"DON GIOVANNI", "NOCTURNAL" BY LUIGI NANNI: THE APPALLING SOLITUDE OF THE JUDGEMENT
It is no easy task to measure oneself pictorially against the "myth" of Don Giovanni: born in the theatre and developed almost exclusively there up to the end of the XVIII century, it was then reworked and transformed into Operas, novels and short stories, poems and verse tales. Yet the whole procession of apparitions and uneasiness that is concealed within this impressive and dramatically titanic figure is immanent, visionary by nature, at the behest of Luigi Nanni's creative vocation: the nocturnal and chtonic struggle between Eros and Thanatos has always been his, one may well say, like a shadow that is thrown into greater relief by the light itself. All the presences evoked by Nanni in his awe-inspiring interpretation of Don Giovanni have the "dreadfulness" of the judge irrevocably "inspired" by the "Commendatore" and Anna, up to the diabolical seducer himself. Furthermore, we can take note how such everlasting state of indictment by the eternal Court of the Inquisition, turns out to be surprisingly up-to-date in today's Italian society. The better-informed spectator will find a surprising and elective affinity between Rocco Familiari's Don Giovanni and the one painted by Nanni, in absolutely autonomous and independent ways. Our artist has given an image to awe-inspiring phantoms made of paint instead of flesh (as in the theatre) or of stone...And each figure exhibits the force of a premonitory revelation, in that visionary mingling of gothic, baroque and decadent elements, even coming close to Egon Schiele's dramaticism; this makes Nanni a unique and "eccentric" presence in the panorama of Italian art. A "theatre" in black and white comes forth, more real and peremptoral than the contingent world: filled with vital shadows but with no temporal bonds. In Nanni's painted faces one can read the awareness that truth is never in the place where we seek it and this is our unbearable sentence. Even the wind of passions that has consumed and engraved immeasurable features concludes by becoming a harmless breeze in the presence of such a verdict. And perhaps Michel de Ghelderode's Don Juan is right when he says that the legend of the indomitable seducer "is an epic story, interminable, episodic, confused, absurd, full of interruptions like a novel in installments or like life".
Gabriele Simongini