Text: ROMANA LODA

"Beatriz Millar: Between wandering and skill"

THE CHOICE TO WANDER

They turned to look at the wall with
family photos, rows of smiling faces,
all dead or distant.
How was it possible, they asked themselves,
to be reduced to being alone?

Bruce Chatwin

The artist is a wanderer, always. He is a condition without any
alternative. Compelled by an inner gnawing, he is forced to scour with
infinite patience all the corners of the routes he travels, all the closets of
the houses he lives in, all the anxieties of his heart.
He is a traveller, always ready to set off to tackle the angry surge of life,
although the return is often not guaranteed. He is a figure half-way between
the Knight-Errant and Don Quixote, fantastic projections that blend in him
until they explode in a unique restlessness that leads him to hate places
where he is forced to stay and anxiously await a new departure.

The artist is a pilgrim, always. He has his own destination to reach, his
own sanctuary to visit. It is not Mecca or even Santiago de Compostela;
nor the Czetochowa Madonna, but saints like Piero della Francesca or
Vermeer, Cézanne or Picasso. And he goes, however he can, loaded down
with books, ideas and also rage. He goes there and comes back, though he
claims at times to have been elsewhere.

The artist is an exile, always. He has no alternative but to seek isolation,
whether he remains in a bawling, insatiable family, or he abandons
everything and everyone to go elsewhere. He will always be a stranger,
wherever he is, a dull, often unfathomable trace in the middle of a silent
crowd. With his unorthodox behaviour, he is the dark side of our
certainties, the anxious interrogative as to our identity.
Like all strangers he is a flayed man who carries inside a secret wound.
He is like Mersault, the stranger in Camus’ book of the same name, oppressed
by a sense of not belonging that makes him psychologically tainted.
everything around him is blurred and, hiding in a hole of smiles, he
performs deeds the destructive impact of which he cannot gauge.

An exile is Beatriz Millar, who has chosen not only to be an artist but
also to live far from her place of origin and her primary affections, forcing
herself to speak a foreign language to go in search of the sun and herself.
It is true that nothing can come from an artist that is not already within
the person, but it has been proved that uprooting is highly traumatic and
can either paralyse creativeness or become a liberation involving choices
requiring immense courage and clarity. Tahiti was fundamental for Gaugin,
not because he painted exotic women in real life, but because it allowed
his painting to free itself definitively from impressionism.

Millar, in her wanderings following her academic studies and a period of
orientation, oscillated widely from analysis of the cromatic
simultaneousness of the futurists (Boccioni’s synthesis and Russolo’s
dynamism in particular) to the silhouettes of Matisse and the wooden
shapes of Hans Arp.

The artist, in his youth, is forced to move within a cage erected by his
culture. He is overwhelmed by great rage deriving from the obvious
disproportion between what he would like to do and the thousand
conditionings that prevent him from doing it. And this continues until the
sparks – if there are any- manage to light the flame of an invention that
is finally freed. Picasso started by drawing inspiration from El Greco,
whereas Mondrian retraced the stylistic elements of the impressionists,
but both gave up quickly until they engulfed their masters and came out
purified, ready to set out on the road to autonomy.

Not even Beatriz Millar could obviously escape what has been defined as
darwinian selection in the intricately wild jungle of art, but once out of
her condition of non heretic-wanderer she preferred to continue alone,
choosing to remain to the side with respect to hegemonic groups – an
exile among strangers.
Unlike Francis Bacon, who admitted disconsolately that he had never
managed to paint a smile, Millar is almost blinded by the sun she has
found and she approaches a project with appealing agility that induces
her to take sides as well as to represent. At first she had to rein in a sort
of eagerness that made her want to say everything in a rush, frenetically.
Then she travelled the classics extensively with humility and achieved a
synthesis of figurality, that goes well beyond a mere figurative exercise.
However, her drawing and subsequent carving and fretworks of thin
wooden boards to assemble and colour do not reveal the self-satisfied
abandon of the handcrafter who uses strange material to create
landscapes from illustrated postcards or scenes from other people’s
masterpieces. In Millar today there is detailed planning and contemplative
work in stripping away exzesses until she acquires a magic intensity that
is the legitimate offspring of a simplicity snatched from the magmatic
confusion of reality.

After being a pilgrim and a wanderer, Beatriz Millar, painter, is an exile by
vocation, a stranger by choice. But she has reached that rare point of
equilibrium in which seeing is nothing but a companion of feeling.

THE CREATIVE FALSEHOOD

Save a scrap of feeling,
keep at least one creative falsehood.
Only in the gentle craft of art
will you be able to set sail
from the tedium of the world.

Aleksandr Blok

To create art you have to be able to suppress reality and convert it into
something else. Art is basically an attempt to reveal what is concealed. It
is a journey of learning, illusion, pretence – a creative falsehood.
Every work of art can be defined as the sum of the misunderstandings it
has caused; it is at once "enigmatic, deceptive, beauty with fraud",
according to Licini, or "magic freed from the pretension of being truth",
in the words of Adorno. True, but on the condition that the untruth is as
unexpected and fascinating as a flash of light in the night or a sunflower
emerging from the desert sand.

The artist, stranger and wanderer, is also essentially a liar as he attempts to
impose on the world his own particular illusion. He has a trunk full of clouds
and extracts handfuls to disperse them in the air so that they become
visions, hallucinations, dreams. Happiness, for the artist, means – in the
Freudian sense – not only satisfying accumulated needs but also the

opportunity to develop freely one’s own creative genius. In this he stands out
from the crowd. And while it is important to live without posing too many
questions, for him it is essential to squeeze from each doubt at least a drop
of honey. It is his nature, as well as his destiny, but what can he do when life
begins to hurt? How can he be absorbed in creative invention when he has
to face insults from fate? No one can make up for a single moment of
unhappiness, but the artist is able to sublime it and turn it into emotion.
And while it is true that the so-called artistic void - a place and time in
which the artist can isolate himself completely from the world – does not
exist, it is also true that only the force of creativeness alone enables him
to pass through it without being overwhelmed.

A youngster today has a perception of reality that is completely different
from that of his predecessors. He grows up in a society parcelled out by
strong, very rapid signals. The current speed of communications ridicules
he high- speed follies so extolled by futurists. The media today brings
everything so close together that one can be anywhere in the world at
the same time, and live in such a turmoil of images that many experts
predict that the next Flood will involve electronics, not water. No one
will be able to escape drowning in the whirlwind of signals, and youngsters
perceive this though they live it with apparent indifference.
A sort of compulsion tocommunicate that wears itself out through
messages without message, ideas without ideology.
Beatriz Millar, a young sensitive artist, lives her time clear-sightedly and
passionately. After reaching the rate of futurists, she realized that they
merely bore the name, whereas in actual fact they were neurotic
descendants of the past. This is why she switched her attention to other
masters whith whom she found affinity - Matisse and Arp, and more
recently Barry Kitaj, Patrick Caulfield, Joe Tilson and Mel Ramos - She
conducted in - depth studies on each one to assess their poetic essence,
not merely to be conditioned by their stylistic characteristics.
In the words of the dog in a fable by Aesop, "rather hunger than the
weight of the collar," and Millar too explored voraciously, but without
other spells apart from the verification of affinity, later to go elsewhere
freely.
She has thus achieved her own type of painting-cum-sculpture, making
de-materialized boards to be hung directly on the thread of the imaginary.
She has thus managed to conceal the pathways of expressive language, to
create syntheses like concentration camps of joyous rapture, of great
visual and emotional impact.
In some of her more recent works, such as a series dedicated to the
Argentinean Tango, some scenes from Marilyn Monroe’s films, and a later
series dedicated to black prostitutes, the perspective effect has been
replaced by maximum stimulation of the surface. It is here that, by
stripping her pictures of all formal excesses, Millar reaches rare peaks of
expressive effectiveness.
In the case of these works, too, it is important not to be misled by the
appealing play of sinewy shapes and bright colours. On the contrary, it is
necessary to pinpoint the various details of the composition to perceive
the fascination of what passes through the memory like a sharp arrow
able to activate the seething forces that intersect and interact until they
explode like fireworks.

Beatriz Millar, having chosen the solitude that led her into exile, has
made peace with the world through her creative falsehoods, which
enabled her to trip lightly through her inventions as if they were cool,
soft, brilliantly coloured carpets. Today, at the end of the first stage in an
activity not long but variegated and sustained by outstanding results, she
realized that the asperities of her formative season can save her from
collapsing on the road to research that is heralded as not lacking in
further developments.
At a time when artistic generations are born and die like blinks of the
eyelids, Beatriz Millar’s choice is for the duration, conscious of the need
to avoid involvement in a context that moves like a train running at
breakneck speed. She knows full well that art, all art, is awareness that a
lifetime is not enough, but also that anything is worthwhile and can be
done provided that the soul is not narrow-minded.

LETTER TO BEATRIZ MILLAR ON BEING AN ARTIST DAY BY DAY AND POETRY THROUGH LIFE (*)
Dear Beatriz,
I was thinking about Kaurismaki's film The Match-girl which we saw
together the day before yesterday and I was still oppressed by the total
lack of friendly words in the protagonist's life and the inevitable decision
to punish cruelly everyone who had denied her a gesture of affection.
I was going over the consideration we made regarding the difficulty in
accepting the hostile indifference of others without generating a form of
violence, which has to break out at a certain point. Well, as you must
realise, I was under a bad influence, as the gentle euphemism goes, and
also slightly melancholy because of the grey windy day. This is why I took
out of my secret drawer a handful of old poems and picked out one by
Pedro Salinas, which goes like this:

What you are
distracts me from what you say

You fire rapid words
bedecked with laughter,
inviting me
wherever they take me.
I do not heed you, I do not follow them:
I watch
the lips that generated them.

All of a sudden, you look far away.
You fix your stare there,
on what I do not know,
and your soul bursts forth
as struck by a pointed arrow.
I do not look where you are looking,
I'm watching you looking.

The only thing I want
is to see you wanting.

I have no idea how many years have passed since I read this poem the
first time, but coming across it again was like sitting in front of a brightly
blazing fire after a dismal, tiring journey.
The words triggered a sort of reverie, which led me to associate the poetic
discourse with some of your gestures and my reactions to them. It all
happened spontaneously, convincing me that it was basically my own
projection freed by the verse. I mean that I associated this poem with a
general idea which I have made of you and have to take into account,
because shadows are not separate from the body that generate them
unless they are cancelled by blinding flashes.
Thus, supporting these stimuli I was drawn to make a broader
consideration of my dealings with artists, and how they have unravelled
during years of reciprocal contact.
Human relations inevitably lead to an intermingling of nerves and more or
less anxious doubts, from which it is difficult to extricate oneself unless
relations come to a stop at the threshold of formalism. In the ritual of
each new acquaintance is released the seduction of a smile, of a word,
or revulsion at a gesture, an inflection. With artists it is different, because
you generally encounter the work first and only later do you move on to
personal relations, and here you often have to give up in the face of the
evident contrast between works at the peak of poeticalness, while the
creator has to live as he can, and often not very well.
Art is an attempt to express the inexpressible; it is elevation of reality
even when it arises from the troubles of life. The artist does not have a
vacuum to work in freely and happily and is often forced to assume a
state of grace that is not his. He works as and harder than everyone else
as life goes on, and tries to take flight, often resulting in humiliating falls.
I am, of course, speaking of those who work in earnest, whatever the
results, because artists - like everyone else - are not all the same and,
despite to attempts to classify them in a single specific category, they each
have their own individual peculiarities that characterise their greater or
lesser ability to keep to what they produce.
Not all the same, as I was saying, and often surprisingly contradictory. At
times you find some who are really exciting as people, as regards their
intelligence, culture spirit and ability to analyse, but who create work of
desolating impotence. With them you can have a pleasant stimulating
relationship, but you also have to suffer the unease caused by this
schizophrenia that is hard to accept. They have masterpieces in their
heads and gems in their words, but everything freezes when they come to
think or make an utterance.
On the contrary, you sometimes come across people who are dull - to say
The least - because of their inability to give the slightest glamour to their
few highly confused ideas, and their constant pettiness. Then you have to
surrender to admiration in front of their works, enchanting through their
inventiveness, depth, spirit of adventure and poetic quality.
It is a mystery , but I can assure you I have seen beautiful pictures come
out of studios-cum-kitchens smelling of cabbages and onions, while I
have seen trivial, lifeless works, perfectly framed and catalogued, in huge
bright ateliers of masters who amiably entertain critics and dealers,
while assistants get down to preparing canvasses and finishing off the
most tedious, repetitive details.
I'll give you an example. The most ridiculous exhibition I have seen
recently was staged in an ancient palace where the artist, wearing an
impeccable dinner jacket, glided from one group of adoring ladies to
another, gracefully rattling off explanations like the eternal struggle
between life and death, between good and evil, in front of pictures looking
like curdled blancmanges. And in one corner, providing a pleasant
background accompaniment, was a young bare-bosomed cellist, greatly
admired and very sad.
I couldn't fail, by contrast, to turn back my mind back to when, many years
ago, I met Antonio Ligabue in a little book shop in Reggio Emilia. I knew
nothing about him and when I found him in front of me I could hardly
stifle an instinctive revulsion. He was like an animal with staring eyes, a
hooked nose and thickly coated yellow teeth. He moved with obvious
dread among the few people present and when a woman approached him,
he panted noisily. I was fascinated by his paintings but I kept well out of
his way as he also stank terribly.
At a certain point I found him right behind me blowing down my neck,
and as I moved cautiously behind a table, he whispered "Voio la veghine!"
(I want the virgin!) The others laughed but I was terrified and didn't relax
until his friends, laughing and slapping him good-naturedly on the back,
led him away. It was a mortifying experience, but I must admit that rarely
have paintings aroused so much emotion in me since the ones by the
customs officer Rousseau, so dear to Picasso. Ones by the De Chirico, of
course, and Burri as well, two other impossible people. Or those by
Orneore Metelli, the painter-cum-cobbler from Terni who painted at night
in the kitchen, got the perspectives all wrong and dispensed authentic
poetry with generosity.
I do not want swept away by my memories and lose the original
thread of this letter. The question that assails me at times is how to blend
creativeness with living, poetry with reality, without forfeiting that part of
each due to human being. I could give a few examples but I want to
talk to you about Giulio Turcato, perhaps the last true painter in the post-
war period in Italy, with whom I have enjoyed a long friendship. I once
called him the Unaware Angel - and I think the name suited him because
he didn't act like an angel though he was one by nature and by effect of
that extraordinary deviation in sensitivity that enabled enabled him to stand with
his head in heaven while his feet were immersed in the mire of the world.
In art he had a season of political commitment, without yielding to banal
populism, as Guttuso did. He kept himself free to transform into poetry
everything he came across, from toy cars to dolls and packets of liquorice
sweets. He did paintings on foam rubbers and called them lunar soils, well
before man actually landed on the moon. He filled his pictures with strips
of human skin, train tickets, coins and endless other objects including
tranquilliser tablets. All this without ever losing sight of genuine exciting
painting.
Turcato did not preach, he had no truth to convey; he lived for his
painting, he was painting, succeeding in the virtually impossible task of
becoming a work of art himself, by living.
I apologize if this has been rather long-winded, but it is difficult to resist
the temptation to communicate when you take refuge in the warmth of
pure poetry. I have not known you for long, but even during our first
encounter you brought back pleasant times connected with some artists I
felt to be particularly akin to me. In you I immediately saw your works, in
which you offer yourself with total, almost naive abandon. We are all
what we do, but in your case it is such a natural way of being that at
times, when we are together, I get distracted from your work and
concentrate on you, as you move in and out of your pictures as if they
were mirrors to dance through lightly. You glide from doing to being with
your eyes wide open, amazed that everything can come so easily. You
know that it is not true, that creating something takes a superhuman effort,
but you manage to exalt yourself in the wonder of a project that becomes
a finished work.
For you I only fear that the inevitable upheavals of life can wear you
down until you are exhausted, transformed. And, while I know you have a
great inner strength, I beg you not to give in. Make art your saviour,
always; do not allow this passion to become a mere job leaving you in a
rut. Avoid transforming your life into a stream of nights marked by the
effort of forgetting the day just over and by anxiety for the new imminent
day. Do not allow your dreams to exhaust their ability to take you by
surprise, which happens when you get to the point of no return, where
you can stand everything except enthusiasm. Above all, do not die of
certainty! Experience the wonder of being unreservedly enamoured of
what you do, even if it takes effort and a heavy toll. You have a rare gift,
that strikes the soul with a pointed arrow, and you must not allow life
and the narrow-mindedness of others to snatch away your poetic ability.

The only thing I want
Is to see you wanting.

This comes from a person like me, who has spent a stimulating season
near some Unaware Angel and has had, despite herself, to resort to
writing with one hand and drying her tears with the other.

Romana

December, 1997

(*Taken from Romana Loda's book "THE SEA WE DID NOT SAIL" about
to be published by Edizioni Multimedia, Brescia , Italy)

Translation by logoService, Brescia, Italy