GIANGIACOMO ROSSETTI

Rossetti’s intimations of mortality and rebirth suggest an eschatological desire to bring his subjects back to life. Alongside recurrent self-portraits, there are nods to Leonardo, including one of his last pictures depicting the young St. John the Baptist. St. John was modeled after da Vinci’s pupil and lover Salaì (alias of Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno). The painting, as a work of the artist’s unconscious, would remain unfinished come quasi intervene di tutte le cose sue (“as happened more or less to all his works”), as, citing a contemporary of Leonardo’s, Freud noted in his biographical study of da Vinci.

”Résurrectine” is borrowed from Raymond Roussel’s 1914 novel Locus Solus, in which the central character and scientist Martial Canterel re-animates cadavers. Under the influence of two fluids of Canterel’s invention, “résurrectine ” and “vitalium,” these quasi-subjects are posed to re-enact the most important moments of their lives. Like Roussel’s imaginary scenes, Rossetti’s paintings infuse a dreamlike precision and hallucinatory acuity that coexist with the works’ incessant tendency to collapse back into the social and historical world it longs to lock out.

Roussel was found dead from an overdose on July 14, 1933; twelve copies of Locus Solus were found near his corpse by police. He was later interred in Père Lachaise cemetery, in a thirty-two-person plot – the number of squares on a folded chessboard, a game with which Roussel became obsessed near the end of his life. The total possible variations of moves in chess are astronomically huge; the mathematician Claude Shannon estimated the number of possible chess games to be far more than the number of atoms in the universe. The limitlessness of the Shannon Number is the other side of the confining limitations of art. Here, we witness Rossetti rediscovering a child’s vision as he examines the rubble of his own associations. He thinks of the grave, in which one is indefinitely buried, an outcast from time. He grapples with the remains of lost histories and confronts something, some excess, which he cannot assimilate.

– Hiji Nam

Courtesy Mendes Wood DM.