The website is clear: the Jack Vettriano exhibition lines the walls of Palazzo Velli Expo in Trastevere, here in Rome, with eighty images, about ten of which are oils. The rest? A dozen photographic portraits of Vettriano himself, by Francesco Guidicini, and around sixty “works on museum paper in unique, certified editions created specifically for the exhibition.” The wording is rather ambiguous regarding the “unique edition” claim — two or three carry numbering and edition details, along with Vettriano’s own signature. In short, these are giclée photolithographic prints.
Is that a problem? No, quite the contrary. The circumstance makes the exhibition a perfect hypostasis of the visual experience of our times. Accustomed as we are to the smooth surface of our smartphones, we no longer notice those few millimetres by which an oil painting on canvas projects itself into the space before it. Vettriano is a painter capable of a textured, three-dimensional brushstroke, tamed by the strong photographic framing of his images. This is a characteristic — perhaps the most interesting one in his pictorial syntax — that tends nowadays to go unnoticed, given that the images we look at are mostly nominally flat.
Yet the comparison between the rendering of brushstrokes in the admittedly excellent “works on museum paper” and the originals — which are certainly not his masterpieces — speaks volumes about the shifting three-dimensionality of his colour strokes, something that can only be fully appreciated in the oil works, in the dialogues they manage to weave with the ambient light. One wonders how many of the visitors, mostly busy photographing the paintings, noticed this difference.
But the suppression of the image’s original surface — replaced by a support that deadens its texture — marks in its own way an interesting contrappasso for Vettriano’s work, which, even from the point of view of content, could be described as an art of surface. His is a style of immediate readability, one that constructs, with consummate sprezzatura, seductive and aestheticising cinematic atmospheres evocative of 1940s High Society, in sequences that adopt an almost relentless modular approach: the dancers on wet shorelines, the waitresses and butlers being bossed about, the beach picnics, the couples sizing each other up on terraces or in the smoky atmospheres of hotel rooms, the women whom the solitude of contre-jour never catches short of elegance. More than people, they seem like characters in search of actors, their poses following one another like exhausted variations on a partial, unresolved theme — one that tells of a life in which childhood and old age are absent, as are ugliness and poverty. And yet, for all that, an existence that is sad, closed, opaque, and in its altogether pointless elegance, ultimately empty.
In short, everything that art needs in order to please, nowadays.
English version prepared with claude.ai translation services.