painted plastic

Giorgio Morandi obsessively painted bottles. There's nothing poetic about bottles, really, other than the way Morandi chose to represent them. Art, sometimes, is about the glorification of certain subject matter, taking a subject out of one context and placing it into another. You know, to make it poetic. To make Daily Life photogenic.

Morandi worked from his studio in Bologna. He rarely left it. For inspiration, he used the same simple elements: bottles, boxes, and the view from his window. He manipulated the arrangement of the former in every way possible.

Morandi's paintings seem to be oblivious to time and place. Maybe, in part, because he removed labels from his bottles, faces from his clocks, and people from his landscapes.

In fact, many of Morandi's works, especially those produced after 1945, are arrangements of pure form. Morandi self-imposed limits then tried to go beyond them.

Boundaries can be a form of restriction. Or a point of departure. Like being indoors or out.

Painted Plastic Bottles

I take used plastic bottles (shampoo, detergent, water), strip them of their labels,arrange them into compositions, glue them together, them paint them. You know, taking simple things and turning them into art. The poetics of the common place.

Naked plastic bottles grouped together make me think of Giorgio Morandi Gone Live. Morandi use to go to La Piazzola, Bologna's Favorite Flea Market, buy cheap bottles, wash them and remove their labels. Once they were anonymous, homogenized, abstracted, he'd line them up in various positions and paint them.

Bottle portraits.

Morandi's first real job was that of teaching drawing in the elementary schools of his hometown, Bologna. Maybe it was from these small children that he learned to keep it simple. You know, the immediacy of the essence.

Like Cezanne, Morandi detached himself from current trends and, instead, devoted himself to the simplicity of smalltown, hometown life. He never went far from his studio at Via Fondazza 36 keeping himself well-rooted to his objectives.

Because not everyone has the same objectives. In 1943, Morandi was jailed by the Fascists because of his association with the anitfascist art historian, Carlo Ragghianti.

Morandi's bottles, like people, changed their identity according to their positioning. His bottles are about rapport, one with the other. In painting mainly bottles, Morandi deliberately delimited his territory. But the large number of such paintings that he produced proves that you can go far even within restrictions. You know, extending the boundaries of confinement. Minimal can be maximal, like ideals.

Still lives re-awakened. Are no longer still.