Having just finished The Magic of Silence by Florian Illies about the mystical, enigmatic Caspar David Friedrich, and lamenting the fact that he never travelled to Italy, we decided to take a look at artists who did paint southern landscapes, especially Sicilian ones. One name in particular sprang out from the crowd, Francesco Lojacono, a native Palermitan who trained with Salvatore Lo Forte, before moving to Naples to study with the Palizzi brothers, Giuseppe and Filippo. After returning to Sicily to fight alongside Garibaldi’s Mille, he then dedicated the rest of his life to art.
He taught at both the Accademie di Belle Arti of Naples and Palermo and found rich patrons in the shape of Margherita of Savoy and her husband, Umberto I, both of whom purchased canvases. He was also critically acclaimed by the king of aesthetes, Gabrielle D’Annunzio. Aside from this potted biography, what did he actually paint and what were his methods? The aforementioned Friedrich would walk as the day slipped into dusk and take mental snapshots of the countryside around him, returning to his darkened studio in order to recall those images, collaging them together in seemingly real landscapes that were, in fact, magpie scenes taken from a range of sketches and mental pictures. Lojacono, by contrast, was one of the first painters to use photography, despite the complications of using the technology outside.
On occasion he was known to take such images as a central reference point when he started to paint. His canvases are not, though, photorealist in nature, but rather fall into the category of ‘Romantic Realism’; in this sense he shares common roots with Friedrich. However, unlike Friedrich, and one could argue somewhat regrettably, there is little of the puzzling melancholy to be found in Lojacono’s work, monks don’t wander alone by the sea or men stare in awe at the drama of nature, rather his themes have a pastoral naïveté reflected in the sybaritic hazy of the landscape. Even his travellers caught in the wind on a dusty track appear to be under the benevolent influence of the sun which is about to burn away the dog day heaviness of the storm clouds.
His Orto Botanico, a verdilucent representation of Palermo’s botanical garden is redolent with the fecundity of nature. The irritating scratch of oppressive summer heat is banished, balanced out by the overwhelming green of the palms, shrubs and nascent plants establishing themselves in the rows of pots. Above all else, in such an obviously visual medium, Lojacono seems to evoke a sense of smell. Even when his farmers are drenched in sun, their laden carts appear to capture the earthiness of the vegetables, the golden comfort of wheat. His seated ladies can obviously smell the flowers, the jasmine and fennel. The sea, with Monte Pellegrino in the background, laps the rocks emitting a tang of brine.
The sun is clearly central to his art, so much so that he received the epithets, ‘Painter of the Sun’ and ‘ladro del sole’ (‘sun thief’), but it’s how that light interacts with its surroundings that mesmerises, a facet so evident in his Olive Grove. A track, half in shade, runs through a strand of olive trees. The gnarled trunk of the largest tree fades into darkness as it reaches the branches. The tree opposite, seemingly wrapped around itself, is touch by a shard of sun at its base, exposing its centuries old foundations swathed in grass. The track leads away through the grove, cut by the sunlight that also sparingly penetrates the grey-green canopy of the trees. His olive grove is a place to sit and dream, a place for Sancho Panza to eat and drink while Don Quixote hatches plans to right the world’s wrongs.
The place to see Lojacono in Palermo is the GAM (Galleria di Arte Moderna): gampalermo.it
