In Conversation with Tommaso Pincio

“Ignoro né mi interessa appurare se l’educazione pittorica dia luogo a uno speciale modo di scrivere. Ciò che mi interessa è il percorso, l’esperienza, l’aver vissuto determinate sensazioni. Volevo fare il pittore, scoprii di non avere sufficiente talento e mollai tutto senza sapere a cos’altro dedicarmi. Col tempo, come una sorta di parziale risarcimento, è sopraggiunta la scrittura, l’alternativa del descrivere e del raccontare. Evocare con parole non è sempre come rappresentare con segni e colori, nondimeno lo sguardo del pittore mancato è rimasto dentro di me alla maniera in cui gli estinti seguitano ad abitare una casa, la maniera dei fantasmi cio蔝

[Tommaso Pincio, “Ritrai, ti prego, la mia storia” (2012) [Please, portray my story], in Scrissi d’arte, 2015]

From his very first novel M. (1999) to his most recent Panorama (2015), Tommaso Pincio’s fiction is an extraordinary example of intermediality in contemporary Italian literature. In his work, the relationships between artistic media figure in their most diverse forms: whether it is the transfer of artists, motifs, themes and narrativity from the visual arts, cinema, comics or the Internet to literature – see, for example, the interesting dynamics between Jack Kerouac, Marilyn Monroe, Arthur Miller, Neal Cassidy and the young Holden in Lo spazio sfinito (2002) [Beat Space] – or the thematization of one medium in another – as in the story of Kurt Cobain, leader of the rock band Nirvana in Un amore dell’altro mondo (2002) [Love-shaped Story] – the common thread in his writing is an open dialogue with the other arts and with their collective imagery. Painting and literature, in particular, feature as profoundly interconnected: his most recent series of portraits, Ritratti pedanti [Pedantic Portraits] and Sfere celesti [Celestial Spheres], confirm the constant cross-fertilization between the two arts.

[Tommaso Pincio, Sfere Celesti, 2013-2015]

It is within this context that we are encouraged to read Tommaso Pincio’s Scrissi d’arte (2015) [I Wrote About Art], a recently edited collection of essays on art written over a 30-year period that provides us with the key to enter Pincio’s intermediality at a deeper level. The Italian critic Andrea Cortellessa, editor of both the volume and its series Fuori formato (Rome: L’Orma), has rightly pointed out that the “archaeological operation, which Pincio’s writings on art provide on his work, was long overdue” (p. 277). From this rich series of articles covering a variety of artistic movements from 1984 to 2011, we do not only learn about Pincio’s past as a gallery manager and an art critic, but we also get a compelling account of Italian art history during those years, and are offered the tools for understanding how those artists who were his most formative influences, from Alighiero Boetti to Marcel Duchamp, had a strong impact on both his idea of authorship and on the writing style of his fiction.

In our conversation last July, Pincio claimed that writing about art was a way to elaborate a failure, or better the anxiety of not having become a successful painter; or at least this was how he conceived of things in 1996, the time when he moved from painting to fiction. During this time of transformation, his writings on art progressively became a pre-text to speculate imaginatively beyond artefacts, or better, strategically to use artefacts as a starting point to tell a story (“fare arte attraverso l’arte degli altri”), – such an understanding of art criticism emerges implicitly in the essay “Il critico immaginario” (pp. 94-95). In other words, the new collection of his essays tells us about the long-term coexistence of two creative voices within the same authorial subject, namely that of the writer and of the painter. Tommaso Pincio (i.e. the writer), is in fact a pseudonym adopted by Marco Colapietro (i.e. the gallery manager and art critic) when he began working on literary fiction. The former builds its fictional identity on a symbolic act of repression or denial (“autocancellazione”) of the latter. Ultimately, this results in a productive collaboration between the two. We may wonder, then, to what extent this strategy was informed by Alighiero Boetti’s idea of adding an “e” between his name and surname: Alighiero e Boetti . (p. 145).* Or should we rather see its origin in the idea of the “opera ulteriore” (p. 170) that Pincio uses to describe Duchamp’s creation of his own authorial myth? Scrissi d’arte is undoubtedly a crucial text in Pincio’s authorial self-identification, but it also reveals a wide spectrum of other significant connections between his fiction and the other arts, including transpositions of genres, formal structures and semiotic complexes, which certainly needs further investigation.

*As Pincio writes about Boetti in Scrissi d’arte, “Esiste forse un modo migliore di fare il mondo e l’individuo partecipi della loro differenza spingendoli a proseguire mano nella mano?” [Is there a better way to involve the world and the individual in their difference while pushing them forward hand-in-hand?] (p. 145)

For further details about Tommaso Pincio’s work, please visit his blog/website here