Places where some little thing is coming into being

Giorgio Morandi 1890–1964, Natura Morta, Tate Gallery

At the end of an essay about the Italian artist Morandi, John Berger (in The Shape of a Pocket) names three distinct decade-long periods of his artistic life.  He writes,

If we assume this is a progression -- that a mastery increased as he grew older -- we have to ask: What was he trying to do?  The answer, often given -- that Morandi is the poet of ephemeral -- doesn't convince me.  The energy of his work is neither nostalgic nor -- in any personal sense  - intimate.  In his life he may have shut himself away.  And his odious politics suggests panic. Yet his art is strangely affirmative.  Of what?

The drawings and etchings whisper an answer.  Because there is no density and no colour the objects there don't distract us.  And we realise that what interests the artist is the process of visible first becoming visible, before the thing seen has been given a name or acquired a value.

....

One has to imagine the world as a sheet of paper and a creator's hand drawing, trying out objects which don't yet exist. Traces are not only what is left when something has gone, they can also be marks for a project, of something to come. The visible begins with light. And as soon as there is light there is shade. The hand drawn shadows on the white of the paper. All drawing is a shadow around light.

The marks weave together, quiver, alternate. And slowly the eye registers and reads the unrepeatable pattern of a particular branch of leaves trembling in front of a particular sunlit wall.

In other words, the objects he paints can be bought in no flea market. They are not objects. They are places (everything has its place), places where some little thing is coming into being.

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Morandi... was in love, not with appearances, but with the project of appearances.