The Magic and the Colours

 in Gianni Maran’s Work

Licio Damiani

It’s evening in Campiello Maran in the old part of Grado. The façade of the antique buildings are covered by oleander shrubs  in flower, outdoor stone staircases and windows with green shutters. From the small square you can see the homonymous Calle illuminated by a circle of light from an antique street lamp. It appears like a theatrical set  echoing Biagio Marin’s verses. (The poet and Gianni Maran  held each other in high esteem):

Mio favela graisan / che senpre in cuor me sona, / fior in boca a gno mare, musicao da gno nona // tu tu me porti el vento / che passa pel paluo, / che ‘l sa de nalbe rosa / e puo de fango nuo. //

E tu me porti incora / siroco largo in svolo, / e corcali a bandiera / como i fior del gno brolo;…

My tongue of Grado / that always resound in my heart, / flower in my mother’s mouth, / made music by my grandmother. // you bring me the wind / that blows over the marsh, / that smells of pink dawn /  and then of bare mud. // And you also bring me / the sirocco in broad flight, / and seagulls waving their wings / like the flowers of my garden;…

We are sitting in front of the artist’s gallery, enjoying the fresh evening breeze.  Gianni appears as a combination of a portrait between Yul Brinner’s head and Lenin’s moustache and finely cut beard.

Traces of the Maran family go back to the times when Roman Aquileia was being invaded by Attila’s horde. Many of the people of Aquileia found refuge amidst the forests in the deserted island of Grado. For this reason, a Campiello and a Calle bear the name of the dynasty in the heart of the ancient and noble city centre. Gianni, an extraordinary storyteller, manages to unravel hidden images in the mind of the listener. …….

Gianni tells the story about how his father, a fisherman, wanted him to go out to sea with him on his boat, to continue the family tradition as a fisherman and of how Gianni would refuse: “I want to be an artist.”, and the father’s reply: “I have never read newspaper announcements: looking for artists!”. In the end Gianni won. He worked at the ‘Piccolo Teatro in Trieste’ collaborating with Sergio D’Osmo, the stage designer and Francesco Macedonio, the director . He performed at the Piccolo Teatro in Grado  and for a short period he also acted as beach director at Isola D’Oro until the time when he decided to leave everything and dedicate himself solely to painting, which was his true calling. His goal became that of narrating the sea through his works. His  art appears in galleries in Vienna and in Berlin, and in summer his gallery in Grado is visited by many Italian and Central European tourists.

Iridescent fish, floating in the liquid red, blue and green spaces, like notes on a pentagram appear on

his canvases and tables:  “leaping votive fish”, as in a verse of the modern Greek poet, Odysseus

Elitis. Maran named one of his personal exhibits: ΊXΘYΣ .  The Greek term does not recall only

the acrostic by which the first Christians indicated Jesus Christ the Saviour and Son of God, it also

and above all evokes “the sea and it’s abundance of fish” under the movement of Telemachus’s ship

pushed forward by the whistling wind during his trip in search of his father in Homer’s epic, “Odissea”… ώρτo  d’έπi  λiỵύς ούρoς αήμεναi. ai dέ μaλωκα / εχθuoεντα κέλεuθα diέdρaμoν…

Massimo Poldelmengo, the artist from Pordenone, had already dealt with the fish theme, as a sort of

logo,  poetically allusive only of the primitive Christian symbolism derived from the graffiti  found in the

catacombs, therefore extremely archaic, stylized and simple. Maran, instead, gives it a joyous

significance of mysterium. The fish, which glides in a dense shoal on the blue canvas (Per una volta ancora istae xe blu sings Maran along the poet Biagio Marin), is either light blue or gold as the sun or purple or red as the sunset or green as the alghi and storms and it becomes the symbol of a vital rainbow, of an imaginificent overwhelming existential adventure in the heart of the sea. Lorenzo Viscidi-Bluer wrote that without the sea – “without its vastness and its mystery, without its colours and its odors, without the wind that comes from the sea and without the tales of the fishermen, Maran would never have been what he is”.

In “Udii parlarmi il Vegliardo del Mare” – Maran seems to be whispering along with another twentieth century Greek poet, George Seferis – “I am your homeland: perhaps nobody, but I can become whatever you want”. The sea, like Grado for Biagio Marin, is chosen by Maran as model of the universe, a universe – as Pasolini noted for the poet Marin – which is also created by subtraction for Maran, by reducing the variety in the world to a few essential signs, to pure, well defined  colours, to the simple Franciscan iteration of forms.

Clear bright lights, like in a showcase, enchanted spaces in a dazzling transparent magical world, magnificent colours, mixed with the radiant light of a Byzantine mosaic. In the acrylic  on wood “ Il vortice della felicità”, for example,  hordes of fish, all the same, like the squares in a mosaic, create the effect of a dragon’s silver tail shining through the vast blue background, similar to an enlarged detail of an earring or an embroidered garment belonging to the Empress Theodora.

White fish dance and dart nimbly, they go round in great circles, they swim in orderly queues  towards some Elsewhere. The sea is tempting and arouses the desire to leave.

“ When you set off for Itaca / hope that the voyage be long / fertile in adventure and experience..”. Kostantinos Kavafis’s famous poem, visualized by the painter in polychromatic strips on a large acrylic on wood strewn with white spots like drops of foam, grained with light rhythmic segments, throbbing with large directional flags for daring navigation, struck by vertical polychromatic glowing, is the “leit-motiv” to the voyage into Gianni’s soul.

A voyage “in fondo al mar trasparente: – quoting Marin once again – cape sante a costole

arcae / cape lisse color spale brunae, / cape spinose biondura insolente”. The fish bones bend, they clash with a sort of merry invigoration. And – to use the poets words once again – even if   “le xe ‘ndae in frantumi / e pur xe incòra lumi /sora la sabia spenta e sita”. Their movement follows the rhythm of the rounded squares coming together on the mosaic flooring of the Basilica of the Patriarch Elijah, so as to suggest the movement of waves in motion.

The vitalism of the rough and spiky  skeletons, which have however got “talking” heads and big, wide open curious eyes, that recall the archaeological remains which have emerged through the years from beneath the surface of the Isola d’Oro, remains which – even though in fragments, or as expressed in the dialect of Grado, “graisan” – maintain a fascinating, enigmatic, communicative power expressing – we could say – the soul of time. They mime even the scraps at the banquets represented in the mosaic floors of the triclinium…: many varieties of fish and molluscs and their bones, heads and shells, even bones picked clean, chicken and cock heads and legs, remains of grapes and melons, nuts, apples, empty pods, peels, vegetable cores, cut flowers, dried leaves and vine-shoots as is revealed through a piece of mosaic flooring  kept in the Archaeological Museum of Aquileia.

Fish bones whose whisper can still be heard are those painted by Maran. The remains of bragozzos stuck in the mud in the lagoon on their way to Barbana flash through the mind, ribs of rotting planking, “ broken masts – as in Seferis’s poem,  The wreckage of the Thrush  – floating at angles on the bottom, like tentacles / or memories of dreams, indicating the hull, / opaque mouth of a large dead cetacean / lifeless in the water” where voices, vague thirsty  whispers  “rise from the other side of the sun, the dark” .

The painting Corpo dell’estate  breaks into confused vertical strips of blue, black, white, yellow, green, red and turquoise, like a vanishing vision  in ecstatic extreme heat. And in Arrivederci fratello mare ,  among embroidered horizontal strips of colours some lyrical verses appear as though stolen from the pages of a secret diary –

“…I take with me some of your shingle / some of your blue salt / some of your infinity / and some of your brightness / and of your unhappiness. / You were able to tell us many things / about your destiny as a sea / here we are with a bit more hope / here we are with a bit more wisdom / and we pass away as we have come / goodbye Brother Sea.”
Ceramic fish and blue enamels come out from the canvas, on satinized stainless steal rods, into reality.

Maran periodically  dedicates time to sculpturing. He is again inspired by marine myths for his ceramic and dark enamel figurines, long-limbed, elegant and sinuous, like fashion mannequins in the Vanità sequence and in the ambiguous, filiform   Agane  ceramic, bronze and yellow cobalt speckled enamel that seem made of Venetian Murano glass. There’s the  Bagnante  with her small disc  hat and long low-necked dress, Poseidone  in gold up to his waist, coming out from a blue flute,  pairing with the Dea Mare, and the Dea del Vento , ready to dissolve…, Bacco in ceramics and milky enamel, with a  fine golden shawl wrapped around his head and falling onto his shoulders and chest and translating into refined synthesis the classical figure, Marte  in ceramics, covered in antique walnut coloured enamel, the Gueriero  wearing red, gold and blue, recalling the Maya and Aztec idol.

One could think that Maran’s polychrome arrangement of fish somewhat unconsciously descends from the antique traditions of Grado, with the pressing and very sweet rhythm of  popular songs sung in occasion of the religious ceremony in honour of the Basilica (Madonnina del mare  /Non ti devi scordare di me, / vado lontano a vogare / il mio dolce pensiero è per te…) and hides some mysterious correspondence with the orgiastic  sabo grando, where wine and songs precede the Sunday of    Perdon  and the statue of the Madonna is brought to the island of Barbana in a procession of boats decorated  with flowers  and festive banners: the Virgin Mary in connection with the sea could have distant pagan roots. “O Regina del Cielo, creatrice prima delle messi…”(Oh Queen of the Sky, first creator  of the harvest…) as in Apuleius’s  Book of Metamorfosis , where Isidus’s simulacrum is adorned with  a garland of roses.

The strong liaison between Gianni and Grado is also confirmed in his short film Ala de Vita, written and directed by him, and produced by Arte Video in Pordenone. The film consists in some close-ups and details inspired by some of Biagio Marin’s poems.  For the most part hands, wrinkled, weathered hands of  fishermen and elderly women, the hands of a carpenter sawing wood for building a boat, hands pouring out wine into a glass, fixing fishing nets, rowing, cleaning fish; female hands preparing soup ( graisan), cooking polenta; hands caressing a child’s head, preparing the altar for Mass ( Me amo la to ciesa grande Elia / pel so silensio e per la so frescura; / là drento quele mura / colone ed archi dilata l’unbrìa)  and many others…

There are no faces, which are cut from the picture or shot against light and therefore unrecognizable. Mankind appears through the objects, in the aura of the places or situations.  The intense and incisive  expressiveness  of the black and white photography, by Nino Gaddi, seems to exalt the odour of the wood and of the tar, of the tasty food of the poor, of the incense in the church, of the salty water.

The figurative  minimalism, the austere inner research , the severe and plain language, the sobriety of tones, the tendency to capture the essence of things through deep expressive reserve, all recall the gradual purification of  cinemagraphy, in Robert Bresson, in his research for an essential form  marked on musical tones and his Jansenistic ethical rigor expressed through silent moments (director of  Diary of a Country Priest/ Curate and of Condannato a morte è fuggito) . But Maran substitutes the grave rhythm of Bach’s sonatas in Bresson’s works with a sweet, eloquent melodism, the deeply felt need to search for the olden times that must be recovered and their vibrant tenderness and melancholy.

The fil rouge  of the different episodes in the short film is the seagull that flies over the sandy beach, the waves in the lagoon, the Island of Barbana and the minor isles, the historical heart of Grado. “ Bocon amaro condìo de sal / tolto dal mar al fondo / tra sighi lamentosi d’un cocal…”