Berlinghiero, Madonna and Child

For many people, another picture of the Madonna and Child is not something that particularly entrances them. But to me, the other paintings don’t have the magic of this one. Unlike a video, unlike the images that we’ve become so used to seeing all around us, her expression is forever: these furrowed brows, the way the cheek tenses up over the nostrils, the pouting lips, the pleading expression on her eyes. It’s an expression that can be dead, unless we engage ourselves in it. Each time it’s slightly different, because we engage in it differently. One week we’re taken by the pattern on her knuckles; the next week, we’re taken by the softness of the modeling of her face, the next week by the patterning of the drapery, the next week the way that she relates to this gold background. Not a room, not a landscape, a gold background. The artist makes it clear that it’s from another world through the abstracting of forms. We are called upon to give life to this image, and of course it’s why they’re perfect receptacles for prayers and supplications on the part of the faithful. In contemporary art, the abstract and the figural are two divisive forces. You either are one or the other. Berlinghiero’s picture brings them together. You get both the abstract and the emotional, the human and the sacred. And it’s this combination of modes of expression, abstract and naturalism, that create this sense of suspension, and of timelessness. And so you have an image that is on a threshold between two worlds: the sacred realm, and the daily life that we live in. And this is to me at the very heart of what art is about. The idea that something engages us simply because it looks like what we see around us, this does not interest me at all. What we actually want from art is a work that takes us someplace where we aren’t, someplace where our imagination is engaged in a new way. It’s not shouting, it’s not begging for our attention. But once we focus on it and engage in it, it takes us someplace.