FERNBERGER

Pier Paolo Pasolini incarnated Italy’s most prominent postwar intellectual and artist. Notwithstanding his simultaneous vocations as a novelist, poet, filmmaker, journalist, playwright, polemicist, and occasional painter, he referred to himself simply as a “writer.” Constanza Schaffner is herself as much a scholar—and, particularly, an adept of Pasolini studies—as she is a painter. With a PhD in Comparative Literature, and a focus on questions of theology, Marxist thought, and modern philosophy, her intellectual familiarity with her subject matter is rivaled by a longstanding dedication to the practice of painting.

In both instances, Schaffner remains concerned with notions of sacrality as they persist into the “disenchanted” era of late modernity. In her pictorial world, as much as in Pasolini’s, it is the body—whether that of the self or the other—that forms a lightning rod for larger questions. And like Pasolini’s wider cinematic and literary corpus, Schaffner’s imagery willfully “contaminates” (to use a term dear to the former) contemporary sensibilities with more archaic textures and myths.

Her painting has long been drawn to aspects of both the archaeological past and cinematic modernity. This latest group of works takes these concerns in a new direction, threaded with recurring motifs drawn from the history of Western—particularly Roman and Renaissance—painting. For all of these works’ seriousness and studiousness, their imagery brims with a sense of impish (even Dionysian) humor. Rivaling the scenes’ attention to art-historical and archaeological references, as well as their allusions to different genres of performance, is a playful, operatic exuberance, equally registered in the granular surfaces of their depicted fabrics, jewelry, drapery, and skin.

Based on a production still from Pasolini’s cinematic adaptation of The Decameron, Schaffner’s The Painter’s Dream immortalizes the director’s role in his own 1971 film. He plays a pupil of Giotto on his way to Naples to paint a (fictional) mural, the completion of which punctuates the film’s end: “Why create a work of art,” the character wonders to himself, “when dreaming about it is so much sweeter?” Setting Schaffner’s own likeness across from Pasolini—his brush held in mid-air—The Painter’s Dream begs the question: precisely whose dream might we be witnessing? This “overdetermination” characterizes the artist’s latest body of work. The Painter’s Dream, after all, borrows its basic composition from Filippo Lippi’s Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement (1440–1444). It thus inserts a twentieth-century reverie—based upon the Italian Trecento imaginations of Boccaccio and Giotto—into a Quattrocento delineation of space.

The horizontal symmetry of Let No One Sleep likewise duplicates a large-scale 1st-century CE fresco from Pompeii’s House of the Golden Bracelet, replacing its sparrow, turtledove, and other birds with a set of owls who meet the viewer’s gaze. So too do the faces of Pasolini and the painter herself, topping the image’s twin herms, while two visages of Maria Callas—one of Pasolini’s most prized actors and collaborators—hang from its upper edge. Maria, meanwhile, presents Callas herself as well as her cinematic alter ego, Medea, evincing a sense of vitality and vulnerability in equal measure. Bearing spindly, veined hands, the prodigious figure—set against a receding portico indebted to Renaissance precedent—we find hints of Kokoschka, a whiff of Böcklin, and whispers of the Pavel Tchelitchew-style hallucinations that mark Schaffner’s previous work.

The floral and arboreal elements that surface in several of the works conjure ecological imperatives, as do the various owls that relentlessly return the viewer’s gaze. Here, too, the natural world appears layered with philosophical ramifications (the “owl of Minerva” evokes Heidegger’s engagement with Nietzsche, for instance). Relating the canvas to a garden, Schaffner opens it up as a space where disparate objects, bodies, and ideas can perch, so to speak, in new threads of (mute) conversation. The garden conceit reappears in several paintings, interconnecting their imagery. In Memoria, floral elements creep over and around the painting’s swirling red fresco. If, in Let No One Sleep, the garden appears as a real space and site of convergence, in The Painter’s Dream it forms a mere representation—rendered on a wall within the painting itself.

Schaffner’s penchant for pastiche honors her subject matter even more subtly. For Pasolini’s working method—which he baptized under the term of aesthetic “contamination”—makes constant recourse to citation, quotation, parody, analogy, and pastiche. The “literary” substratum of Schaffner’s work surfaces in various ways—not merely in terms of iconographic content, but also in narrative momentum and continuity. The errant eye that appears, occupying a tondo in Untitled (My Eye) and staring out from Memoria, had already appeared in the paintings Querer Agarrarlo Todo (2022) and Filo (2021), just as some of the motifs of the present body of work will, in turn, provide the touchstone for a new series to come.

Anchoring subtle reworkings of style in the larger trajectory of Schaffner’s corpus is the consistent representation of her own physiognomy, whether whole or partly disembodied. Whereas previous self-portraits have mostly revealed her image isolated from other individuals, the present work finds her image incorporated in a number of new ways. In Let No One Sleep, her face tops the stone herm in the painting’s bottom right corner, while her full figure appears in Villa of Mysteries, imbibing from a satyr’s bowl or cup. We find here no simple conflation of antiquity and the present tense, however. For flanking this central cluster is Pasolini at left, clad in a loincloth, and a further figure at right. Based on the mime from Marcel Carné’s 1945 film Children of Paradise, the latter holds up the grimacing head of Maria Callas in a posture recalling Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath (1609–1610). The entire scene is based on a fresco grouping from Pompeii’s Villa of the Mysteries, featuring the satyr Silenus (companion and tutor of Dionysus) alongside two disciples. The painter once again projects herself into a network of disparate historical images, pictorial epochs, and embodied subjects, performing a higher mathematics of Pasolinian pastiche. - Ara H. Merjian

Constanza Schaffner was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1989. Her work has been exhibited at Luhring Augustine, New York; CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach, FL; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Plymouth Rock, Zürich, Switzerland; Bortolami, New York, NY; Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London, England; Park View/Paul Soto, Los Angeles, CA; and Galerie Houssenot, Paris, France. The artist’s work is included in the permanent collections of Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; and the Hall Art Foundation, Reading, VT. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University’s Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.