dIn all sports, the one that fascinates me the most is boxing. It’s hard to even think of it as a sport, because it’s violent, risky, it puts integrity and sometimes life at stake. And yet it indicates direct competition without a team, without support. One versus one. noble art. Boxing evokes courage, challenge, individual skills. The loser can lose outright by knockout, or lose on points, by standing. The winner wins, the loser is not humiliated. Because of this I didn’t think twice about proposing the exhibition Piero Pompili. Boxers at the Mart in Rovereto. For the uncorrupted, or pure, beauty of his photographs, and for the strength that they express, in every point of view, competing with the statuary.
Piero Pompili, “Prometheus’ fire”, 2013-2023, silver salt print, 100×100 cm (courtesy Mart, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto).
Boxers are always ready. And Pompili faces them. She has them in front of her. Heroes. Immortalize them. Statues. Strong men. These are the gods. Boxers. Warriors. Already in the prehistoric graffiti of the third millennium BC, now in the British Museum, we see men fighting with clenched fists. Nothing has changed since then, and nothing can change. We will always be facing each other, it will always be a clash. Whoever keeps his hands down is lost.
Pompili, with its timeless images, would have pleased Pasolini. His light overturns the painful darkness of Dino Pedriali’s bodies. His vitality drives away the threat of death. Enzo Siciliano had understood this: «It seems to see him, Pompili, with a camera of his going around Rome, quick as a desire for image, always trying to download in what he sees the sign of his own vitality and passion as an observer. Pompili doesn’t tear life from life: he spills it over us.
You need to know Rome well and know how plagued a city it is today, offended, torn by its very being metropolis. Well, Pompili captures his shots beyond this laceration, even though the laceration itself is his theme. His eye is filled with bodies, with residual materials, with cancerous urban unhappiness. But his is a gaze that cuts, frames situations with the happiness of a painter.
Pompili works by instinct: he doesn’t work, as they say, “on samples”. It is precisely his hand that leads, so to speak, the images to maturity: indeed, according to the thought of Cartier-Bresson, his legs. The best target is the legs, Cartier-Bresson argued: you move away, you get closer… It’s the boxer’s movement. A leg sport, in which the hands give the victory. And even the photographer walks, moves, and shoots with his hands, strikes: the lens captures the lens.
And it is true that the subject of boxing is also found in painting (I am thinking of Giacomo Balla, Alberto Ziveri, Othmar Winkler) but it is above all in sculpture, in the ancient one that honors athletes and in the modern one, with some extraordinary examples, among which most notable The boxer by Francesco Messina.
Romeo Gregori, “Boxer’s head”, 1934 (courtesy Mart, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto).
But I loved above all others the punch boxer of the forgotten Romeo Gregori, which I bought for myself forty years ago, when no one remembered it, in an exhibition where it was mistaken for another. And I also wanted, in a second version, to acquire it for the Mart collections. Romeo Gregori’s boxer is played, with one eye closed and incredible ears, but he is integral in his willingness to lose with honorto have measured himself, to have faced, without fear, the antagonist.
As a boy he was a legend Cassius Clay, very powerful and supporter of the civil rights of minorities. His strength was heroic. He was against bullying. Force is not violence. Probably the same encounters (with Sonny Liston, with Joe Frazier, with George Foreman) struck Pompili’s imagination, as did the legends of Rocky Marciano and Sugar Ray Robinson.
And, in front of his photographs, I found my thoughts expressed in epic images and not in words, and I wanted this exhibition so that the example, the passion of the great boxers would give us courage. Without which no enterprise, even a losing one, is noble. Like boxing: noble art.
INFO: the Piero Pompili exhibition. Puili is at the MART in Rovereto until Sunday 2 July.
mart.tn.it
iO Woman © REPRODUCTION RESERVED