“Organizing Chaos”
Piero subscribed to the ambitious artistic goal of organizing Chaos. I believe Piero understood on a very deep level that through his imaginative explorations he was entering a space where our words fail: the Great Unknown, a sphere he called “Chaos,” a space beyond our Time where the forces dance. In his Kites he left behind his very own roadmap, one that can only be contemplated and believed.
Is there any other way to organize Chaos?....
…Maybe Piero never did get to fully organize Chaos as such, but I think we all understand his noble endeavor. Fondly I am remembering our conversations covering this very topic: how well he used his many language skills in order to create new metaphors that would enlighten me! He not only used the visual artist’s skills and perspectives, but he employed the many tools of a linguist as well, speaking light into the darkness where a paint brush couldn’t go.
Occasional excursions took us from his beloved studio in Oulx to the borderlands between France and the Piedmont, a place where his native Piedmontese culture embraced and inspired his ongoing reflections and creations. Maybe it was due to this intimacy that his Kites unfurled from the perceived center of Chaos with enthusiastic force, dancing dressed in colorful masks and ribbons across the canvas, a canvas always too small. Thus his dazzling mind fashioned visual symbols, creatures at once so fragile and yet so resilient, unpredictable in flight, emanating from a distant vanishing point and dissolving into the vastness of any observers imagination.
We also talked about the Blues, not as much about its musical form as about its philosophical platform. Similar to Chaos, the Blues seems to elude satisfactory definition, it remains an individual’s concept. I have been trying to personally define the Blues for almost forty years, and so far I have failed. The Blues is elusive and slippery, and yet sticky and insistent. It always is: sometimes we are aware of it and sometimes we are not. Attempts to describe the Blues through our artistic voices are temporary at best as they fall short of definition.
Contrary to Chaos, the cause that leads to the Blues is known to the individual. The Blues is felt. It seems to slow down our experience of time, and yet it can never be adequately described. For example, visual reflections on the Blues appear to prefer dark-mood colors. The inherent energy however is always dynamic. In spite of its almost suspended time the Blues moves, it flirts and jabs, it caresses and abandons, it escapes our control into uncharted territory. The skills of improvisation help us with our respective narratives. |
|
Maybe Piero actually did get to organize Chaos. Chaos not only lives in the absence of logical and reasoned organization, but it also exists beyond our evolved language. We lack the words to describe it, but we can play with its metaphors. Chaos forces us to let go of all constraints of constructed logic; it invites us to float on its unpredictability instead. Piero was a firm believer that the absence of reasoned cause and effect in Chaos was its beauty: a place of renewed chances, a place of freedom not founded in the often quoted “cogito ergo sum” but rooted in the intact imagination of the child instead.
Piero reminded me of the ancient philosophers, or at least of what has been passed down to us. He walked with Nature inspired by her artistry; he described what he saw and felt in either Latin or French, English or Italian (and of course Piedmontese), always searching for a clearer metaphorical image. And then, as he painted, cut & tore, glued & shuffled the pieces, a puzzle was born. And yet there was always this sense of not being able to finish his roadmap of Chaos, territory that had to remain uncharted in order to surrender one’s self to the notion of Piero’s “Chaos.” His was a place of close existence not one of distant contemplation.
Piero’s Kites swarm forth from a felt center, their colors lift the viewer’s mood. The fragile constructions dance and thus we feel the air. They react to what we can’t see. They invite us to play along, blow soap bubbles and run barefoot through tickling grass. It is only when we concentrate our curiosity on the space beyond Piero’s creations that we discover indefinable shadows, the anti-kites. We sense their counterweight through their colorful movements. Piero knew about the Blues, and he braved it with furious giddiness and sparkling wit. Dancing with light and color was his cure for the unfathomable sphere where imagination and reality have not been separated yet.
Just like his Kites, Piero soared towards the always distant horizon. And just like a kite he was anchored to a home, a spiritual place he called “Chaos.”
(From: Walter Liniger, “Organizzare il Caos”, in Ivana Mulatero, ed., Piero Lerda. Dal caos al gioco. Opere dal 1948 al 2007, Edizioni Il Marcovaldo, Caraglio, 2007, p.208-209,
Walter “Wale” Liniger. Musician; adjunct Professor, Columbia, South Carolina, USA)
Walter Liniger, 2008
Musicista interprete del blues; University of South Carolina, Columbia, USA. |
Piero Lerda’s Metaphisical Painting
…It seems characteristic that in “La mia Poetica” Piero Lerda quotes from both Friedrich Nietzsche, A master of startling phisolophical aphorisms and from Jorge Luis Borges, a great explorer of the borderline between the surreal and the absurd : “Everyone must organize the chaos that finds in his self”, and “Nobody can pronounce a syllable that is not filled of tenderness and of terrors; that there is not, in one of those languages, the powerful name of a God. …
Nietzsche and Borges make an unlikely pair, but they are indicators of the peculiar metaphysical suggestiveness of Lerda’s paintings pointing beyond their brilliant surfaces. Those of his works, which radiate a magic aura, but also the paintings conveying a surrealistic clearness, intimate that there is more in this visual art than ‘meets the eye”. It bespeaks Lerda’s artistic power that the philosophical dimension of his canvasses does not conflict with the specific sense of lightness and play characterizing his handling of forma and colors.
The phenomenon of play/gioco dominate his cultural theory as well as his painting ; “civilization is a path that leads from necessity to play”. Finally Lerda’s “metaphysical playfulness” is one of the qualities endearing him to his friends who loved his wit and subtle sense of irony as much as his culture and his humaneness…
(Quoted from: Lothar Hoennighausen, “La pittura metafisica di Piero Lerda”, in Ivana Mulatero, ed., Piero Lerda. Dal caos al gioco. Opere dal 1948 al 2007, Edizioni Il Marcovaldo, Caraglio, 2009, p:35-40)
Lothar Hoennighausen, Professor Emeritus of American Literature, Bonn, Germany.
|
|
In memory of Piero
“Piero Lerda was a far more complicated person than one could imagine upon first meeting. He was nothing short of charming, engaging and lovable. At intervals in conversation, he would interject a bit of humor that took one off guard; here was the hint that his inner mind’s eye saw the world just a bit absurd, off kilter, out of sync….
His paintings reflect the same complexity….
To be a boy and to be unable to stop the unjustifiable violence against home and nation (during WWII) must have left an imprint not unlike that which emerged among the post-war Existentialists.
…His paintings are his answer to the chaotic world of his adolescence, his response to innocence and to evil.
…By finding in himself the source of memories, by mustering the courage to realize another vision, his childlike paintings reflect both the horror of the absurd and a newly imagined reordering of the universe.
…His body of work evolved and rotated over time to reflect new and imaginative ways to express a profound longing for humanity’s spiritual evolution. His reverence for life and his hope for its survival is found in every painting .”
(From: Elizabeth Hayes Turner ,“Un ricordo di Piero”, in Ivana Mulatero, ed., Piero Lerda. Dal Caos al Gioco. Opere dal 1948 al 2007, ed. Il Marcovaldo, Caraglio, 2009, p.207 ).
Elizabeth Hayes Turner, Professor of History, University of North Texas, USA. |
