The many ways of looking | UniCredit Art Collection

Choosing among so many images and creating a body, a meaningful sequence, is not easy. Where to begin, which thread to follow?
I thought about what I instinctively searched for across different eras and styles, and I thought of the gaze. The eyes of those who look, of those who have looked, of those who have painted.
I look at images, and images look both inward and outward through that subtle liminal zone that is the surface of the painting.

At this point it was impossible not to return to a form of writing that is fundamental for me: that of John Berger, and his unique and deeply life‑immersed way of describing the encounter with every work of art as a “lived moment.”
What does it mean to look at an image? Today more than ever, it is a central question.
Luigi Ghirri
Amsterdam, 1973, dalla serie “Diaframma 11 /125, luce naturale”, 1973
Chromogenic print from negative 24 x 36 mm / Stampa cromogenica da negativo 24 x 36 mm / Chromogener Abzug vom Negativ 24 x 36 mm
7 1/8 x 11 in
18 x 28 cm
Hans Op de Beeck
In Silent Conversation with Correggio - Nocturnal Sea, 2009
Acquerello su carta Arches
52 7/8 x 96 3/8 x 23 5/8 in
134.4 x 244.7 x 60 cm

What does it mean to experience an image through a screen? A vast and complicated subject of reflection, impossible to address fully here, but I believe it is interesting to use this lens to read these works. I will not recount their history; I am not an art historian, and my artistic practice does not deal with painting. At the same time, I am deeply implicated in everything that looking means. As Berger again says, looking is also a political question. And in this era it is increasingly so.

In 1972 the BBC broadcast the television series Ways of Seeing by John Berger (directed by Mike Dibb) and the author published its text (in Italy translated by Maria Nadotti), offering a powerful methodological guide for approaching the study of images. The work took the baton from Walter Benjamin’s famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. It updated themes that have now exploded in contemporary times: the dynamics of power, gender, domination, and freedom within images are reread critically and questioned by the author. “The art of the past as a whole has become a political issue,” writes Berger, “the art of the past no longer exists in the forms in which it once existed. Its authority has been lost. In its place there is the language of images.” And it is truer than ever that “what matters is who now uses this language and for what purposes.”

The gaze is never neutral; it is influenced by our history, our background, the codes we have been taught, and the prejudices that follow—both aesthetic and moral.
In this sequence I have included two images of animals. Animal gazes add another level of reflection: we who look at the animal, through the artist’s gaze, the animal that looks… but what exactly do we see? What can we imagine the crow perched on a branch in a barely illuminated darkness is looking at? What does its shadow look at? How deep can a shadow be?
Shirin Neshat
Speechless (Women of Allah series), 1996
Ink on silver gelatin print / stampa alla gelatina d'argento e inchiostro / Tinte auf Silbergelatineabzug
63 1/4 x 45 7/8 in
160.5 x 116.5 cm

What do I see when I look at the young woman with the exhausted, deeply sad gaze, and the barrel of a gun emerging from the veil she wears? What does that fine calligraphy on her skin tell me, in a language I do not know? What does human skin carry written upon it? I am looking at a woman who looks elsewhere; the barrel of the gun touches the skin and the writing — a written and tattooed testimony that calls me to attention. There are things I cannot see, even if the image is clear. In the end, I feel it as a lesson.
Piero Pizzi Cannella
Pulcinelle (Bella Coppia. Pulcinelle), 2003
Oil on board / Olio su tavola / Öl auf Karton
64 1/8 x 56 1/2 x 2 1/8 in
163 x 143.5 x 5.5 cm

Observing a painting means imagining and confronting a map, searching for the cardinal points in order to navigate it. At times one encounters moments that create intimacy; at times one seeks to be seen, to be recognized.
A floating mask of a Pulcinella, its body invisible. These masked eyes surface on an empty canvas; they begin to gaze into the light everywhere around them, seeing in order to exist, still trying to look at the world with no certainty of perceiving it, continuing relentlessly, fulfilling the light.
Antonio Donghi
Ritratto di ragazza
Oil and tempera on plywood / Olio e tempera su compensato / Öl und Tempera auf Sperrholz
14 1/8 x 10 1/4 in
36 x 26 cm

Sometimes it may be a woman’s face that appears — a face almost transparent in its faintly sketched colours, and something subdued along the tear that is slipping toward the ground from one of her eyes.
Felice Casorati
Donna con manto o Ragazza seduta con coperta, 1935
Oil on cardboard / Olio su cartone / Öl auf Karton
30 1/4 x 23 5/8 in
77 x 60 cm

In looking, the enigma of meaning radiates; narration ignites as an attempt to anchor one’s own existence within the time of the image. A woman wrapped in a blanket that functions like a supporting architecture: it holds her probably naked body as she looks sideways, with swollen eyes, perhaps on the verge of saying something. Here too, a gaze turned elsewhere — so as not to forget what we do not see, so as not to forget that even when we look with utmost attention, not all of the world allows itself to be seen.
Felice Casorati
Le sorelle Pontorno, 1937
Oil on canvas / Olio su tela / Öl auf Leinwand
63 3/4 x 50 3/4 in
162 x 129 cm

I want to say it clearly: Casorati offers an extraordinary faith in the act of looking. He nurtures this faith in the Renaissance, in a hope for order and for the quiet clarity of knowledge — for a way of understanding that proceeds according to human measure… and he renews this faith at the moment of the great transformations at the dawn of the 20th century.
And so, the gaze within this gathering of young women must move, must rotate clockwise from the child’s body, and even earlier, from the sheet/letter he holds in his lap. These are clothed bodies, naked bodies, blank pages. Their gazes intersect with ours, we who stand as external observers, in a perspective without a single vanishing point. They cross the room, exiting and re‑entering through the doorways.
Agostino Carracci
Giuditta con la testa di Oloferne, 1580 circa
Oil on canvas / Olio su tela / Öl auf Leinwand
43 1/4 x 33 1/2 in
110 x 85 cm

The gaze follows the trajectories set in motion by the painter: style is a continent, or an alphabet that can become a lexicon; it must be read, and every word is a discovery, or an invention — unexpected and full of wonder.
The observation of a painting must be learned; one should pretend, each time, that one has never seen anything before, and thus manage to practise the new alphabet: Judith, seemingly devoid of emotion, her gaze far from what her hand has just done, does not invite the viewer in; nor does she seem aware of the body — the head with the open mouth just fallen onto the table, the head she has just severed.
Antonio Carneo
Menade addormentata, c.1650-1700
Oil on canvas / Olio su tela / Öl auf Leinwand
25 3/4 x 36 3/4 in
65.4 x 93.5 cm

To recognize one’s own era in the nuances of an ancient light, painted almost five centuries earlier.
The sleeping body of the Maenad.
Giovanni Crivelli
Caccia al cinghiale
Oil on canvas / Olio su tela / Öl auf Leinwand
65 3/8 x 92 1/2 in
166 x 235 cm

In looking, we discover something about ourselves.

Even when observing the terrified eye of the hunted boar fleeing for its life? What do we recognize in that animal eye? How painful can the bite sinking into flesh be, and the fear of what is about to end?
I would like to close with Berger’s words, again from Ways of Seeing:

“The originals — the works — are mute and motionless in a way that is entirely foreign to information, where information is never mute or still. From this point of view, the reproduction hanging on a wall has nothing to do with the work itself. In the original, silence and stillness permeate the very substance, the colour, in which we follow the traces of the painter’s sudden gestures. The result is that the temporal distance between the making of the painting and our looking at it is reduced. In this very particular sense, all paintings are contemporary. Hence the immediacy of their testimony. Their historical instantaneity stands literally before our eyes. Cézanne made a similar remark, from the painter’s point of view: ‘A minute in the world’s life passes! To paint it in its reality, and to forget all else for its sake! To become that minute, to be the sensitive plate… to give the image of what we see…’ What we do with that painted instant when we have it before our eyes depends on what we expect from art, which today in turn depends on how we have already experienced the meaning of paintings through their reproduction.”
Claudia Losi

Born in Piacenza in 1971, Claudia Losi studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, where she also earned a degree in Foreign Languages and Literature.

Her artistic research explores the relationship between human beings and nature. Travel, walking, and exploration are investigated as forms of knowledge through which she establishes a direct relationship with places, interweaving disciplines such as natural sciences, ethnology, geology, geography, cartography, literature, and poetry.
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