Finzi Contini family in Ferrari, but is an artist trying to recall memories of the past as told to him by someone else.

To my knowledge, this is the first time Finzi has worked directly from the narrative that De Sica has given to his film. The information the artist extracts from the film and, in a sense, appropriates into his epoxy paintings is twice removed from the

actual history. Yet the memory, latent with feeling, continues to live on, despite the artist’s desire to displace it. By displacing it, he gives it another form for other generations to interpret not only as images within a narrative, but as objects to feel in time and space.

Finzi’s paintings are created through a highly technical working process. His primary material is epoxy resin, which offers the potential of a health risk. Necessarily aware of the danger, the artist protects himself with full body covering and a breathing mask. In addition he works in a studio environment fully equipped

with state-of-the-art ventilation. The question may arise as to how Finzi is able to focus on the objective of memory-flow in such an environment. The subject matter of his work and the materials with which he works appear contrary to one another. But he does not see it this way. As an artist, he requires the resistance and transformative potential offered by an atypical, non-friendly, anti- bohemian atelier. His studio is unlike any other artists, at least in the romantic sense. In Finzi’s case, the studio is a place where

he must forever be on guard, fully alert to what is happening around him. Over the years, he has acquired a near instinctual awareness, a sensory cognition (close to art), and a pre-cognitive reflexivity that undoubtedly relates to his ongoing practice as a surgeon. Still, It is encouraging to know that his “embodiment of knowledge” – to quote from the poet William Carlos Williams – in art and science is still capable of moving civilization forward.

For those who have seen the De Sica film, it is a gripping and moving narrative that focuses on the Finzi Continis, an opulent and highly cultured Jewish family living in Ferrara. While living under siege from Fascism and the “Radical Laws” proscribed

by Mussolini, the family relentlessly protests what is unjustly happening in Italy, even as the momentum of the times appears to move beyond their control. Still, the Finzi-Continis adhere to an exalted dignity, believing that their fate was still within their grasp.

What concerns the artist Eric Finzi in these elegant, deeply saturated paintings and sculptural objects is less about

establishing a single or monumental conclusion (for which, in fact, there is none) than to come to terms with the memory-flow. Finzi is clearly alert to the past and to the memories that constituted the past, described to him by his father. For Finzi, the journey is a tenuous, conscientious one. Each of the works in this exhibition

-- the portraits and objects, the landscapes and the people, the expressive ticks and demeanor of the family – together constitute the meaning or absence of meaning latent within the Finzi Continis during one the darkest moments in human history. It was

a time when human beings lost their ability to empathize with the suffering and angst of. humanity through fear and withdrawal from life.

In these paintings, Finzi explores these symbolic referents and metaphorical incidents as they evoke the heritage of his past. I believe these works are meant to envision his memory-flow more than coming to a single conclusion or some illusory monumental statement. Finzi has clearly contemplated that not so long ago, a way of life, filled with refinement and invisible cohabitation, had existed for over four hundred years without animosity or dissent, until it was inexorably destroyed and temporally annihilated. It remains a tragic and excruciating chapter in the recent history

of Italy, particularly among families living in Ferrara today, many of them Jewish, that when this highly cultured town and way of life was under siege, the result would be some form of heinous destruction. When hysteria and fear entered into daily life and became pandemic in the early 1940s, after Mussolini put the laws

of discrimination into effect, there was little doubt that a significant percentage of the residents of Ferrari would suffer and finally become the victims of a mindless bureaucratic annihilation.

Finzi has referenced this history in previous exhibitions, but this is perhaps the most complete in terms of a tragic poetic saga that goes toward the intimate scenarios of a historical moment he wants to make clear. As with any significant art, his is primarily a matter of making the history clear to himself, to relieve the burden of its effect, relatively speaking, and to continue onward.

Still, it is important to refer to the work itself. I have often reflected on the meaning of the glass tennis racket – a symbol not only of Crystal Night, but of a fragile, yet formerly pleasurable life in which Jews engaged with Gentiles in a game of tennis or

a walk through the garden. Then, I contemplate The Long Walk, a painting so accurately portrayed from the De Sica film as the residents of the garden mansion descend the stairway in their home for the last time, while their admiring servants pay silent

respect and homage. Finzi’s Primavera Memory further moves me as he has situated an appropriation of Botticelli’s Venus within the mansion as an implicit sign, a manifestation of the Contini Venus (played by the actress Dominique Sanda in the De Sica film).

More than any other character, this Venus figure retains the heroic presence of the young Jewish woman, Micol, who continues in Finzi’s painting to stand her ground as a heroic symbol of a proud Italian heritage.

To give the proper affect to such expository images would not have occurred without the artist’s supreme command of his materials. To portray these images accurately in terms of feeling

would not have occurred without an inscrutable formal grasp and contextual understanding of how to embody meaning through form. Finzi made this happen. Given the background of the film, and the history that clearly supports the narrative on which the film is based, Finzi has chosen to re-tell the story in his own terms through painting and sculptural objects. His re-telling was done in terms that remain meaningful to his practice as a painter which has a language of its own, a language that defines the presence of a life.

Robert C. Morgan is a writer, art critic, and artist. He is Professor Emeritus at the Rochester Institute of Technology and currently serves as Adjunct Professor in the Graduate Fine Arts program at Pratt Institute. Author of numerous books and monographs, he has lectured on issues confronting artists in the global environment in countries throughout the world, working in twenty languages. He was inducted into the European Academy of Sciences and Arts in Salzburg in 2011.