Pasolini never ceased reflecting upon the painterly nature of the image outside of both literalness and abstraction. In Pasolini we are accustomed to be exposed to a set of antinomies: image and depiction, tradition and the primordial, figuration and the tactile, the world and its fragments. The publication of his miscellaneous writings on painting (and painters of the Italy of the 1950s-1960s) Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on painting (Verso, 2023), edited by Ara Merjian and Alessandro Giammei, provides depth and substance to document Pasolini’s insistence to the pictorial activity as an index of unmediated expressivity against the domestication of the accelerated capitalist form that soon enough will generate devastating consequences for idiomaticity and the pregramatical expression of a living culture. It is not too far-fetched to claim that painting remained for him a necessary condition of the cinematic; a specific craft that fundamentally rejected the impulse to naturalness and its mimetic performance. Pasolini remains attached to painting as a form of embodiment, a corporeal resource, and an energetic surface of positioning of light.

After all, as the editors of the book remind us at the outset, Pasolini was after the “plasticity of the image” (37). And plasticity pushes the dexterity of human creativity, but it is something else as well: it is a line of expansion into the prehistoric when it comes to the frontier of appearance. And perhaps Pasolini would have agreed with Gianni Carchia’s indictment in Il mito in pittura (1987) that the attempt of realizing appearance – even at the cost of failing at it – is the fundamental metaphysical node in which the entire history of Western painting stands. A good painting elevates itself to supreme theology, as Luca Giordano said of Velázquez. The problem of appearance in Pasolini’s scene of writing on painting is registered through partial indications: the tone of detailism, the violent and free moving impressionism, the struggle for stylistic contamination, or in the “fragmentary chromatic and interrupted aesthetic” (114). Pasolini’s eye is always accessible to the transient and expressive in a picture.

But the Italian filmmaker struggles with description of paintings, as if possessed by a permanent impatience that harbors his recurrent shortcomings. And he was not unaware: “I am not fluent in the terminology of painting, so forgive me if I sound less specific” (134). It is a declaration that does not only appear once in this collection. One could speculate that this dilemma is resolved by Pasolini in three ways: first, he can choose the painters from a personal criteria that would justify his awareness of painting as a prehistoric cultural activity. Secondly, Pasolini repeatedly alludes to the teaching of the great Italian art historian Roberto Longhi – who was responsible for the first formal analysis of Piero de la Francesca’s pictorial oeuvre – as companion and a maestro that during the Fascist interwar period gifted his students (and Pasolini among them) a different reality through commentaries on the seminal works of Italian Renaissance painting (155). Longhi’s anti-iconographical approach to the pictorial tradition allowed Pasolini a sense touch – not less real than the physical hand that caresses another body or hard surface – and the inexorable mystery-like quality of plasticity. Thirdly, Pasolini avoids coming near a possible ontological description of what, in fact, painting as such stands for him. Does it have an autonomous specificity, or an internal grammar, or perhaps an intricate dependence on other artistic activities (poetry, cinema, social criticism, politics)? Pasolini wanted to understand painting as a force of absorption even if ultimately blinding to the spectator. Nonetheless, Pasolini’s commentaries is rigid at the abyss between what painting is (or should be) and the painters or pictures that he explores in these pages.

This abyssal between word and depiction vouches for Pasolini’s unresolved tension with the nature of painting; a picture is always already dependent or attached to a peripheral phenomena that moves beyond the modern vista’s fulfillment towards totality. In fact, there are a few moments where painting is qualified, as in the text on Carlo Levi: “We are in the presence of something mysterious, ineffable. To speak about that something I can only fumble in the dark, since O a, without a proper terminology…but this ‘something’ is a mystery to me” (176). Or, when in the fragment “Dialectal painting” he suggests that “ [the dialectal tone] is not for the objective content of its figure sand landscapes, but also for the tone he uses to represent it (a tonalism drawn, we could say, from a crepuscular post-impressionism)” (81). Both fragments – so distant from each other in time; one from the fifties and the one on Levi from the seventies – provide an approximate orientation of Pasoloni’s fixation of painting in its specific muteness. This is not because it lacks language, but rather because it only speaks in its own dialect. A painted picture is always about resolving a situated uncanny appearance.

And for Pasolini only the partial profile of a picture – its superficial depth and strength of figuration, but also its lack of sentimentality and abandonment of lyricism that he would come to associate with the bourgeoisie worldview – was capable of dialectical valance, thus upending its misstep into the vulgarity of the “equality predestined and predetermined…the representation of such a world excludes the very possibility of dialectics” (186). This was his indictment of Warhol’s homogenous silkscreen prints and the general phenomenon of Pop Art and the neovvanguardias as coordinated efforts to surpass all that was past and present collapsing into “the voice of the homo technologicus…replacing history with a surreptitious and sacral prediction of history” (147). Bernard Berenson would have agreed to this: the inception of ‘knowing’ over seeing will only secure further mimetic and mystified (through mechanized and applied models in advance) points of departure for a subject of consciousness directed towards history. This is why for Pasolini the avant-garde can only “make the definition of that moment zero [of absolute beginning] profoundly insincere” (149). Painting and tradition walk along the abyss of nihilism. Only negatively can we say that for Pasolini painting is, then, an earthly activity; it is about being in the world in spite of the state of the world; attached to seeing even if the blurred limits perturb the open horizon.

The allure of a lagging postmodern and mechanized painting – but isn’t’ the eclipse of painting for the epoch as such? – for Pasolini exchanges, rather too quickly, lyricism (dependent on the romantic subject that attains it) for nuanced poetic sayability. After all, one of the most straightforward assumptions entertained by Pasolini is that “a painter is a poet who is never forced by circumstances to write in prose…” (106). A remark that comes very close to Poussin’s assertion that painting is an endeavor about the mute nature of things. The muteness of painting has granted artists the possibility to evoke the picture from poetry, as if word and image by entering into proximity can finally participate, side by side, into the mystery of appearance withdrawing from the “adumbrations of our present image-world”, as T.J. Clark recognizes it. There is something to be said in this respect about Pasolini’s long poem “Picasso” (1953) where the medium of poetry touches Picasso’s canvas only to flee from its empty abstraction, disclosing the cunning negation of the world. Or to use a trope common to Clark’s art criticism: Picasso’s fall of Icarus lacks any possible awakening in the present.

Pasolini’s last verse of the poem expresses what for him painting should avoid: “Sunday air…and his error is here [Picasso’s], in this absence. / The exit to / eternity lines not in this desired and premature love. Salvation is to be sought by staying in hell, with a marmoreal will to understand it. A society fated to lose its way is always bound to lose it: a person, never” (75-76). For him painting and Paradise are not meant to cohabitation – which bears witness to Pasolini’s long lasting commitment to the fallen modern world ascertained by the promethean durable struggle. Painting is poetically affirmed by retaining to what does not come to pass: the convulsions of this world. But a question remains: should not the distance implicated in seeing be sufficient in a fading world? Traversing this distance is the inherent divine task of painting; or, as Pasolini simply called it: “exquisite, mysterious – a new religion of things”.