Rome Journal: Pasolini pittore

 

"Autoritratto con Fiori in nova" by Pier Paolo Pasolini

“Pasolini pittore” at the Galleria D’Arte Moderna, like "Tutto e Santo" (at the MAXXI, Galeria di Arte Antica and Barberini) commemorates the l00th anniversary of Pasolini's birth. The exhibit documents the influence of pictorial composition on the famed director's work. Painting was a medium of expression for him even before writing. “Lo leggo poco dipingo molta in comenso” ("I read little and painted more in the beginning"), he said about his early years growing up in Casarsa della Delizia in the Friuli region. Pasolini and his good friend Fabio Mauri both studied with Roberto Longhi in Bologna. Naturally it would be words and then cinema that became Pasolini's favored mediums of expression, but the early portraits, exhibited in the current show created a palette; both his novels Ragazza di Vita and Una Vita Violente and his early Roman trilogy Accatone, Mamma Roma and La Ricolta drew from his paintings. "Autoritrato con fiori in nova” (1947) Is an iconic self portrait epitomizing Pasolini's interest in both self-portraiture and self/conception. Though the surrealist elements may have been uncharacteristic, it should be noted that Pasolini also counted a Man Ray in his personal collection (which also included Warhol) and is represented in the show. The director's early interest in painting infuses all his movies. The beginning of Mamma Roma is da Vinci's The Last Supper. Mantegna's "Lamentation of Christ" is cited in another key part of the movie.You might say that specific frames of his movies started as paintings only to become tableaux vivants in their cinematic form.

read "Pier Paolo Pasolini's 'Mamma Roma," An Iconography" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and watch the trailer for Erotomania