The most fascinating journey is a return
Claudio Magris, The infinite journey
Travelling, painting. To travel again and to continue painting. Both verbs are intertwined in Federico Granell’s creative process. It is an eternal return. Rome, Florence, Venice, Naples, Capri, Sorrento, Palermo, Padua, Pompeii. Each and every one of these Italian cities has been experienced by the artist. Each and every one of them has been stored in his memory, fixed in his retina and travelled through with the spirit of the flâneur who knows how to wander through the streets and take advantage of that ‘gift of wandering’ (as Louis Huart would say) for the aesthetic capture of the world around him and, in this case, its subsequent representation.
Come back with me to Italy is a sort of artistic geography with a soundtrack included. It is an evocative game that invites the spectator to hum the melodies referenced while standing in front of the painting. It is an invitation to a Baudelairean journey where all is beauty, all is order, all is luxury and stillness. Claudio Magris, in the preface to the book El infinito viajar, states that ‘to see a place it is necessary to see it again’. That is, to understand the journey as a return. The journey must begin again in a circular movement that not only implies the return home (in the sense of Homeric Ulysses) but also to the destination. A condition of profane status viatoris that makes Granell make an eternal pilgrimage and retrace his steps. And, at his side, we travel. We return with him to Italy.
Each painting and each drawing is a stop on the painter’s journey. Work after work we accompany him on his personal Grand Tourcontemporary. Attilio Brilli analyses in detail the origin of the phenomenon of travelling to Italy from the Renaissance, through the Eighteenth-century itinerary of antiquarian and artistic research, to the present day, characterised by acceleration and massification (the recently christened Venice Syndrome). The writer reveals at the end of the book:‘Those who revealed to the world, with new and different eyes, in their entirety and through characteristic routes, the Italian landscapes and cities, belong to that genre of wandering characters for whom travel is never a holiday nor, much less – as is the case with tourist transfers – a way of clearing the mind. It is an intense activity, a passionate and fascinating search that pushes us to live and give meaning to every moment’.
Federico Granell se encuentra entre el grupo de personajes descritos por Brilli. Más allá de visiones manidas y estereotipadas, ofrece un paseo emocional por la Italia anhelada. Cada imagen es una vivencia propia cargada de una atmósfera especial y cargada, también, de literatura. Ante sus escenas, los lectores de Guy de Maupassant rememorarán sus diarios de viaje por el Mediterráneo en “La vida errante” con pormenorizadas descripciones de la bella Florencia o del carácter extraordinario de las Catacumbas de los Capuchinos de Palermo. Del escritor francés (quien también parecía tener el “don de la errancia”) son las siguientes palabras: “Al hombre que vaga por el mundo le resulta prácticamente imposible no mezclar su imaginación con la visión de la realidad. Se acusa a los viajeros de mentir y de engañar a quienes les escuchan. Pero no mienten, no, lo que ocurre es que observan mucho más con el pensamiento que con la mirada”.
Travelling, painting, imagining. To travel again, to continue painting and to continue imagining. A third verb ser is added to the artist’s modus operandi. Travelling is an intellectual act and each place speaks to the traveller. In this conversation one looks, one listens, but, above all (following Maupassant), one thinks. Because for Federico Granell, travelling is also meta-painting. A second level of play is present in his canvases. An intellectual and aesthetic game through which to reflect, in a double sense, on the art contained in the journey and on the art contained in art itself. We speak of the painting within the painting. A tautology. The intrahistory of the journey experienced and represented; the intrahistory of the History of Art from Antiquity to the most absolute contemporaneity of the Venice Biennale, for ‘a place is not only its present, but also that labyrinth of different times and epochs that intertwine in a landscape and constitute it’. We have returned to Magris in the infinite journey proposed to us by the works in Come back with me to Italy, with Granell also in Arcadia (in memory of J. W. Goethe).
