In a catalogue essay of 1993, describing the paintings using predominantly red and green, Sarah Kent spoke of the coloured points as “particles of energy”. The paintings suggested, for Sarah Kent, “matter that has not yet come to rest or cohered into a stable form”.4 The way is left open for multiple associations: of landscape, of galactic gas clouds, or nerve ganglia, or thermal images of conurbations from the air, patterns of sound, a musical score rendered in a fantastic new form of notation – or simply a kind of automatism of the application-in-time of the countless painted dots and broken lines, a fusion generating its own form of visual energy.
Around 1971, after leaving the Slade School of Art, Masoero worked for a time in an Architecture and Town Planning Office, drawing maps. On the walls in the corridor of her house are some London maps she drew at that time, giving various forms of data. Maps are certainly one of the associations her recent paintings conjure up. Not so much the literal resemblance to a map as the activity of map-making as a layering process, as the overlapping of multiple levels of experience to form an approximation to the complexity of reality. A city map, for example, can become the basis for imposing any number of conceptual orders: ‘maps’ of very diverse data or desires can be laid over the grid or tangle of streets, as when, for instance, a chart of the movements of the characters in a novel can be overlaid on the map of the ‘real’ city.
Adopting a completely different tack, a further glimpse from Jeanne Masoero’s biography would lead us back again to her paintings in another sense: her prolonged exposure to, and learning to sing, Gregorian Chant when attending convent school in London as the child of Italian immigrant parents after the war. “At school we were taught Latin and Gregorian Chant and nothing much else, so one could daydream like anything all day long and one’s head wasn’t crammed with facts.”5 As so often, there was an unusual teacher involved, a Mother Mary Gregory who passed on her “deep love and understanding” of Gregorian Chant to this particular, highly receptive pupil who never forgot it. Either it is the music itself, or the words Masoero chooses to describe it, or both, that echo a crucial aspect of the paintings, Gregorian Chant’s “great circular rhythms and its rising and falling from the silences between the phrases”.
The ‘silences’ in the music are the white spaces in the paintings. In Masoero’s paintings of the last ten years, the way in which the edge of the painted field meets the white canvas is endlessly intricate: an extraordinary visual elaboration of the feeling of an edge which hesitates to define itself, a continual exploration of the interface of a coherent body or organism with the limitless space beyond it, of the known with the unknown, a meeting which takes place as much in the interior of the figure as outside it. Its indentations, its tiny spikes and inlets, are as complex as a coastline, or as a coastline may be imagined to be, more complex than can ever be mapped or measured. James Gleick, in his book Chaos, points out how approximate the measurement of a coastline must always be since to be ‘accurate’ one would have to measure the way round every rock, tuft and pebble. This is where the artistic ‘model’ both takes hold of, and wisely or elegantly lets go again, of the richness of reality.
Up to now, two tiny biographical facts have crept into this essay: the references to map-making and to Gregorian Chant. I hesitated to include even these, out of respect for work which is abstract, which has no overt autobiographical or anecdotal references, and out of fear of making simplistic parallels based on a very slender knowledge. Although I first saw and wrote about Jeanne Masoero’s work as long ago as the beginning of the 1970s, I saw her primarily as a leading abstract painter on the London scene, knowing little about her personal history. And it was only tentatively that Jeanne offered to lend me, in preparation for writing this essay, an autobiographical memoir she had written.
It turned out to be a fascinating document of Italo-British history and the minute particulars of an individual itinerary: her early childhood in a farming village in a valley in the Alpine foothills while her father worked in London hotels; the atrocious treatment and deportation of Soho Italians during the war by the British Government as enemy aliens; the fervent atmosphere in Mussolini’s schools; the increasing threat from the beleaguered Germans in North Italy and the family’s escape by train through Spain to Portugal; the perilous journey by flying-boat to Britain; learning English and growing up in Camden Town; the struggle to become an artist and eventually to enter the Slade school.
It was only in certain ways, however, that reading this memoir brought me back again to Jeanne Masoero’s paintings: the two experiences mentioned earlier, and also a childhood memory of a sensation of space, looking from the mountain tops down towards distant Turin and the beginning of the Lombardy plain. Besides this, there was Masoero’s own insistence that she paints “in order to transcend my fallen state”. “My painting doesn’t have to do with social and political issues, political in the narrow sense, but is concerned with the practice of art as a means of transcending the self, the tyranny of the ego, the false self. It has to communicate a reality which can’t be seen or described but which is sensed as something concrete and which is the only way work can communicate itself to others.”6
Looking at Jeanne Masoero’s painting of the last thirty years one has the impression of an increasing density. Schematic structures and single effects are gradually relinquished for a more personal and searching process, resulting in the layering of space in ways which take time to unfold in the perception of the viewer. In this sense they go against the trend towards instant impact and ‘one-liner’ attention spans imposed by the huge expansion of the ‘exhibition-going’ experience. In the ‘optimum’ lighting conditions of an art gallery, the intricate changes of light intensity and nuance of everyday experience are obliterated. Jeanne Masoero’s paintings may be more suitable to a domestic space, or more accurately to a time dimension of ‘living with’, rather than visiting, a work of art. Yet they have little to do with domesticity. They remain models of infinity.
FOOTNOTES
