Peintres au Cafè Sonnant!
The challenge that Giorgio Gaslini has set himself in translating into music the artistic character and temper of eight of the most important painters of the twentieth century, has generated another, for those who write, equally difficult: that of returning these artists to the “visual”, but filtered by the way in which the composer expressed them in music. A game of mirrors, therefore, that starting from the space of the canvas moves to the temporalization of the music and then returns to the spacetime of the video or cinematic language. The rhythm of the editing thus acts as a second voice, and in some cases as a counterpoint, with respect to the music.
In contact with sounds, the images of these great artists (in some cases real icons of contemporaneity) have become magnetized with each other, assuming senses and meanings seconds, in many cases transfigured by music. Gaslini’s suite has created a kind of deep synthesis of the poetic temperie of these painters, however very different.
One last difficult task remained: the ending on the painter to come, provided for by Gaslini’s “program” placed as an epigraph of the score. I came to the aid of an old Jean Cocteau film, which I used to literally “flip” its meaning.
Many elements therefore merge into this new synthesis, which seeks to reinvent in a new, but pre-existing light in a latent way, characters that are in the collective imagination. In this sense, peintres au café-sonnant, beyond the artistic-musical value, wants to be an exquisitely hermeneutic operation to restore depth of meaning to these great masterpieces.
Francesco Leprino