The Gnosticism of Giorgio Morandi

“For students of painting (Morandi) continues to question, allowing us through painted palimpsests to see him in the act of deciding. In spite of a natural reclusive inclination, he showed us what it is to believe in painting as a way of life, to love its tattletale evidence of our humanness….In one completed painting exists a layering of faltering probes: passage over passage of stutterings, mutings, bumblings, corrections, slaps and sludges which finally slouch towards a homemade hand-hewn idealization. This is a stirring and captivating demonstration of how to labor a painting through to a life of its own. It is as if the actual birth process of a painting has been anthologized.”      –Wayne Thiebaud, on Morandi

Read Wayne Thiebaud’s entire article on Giorgio Morandi, published in the New York Times, November 15, 1981, on occasion of the retrospective of Morandi’s work at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

Richard Cook’s Dreams and Reflections

“In one sense (paintings) are dreams and they’re reflections and they’re memories, and they become more so; but they are crucially tethered to a particular place, all of them, to the point I could give grid references for all of these paintings.

I think the thing about painting is that it’s always out of reach slightly… one reaches for something… like the horizon, and yet one can never have it, one can never even touch it; one sort of yearns towards it and that’s all one can ever do.”