Tommaso Fattovich – Painting: Defiance of Contemporary Art

For decades discussions of contemporary art have degenerated into sterile quarrels, generating more heat than light. Defining the term more rigorously than is customary offers a way out of this impasse. To this end, French sociologist Nathalie Heinich proposes to consider contemporary art as a distinct artistic genre and a new paradigm of art.¹ In her schema, contemporary art is not considered chronologically, as a certain period in art history, but as a generic category, defined by a specific practice of art. So, if classical art is a genre that implements the academic canons of figurative representation, more or less idealized, and if modern art is a genre that challenges the rules of figuration and demands the expression of the artist’s subjectivity, then contemporary art is a genre that plays on the ontological borders of art, challenging the very notion of a work of art as it is commonly understood. While recognition of a plurality of genres (and consequently of a plurality of principles of appreciation) has the advantage of defusing the explosive confrontations between the advocates and adversaries of contemporary art, the generic approach, because it is largely limited to the aesthetic dimension, fails to adequately capture, Heinich argues, the status of contemporary art. Indeed, she asserts, the specificity of contemporary art is apparent at many levels other than that of the works themselves. More than a genre, then, contemporary art is a new artistic paradigm.

1 – Nathalie Heinich, Le paradigme de l’art contemporain : Structures d’une révolution artistique (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2014) ; Le Triple jeu de l’art contemporain (Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1998) ; Pour en finir avec la querelle de l’art contemporain (Paris: L’Échoppe, 1999). In English, Martha Buskirk in her book The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005) covers much the same ground as Nathalie Heinrich.

Nathalie Heinich explains that, as an unconscious model that formats the sense of what is normal in art, an artistic paradigm¹ is operative not only in the creation but also in the perception of artworks. Contemporary art, insofar as it entails a redefinition of art, represents a radical paradigm shift in Western art. Indeed, its ontological rupturing of the borders of the generally accepted understanding of art has, as Kuhn’s theory posits, relegated perennial artistic problems—to do, for example, with easel painting and pedestal-mounted sculpture—to a small band of ‘rearguard’ artists, while bringing to the fore previously peripheral problems such as the limits of what can be accepted as an ‘artistic proposition’. Where classicism and modernism offered beauty and aesthetic emotion, contemporary art offers sensation. Where the earlier paradigms valued closeness and authenticity, the current one swears by distance and irony. The new paradigm radicalizes the ‘regime of singularity’, favoring novelty and originality, while the ‘regime of community’, with its attention to traditions and standards, reigned in the old paradigms.

1 – Cf. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press, 1962)

Traditionally, the model for dealers has been to bet on raw talents, and support these artists until work by some of them sells well enough to cover the bets made on all the others. Under the mega-gallery model that Gagosian pioneered, the top dealers don’t even bother with nascent artists. Ellie Rines, who runs 56 Henry, a small gallery on the Lower East Side, told me, ‘What I can do that the big galleries can’t is that I spot someone who has potential’. Gagosian is content to let people like Rines do the wildcatting. Once they’ve discovered an unknown and nurtured her into a valuable commodity, he can lure the artist away with promises of more money, more support, and a bigger platform. Patrick Radden Keefe, The New Yorker, 24 July 2023

The polarization between big international galleries and small local ones is intensifying. Mid-market galleries are being squeezed, with some closing down and others changing their business model. Georgina Adam, Dark Side of the Boom: The Excesses of the Art Market in the Twenty-First Century (London: Lund Humphries, 2017)

Larry Gagosian, with nineteen galleries that bear his name, from New York to London to Athens to Hong Kong, generating more than a billion dollars in annual revenue, may well be the biggest art dealer in the history of the world. He represents more than a hundred artists, living and dead, including many of the most celebrated and lucrative. All told, Gagosian has more exhibition space than most museums. In 2012, he opened a gallery on the grounds of Le Bourget airport, outside Paris, where his clients can buy art upon landing in their private jets. Patrick Radden Keefe, The New Yorker, 24 July 2023

Art fairs grew at breakneck speed from the turn of the millennium and reached unmanageable levels in the years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. With each success came increased dominance and the industry seemed out of touch with the galleries it purported to support. Art fairs were expensive exercises. For dealers with art priced at the lower end of the spectrum, it all stopped adding up. Melanie Gerlis, The Art Fair Story: A Rollercoaster Ride (London: Lund Humphries, 2021)

Where collectors were previously viewed as clients of the galleries, increasingly they had become clients of the fairs. The relationship had shifted. Other factors leading to the shifting loyalties include the sheer number of galleries that exist now and the shorthand that has evolved in determining where a gallery stands in the overall pecking order based on which fairs they do and where their booth is located in them. The fair has become the brand that collectors trust, the brand that sells the art, displacing the gallery to a large degree. The power that the fairs have over a gallery’s financial well-being has become starkly obvious. Viewing the fair as ‘the brand they trust’ makes collectors less reliant—in the middle and emerging sectors of the market—on developing a personal relationship with the dealers they meet there. Edward Winkleman, Selling Contemporary Art: How to Navigate the Evolving Market (New York: Allworth Press–Skyhorse Publishing, 2015)

Artists prefer having their work presented in a gallery context over an art fair. The top metric for the ‘success’ of any artwork at fairs is whether it sold or not. Having artwork not sell at a fair puts stress on the artist’s relationship with the dealer and risks influencing what the artist decides to create moving forward. Edward Winkleman, op. cit.

In today’s greatly expanded art world—and art market—it’s the artists making diluted art who have the upper hand. A large swath of the art being made today is driven by the market, and specifically by not very sophisticated speculator-collectors who prey on their wealthy friends and their friends’ wealthy friends, getting them to buy the same look-alike art. Galleries everywhere are awash in these brand-name reductivist canvases, all more or less handsome, harmless, supposedly metacritical, and just ‘new’ or ‘dangerous-looking’ enough not to violate anyone’s sense of what ‘new’ or ‘dangerous’ really is. All of it is impersonal, mimicking a set of preapproved influences. It’s also a global presence.

This work is decorator-friendly, especially in a contemporary apartment or house. It feels ‘cerebral’ and looks hip in ways that flatter collectors, even as it offers no insight into anything at all. It’s all done in haggard shades of pale, deployed in uninventive arrangements that ape digital media, or something homespun or dilapidated. Replete with self-conscious comments on art, recycling, sustainability, appropriation, processes of abstraction, or nature, this array of painting styles shares a common vocabulary of smudges, stains, spray paint, flecks, spills, splotches, almost-monochromatic fields, silk-screening, or stenciling. It is visual Muzak, blending in. Collectors needn’t see shows of this work, since it offers so little visual or material resistance.

Almost everyone who paints like this has come through art school. Thus the work harks back to the period these artists were taught to lionize: the supposedly purer days of the sixties and seventies, when their teachers’ views were being formed. The saddest part of this trend is that even better artists who paint this way are getting lost in the onslaught of copycat mediocrity and mechanical art. Going to galleries is becoming less like venturing into individual arks, and more like going to chain stores where everything looks distantly familiar.

The art market is a ‘winner-takes-all’ market.¹ In 2017, just 25 artists account for nearly 50% of global auction revenue from contemporary art. J. Halperin & E. Kinsella, ‘The “Winner Takes All” Art Market’, 20 Sep 2017 (Artnet).

Gagosian says he prefers collectors who trust their own taste. But it has long been suggested that many of his collectors simply ape his taste. In 1984, the cantankerous art critic Robert Hughes bemoaned the new generation of collectors: ‘Most of the time, they buy what other people buy. They move in great schools, like bluefish, all identical.’ Indeed, many prominent collections now reflect the sensibility of Gagosian. Patrick Radden Keefe, The New Yorker, 24 July 2023

Robert Scull was a rainmaker. People that respected him decided that if he liked something, it was worth liking. We’re lemmings! In the art world there’s a lot of followers; a few leaders and a lot of followers. Which is okay if you follow the right leader. Collector Stefan Edlis, The Price of Everything, dir. Nathaniel Kahn, HBO DVD 2018

Some major collectors now buy and sell art so frequently, and in such enormous quantity, that little of it gets displayed at all. The Geneva Freeport—a tax-free zone in Switzerland where art is stored in climate-controlled, highly secure facilities—is thought to contain more than fifty billion dollars’ worth of art and antiquities, including works by van Gogh, Picasso, and Leonardo da Vinci. It would be one of the biggest museums in the world if it were open to the public. More and more art disappears into loading bays in Switzerland. One perverse outcome of the hysterical inflation of art prices in the past half century is that great works end up reduced to stock lists. Patrick Radden Keefe, The New Yorker, 24 July 2023

1 – For an excellent scientific explanation of how the winner-takes-all-market in art works, see the section, ‘How Collectors Influence the Global Art Market’ by Alessia Zorloni & Antonella Ardizzone in Art Wealth Management: Managing Private Art Collections, ed. Alessia Zorloni (Springer International, 2016) pp. 69-71.

B. — I speak of an art turning from the plane of the feasible in disgust, weary of its puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road.
D. — And preferring what?
B. — The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living. All that is required now is to make of this submission, this admission, this fidelity to failure, a new occasion, a new term of relation, and of the act which, unable to act, obliged to act, he makes, an expressive act, even if only of itself, of its impossibility, of its obligation.

I trust, dear reader, you’ve recognized the voice of he who wrote Waiting for Godot. Yes, he who also wrote: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’¹ If I’ve chosen to open this reflection on art with these words of Samuel Beckett,² it is because discourse on ‘the re-enchantment of the world through art’³ is often trite and I, for my part, wish to oppose that triteness by taking a different tack.⁴

1 – Samuel Beckett, ‘Worstward Ho’, in Nohow On, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho (New York: Grove Press, 1996) p. 89

2 – The first two citations are from ‘Three Dialogues with George Duthuit’, first published in Transition in 1949; reprinted in Samuel Beckett, Disjecta, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984) pages 139 & 145.

3 – This notion will run, implicitly, throughout my discussion of Tommaso Fattovich’s paintings, below.

4 – Triteness is ripe in the art world. Just listen to the interviewees in Nathaniel Kahn’s art world documentary, The Price of Everything,* for example: the mediocrity of the discourse, the glibness with which inanities are uttered, bears out the truth of this observation.

* The Price of Everything, dir. Nathaniel Kahn, HBO DVD 2018

The Hermitage didn’t stop the Holodomor, Angkor Wat didn’t stop the Khmer Rouge, Mozart didn’t stop Mauthausen. So let us be humble. Let us be content with art as an encounter between a work and an individual. Let it suffice that the astonishment that may arise from that encounter make, however momentarily, one less zombie seeking distraction before sinking into the big sleep.

When wind and hawk encounter,
What remains to keep?
So you and I encounter,
Then turn, then fall to sleep.¹

So wrote Leonard Cohen in ‘As the Mist Leaves No Scar’.

True love leaves no traces
If you and I are one
It’s lost in our embraces
Like stars against the sun²

So he wrote in the song version of the poem. Do you see what I’m getting at, dear reader? Do you see that art has to do with being, not having? ‘Only art lets be’, wrote Martin Heidegger, ‘in unconcealment dwells hiddenness and safekeeping’.³ Reader, put that in your pipe and smoke it.

1 – Leonard Cohen, ‘As the Mist Leaves No Scar,’ The Spice-Box of Earth, 1961. Also in Leonard Cohen, Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs (New York: Vintage Books, 1994) p. 15

2 – Leonard Cohen, ‘True Love Leaves No Traces’, Death of a Ladies’ Man  (Warner Bros. Records, 1977). Also in Leonard Cohen, Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs (New York: Vintage Books, 1994) p. 216

3 – Quoted in George Steiner, Heidegger, Second edition (New York: Fontana Press, 1992) pp. 133-34

Lois Oppenheim: Beckett’s phenomenology of painting bears a resemblance to Heidegger’s. Both in form and content his metacritical essays on painting are highly reminiscent of ‘The Origin of the Work of Art,’ where the art ‘object’ is similarly located outside the aesthetic domain—in the totalizing movement of the concealment and disclosure of Being—and the problem of art is rethought in such a way that the finish is the return to the start. Heidegger’s focus is the work at work, the unveiling of a thing in truth. For him art transcends the aesthetic valorization precisely in the revelation (as opposed to representation) through which it speaks. So, too, Beckett situates art on the level of the primordial (visual) apprehension of the real. And it is this that accounts for the incongruity at hand: Art fails for the impossibility of expression; yet—as the creative counterpart of the existential ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ at the crux of every Beckett work—its failure is not its end. Rather, art originates precisely therein. This is to say that, to the extent that it is the pre-rational or ante-predicative seizure of the elemental, art, by its very failure to represent, is authentically innovative and retains its potential to be.¹

1 – Lois Oppenheim, The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett’s Dialogue with Art (University of Michigan Press, 2000) pp. 77-78

Three remarks:

1. Like Heidegger’s philosophy (and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology), Beckett’s thesis is rooted in ontology. Being, then, will be central to my interpretation of Fattovich’s painting, but only implicitly: I leave you to connect the dots.

2. For Beckett, every creative effort is interrogative, meaning it is irreducible to any one meaning. Exploration and openness, then, will be the watchwords of my approach. Dogmatism is the enemy of art.

3. Beckett is painfully aware of ‘the difficulty of uttering the experience of looking at art’¹. In his homage to the painter Jack B. Yeats, for example, he writes, ‘In images of such breathless immediacy as these there is no occasion, no time given, no room left, for the lenitive² of comment. No. Merely bow in wonder.’³ Be forewarned: a Fattovich painting can leave you dumbstruck; bowing in wonder before it testifies to a state of grace.

1 – Lois Oppenheim, The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett’s Dialogue with Art (University of Michigan Press, 2000) p. 67

2 – lenitive: that which soothes or alleviates pain or distress

3 – Samuel Beckett, ‘Homage to Jack B. Yeats’, in Samuel Beckett, Disjecta, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984) p.149

Put simply, Tommaso Fattovich’s defiance of contemporary art can be expressed thus: Where they prefer the readymade, he prefers the handmade. The readymade, as we’ve seen, is but an occasion to express a concept. It is a vehicle for an idea. Ideas are a dime a dozen. For the most part, they are free-floating and anonymous, as disposable and recyclable as your baby’s Pampers—just like the objects-in-context that serve as vectors for them. The ‘facture’ of these objects—be they a taxidermized horse on a wall or a shark in a tank of formaldehyde—is a matter of complete indifference. On that score, Maurizzio Cattelan and Damien Hirst are perfectly interchangeable. Not so for the ‘facture’ of Ingres’ line and that of Schiele, de Kooning’s brushstroke and that of O’Keeffe—in no way are these artists, their works and workmanship, interchangeable. Apples and oranges, you might be thinking: one can’t compare readymades to paintings. You would be right, dear reader, if I were using the term ‘readymade’ in its strict sense: I am not. By ‘readymade’, here, I mean two things: minimal spontaneity in the execution of the painting and minimal trace of the hand in the finished work. By this definition, grid-based and op art paintings are readymades, as are stencil-and-spray paintings and paintings patterned like wallpaper. They are conceptual in that they are preconceived, a visual idea transferred ‘readymade’ to a surface. In them, the brain has relegated the hand to mere executant: inert, it has no say in the making of the painting. Tommaso Fattovich, for his part, restores to the hand its dignity—its capacity to go where its curiosity takes it, its ability to explore and investigate. How do we know that? Just take a look at his paintings, and feel the freedom blowing through them.

Fattovich brings his paintings into being through sensuous, not cerebral, knowledge. Palette knife, brush, bare hand, scraper: in intimate contact with the canvas, his hand discovers at it discloses, reveals as it conceals, emits silence as it speaks. ‘But where there is danger, there also grows the strength’¹: from the unknown into which he allows his hand to lead him, Fattovich brings forth the vibrancy that characterizes his paintings, that painterly spark that flashes when promise and peril encounter. And what remains to keep? The scintillating marks on the canvas, of course, their particular gestural quality, but also the sensuous knowledge that derives from risk assumed. Situated and embodied, Fattovich’s skill, we see, has nothing to do with schooling:² it comes from the way he affirms the hand’s dignity. The hand, in turn, affirms him in his agency.³ Far from the cerebralism of conceptualism’s ‘artistic propositions’—most of them about as robust as a balloon after a party—Fattovich’s paintings, in their physicality, engage us holistically. The dignity of the hand is evident in them, and as that hand, via the marks it has made, touches us, moves us, our fragmented lives may, however fleetingly, be made whole.

1 – Friedrich Hölderlin, from ‘Patmos’, translated here by George Steiner in his Heidegger, Second edition (New York: Fontana Press, 1992) p. 141

2 – He never went to art school.

3 – Note that there is an ethical dimension to this relation, in that it brings freedom and responsibility into play: it is the hand that makes us human.

Subject matter—the what—is easy to talk about. But more to the heart of the work, the thing that reveals its nature and quality, is the how, the specific inflection and touch that go into its making. To take a work’s psychic temperature, look at its surface energy. Like syntax and rhythm in poetry, it’s the mechanics that reveal an artist’s character. They determine the way that art will get under our skin, or fail to.

David Salle, How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art (New York: W.W. Norton, 2016) p. 15

The narrow intention of what brings an artist to the canvas does not control meaning nearly as much as does the material existence of the picture itself. The experiential dimensions of abstract art—its scale, materials, method of fabrication, social context, and tradition—are crucially important to our understanding of it.

Kirk Varnedoe, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock, (Princeton University Press, 2006) pp. 251-52

It’s a plastic thing. If intellectual at all, it is fluid, emotional intellect, not analytical. Critics tend to pick things from artists’ work to fit a theory. That’s not how art is made. The artist works from something more direct. It is a visual medium. We don’t need literal interpretation of visual things. Enjoy it for visual, sensual reasons, not literal, interpretive reasons.

Cy Twombly quoted in Paul Winkler, ‘Just About Perfect’. In Cy Twombly Gallery: The Menil Collection, Houston, edited by Julie Sylvester & Nicola Del Roscio, 13–30. (New York: Cy Twombly Foundation/Menil Foundation, 2013)

I conceive the artist, here, as an individual, with ‘individual’ defined as ‘idiosyncrasy, embracing the true grandeur of one’s eccentricity; singularity, becoming who one is, the realizing of one’s personal vision’.¹ The individual is one who realizes that ‘there is something within us that exceeds the world that we find, and to which we must pay our most serious attention because it is driving us, one way or another, into what we are and will be’.² All Fattovich’s paintings give evidence of his hand: that hand is the personal hand of an individual, as defined here.

1 – Adapted from Adam Phillips, Going Sane: Maps of Happiness (London: Hamish Hamilton-Penguin Books, 2005) p. 14

2 – Ibid.

Now, turning from the individuality of the artist to the individuality of the artwork, I offer this exposition by Brian John Martine.¹

A good painting is active, it bodies forth a certain mode of being, not in referring to something outside itself, but rather in turning back upon itself to refer to and sustain its own ontological reality. In other words, we can say that the painting is actively engaged in individuating itself. The self-individuating character of the work cannot be penetrated by means of a discursive account. Nevertheless, this facet of the work of art is certainly an undeniable feature of our experience of it. It is precisely this character which is the seat of the power or the life, if you like, which we experience when we are confronted by a painting that works. A thoroughly insistent self-identity lies at the very center of it, and it is translated into our experience as the exhilaration and even perhaps the threat which we know when we stand before it. It is that in the work of art which we experience as ineluctably other. Every good work of art, in exhibiting this facet of its being, declares itself to be independent of external determination. We encounter it as something capable of grounding itself. It supports and sustains itself as a world richly textured, related only coincidentally to what we can call the world.

1 – Brian John Martine, Individuals and Individuality (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984) pp. 77-85. I have edited these extracts for relevance and readability in this particular context.

We recognize that the elements of a painting, however general they may be, take on a peculiar aspect when they are seen as parts of a particular painting. They participate in a universal structure of an intersubjective world, and yet, as a part of the painting, they participate in the mode of individuality which we recognize in the painting as a whole. They remain universal while coming to be at the same time individuated. In other words, these elements, as something integrated into this particular whole, come to be something more than they were before such an integration: more in that they are not only instances of universal elements, but also participants in a relation unavailable to universals as universals. They stand, in a sense, over against themselves. While they might be elements which one could meet elsewhere, they become rich and meaningful as a result of their integral place in the construction of this particular picture. The mode of individuality is made available to them only insofar as they participate in the painting.

In presenting a mode of access to the immediate, art offers a kind of expression which can take account of individuality without reducing it to the universal categories of philosophical reflection. It is to this character of the work of art that I meant to point earlier in referring to it as a self-contained ‘whole’ or ‘world’. While we can know and describe works of art in terms of their general characteristics, our experience of them always seems much richer than the general descriptions we construct. The work of art stands in both universal and individual relation to its audience, and can only be fully understood when it is understood as an individual.

When a painter like Tommaso Fattovich makes a painting that works, the ‘aura of the individual’ is intensified manifold. From ‘person’ to ‘individual’ to ‘subject’, the journey deepens as intersubjectivity and humanity deepen. The dignity of the hand humanizes, the materiality of paint embodies, and the aura of the individual makes intersubjectivity (relationship) and humanity (freedom and responsibility) possible. Yes, dear reader, Fattovich’s paintings can not only decorate a dwelling, they can also heighten the humanity of its inhabitants.

Contemporary art has, perhaps, had its heyday. The quarrel about it seems to have died down. Its founder, Marcel Duchamp, had the honesty to abandon art when he had said all he had to say. Very few of those who walk in his wake have had the integrity to do likewise. The comeback of painting continues as the conceptualists become less strident. Their ‘transgressions’, whether adult or juvenile—religious and philosophical or sexual and excremental—now barely cause a stir. And yet it remains a fact that contemporary art’s impact has been massive. For better of for worse? Each of us has their opinion. For my part, what concerns me in the current environment is the fate of artists who have found a voice but not an audience. The alliance of contemporary art and hyperconsumerism has, I’m convinced, intensified the ‘winner-takes-all’ phenomenon. ‘When the poets are forgotten the mathematicians will still be remembered’: My ideal is to live in a world where both Hilbert and Shakespeare, Euclid and Aeschylus, Gauss and Goethe have pride of place. The fact is, however, that while engagement with art as a consumer is booming, engagement with art as an individual seems to be in terminal decline. Which is why, when I look at Fattovich’s work, I get excited. This, for me, is art that can grab a consumer and turn him/her into an individual, or at least set them on that path. My task in this essay has been to clear a path for you to Fattovich’s work.