PORFIRIO DIDONNA
INTO THE GARDEN
This is such
a simple story in so many ways, and the drawings and paintings
tell it so well. Porfirio DiDonna lived and died. He had parents
who brought him up close, and he stayed close. He drew and painted.
He said what he had to say with marks and shades and colors,
and he put it down with touch and with something more than confidence.
Something more like pre-knowledge, if it exists. Something like
faith. And he was awake to it all. Love, light, god, joy, darkness,
evil, pain, the physical, the musical, the mystical, dreams,
smells, the building, the garden, the road, the home. The paintings
tell his story, and how could it be any other way. If you find
these paintings, they will find you.
First of all, the seventies were Porfirio Didonna's complete
decade, the fulcrum at the middle of his life's work. In the
late sixties he studied at Pratt, and then Columbia. In the eighties
he achieved his mature style, but died in August of '86. In the
seventies he experienced a complete decade of style, and explored
it from one end to the other. This was the period of his dot
paintings. It is a body of work that holds together like a train
of box cars.
It was all
there in the Seventies in the drawings. All of the shapes and
the marks. They were the language of signs which would later
shape his expression; hammer, lift, and illuminate. And what
appeared as openness in dot paintings, and was born in the drawings,
slowly became realized in the new work. Something also new in
the work was a sense of struggle, something which was natural
in his student work, but sublimated by the formula of the dot
paintings.
Porfirio DiDonna was born in Brooklyn in 1942, and grew up there,
living at home with his parents until he was thirty-five. That
is unusual in this country. He had brothers and sisters, and
in an apparently quiet and uncompetitive way, he was something
of the chosen one. He had a very close and loving relationship
with his mother which seemingly nutured him completely. At thirty-five
he moved to Manhatten, but stayed close to home. At the age of
thirty-eight, in 1981, he made a trip to Italy. His mother gave
him foundation, support, and religion. Italy gave him space,
color, and light. When you look at his drawings you can see that
this was not a person searching for connection, reacting in confusion,
striving to prove something. This was a person fulfilling a vision
with the rapid fire of dominoes falling. The hunger for marks
evident in the drawings tells you he was on to the next drawing
while the last one was still faint from the fury of fusion. He
had roots like the rock to give him the kind of freedom to serve
his vision. Freedom we pick up on and appreciate so much in the
drawings.
There is something
familiar about this work. The generousity and openness is a big
part of that; it also creates a dialogue which talks and listens.
We can do the same. These final works extend a hand so gently
that we can hardly refuse it. It is so firm and steady that we
take it.
The final works exploded onto paper and canvas in 1985, just
before something exploded in his brain. They possess that intensity
of almost unbearable proportion. The less gentle ones have colors
and edges which can cut us open and burn into us. There are images
of love, and then ones of almost possessed vision, pressing evangelical
action. The chalice and the sword. Which is it? Are we the guest
or the meal?
Certain paintings are clearly the chalice. They bear us love.
One is the red and green radiant vitality of the garden. The
centered shape becomes the tree of life. A trunk we can put our
arms around. It is also the male shape, and equally the female
shape, but then, which is it really? Another becomes more the
frescoe. Shadows washed with light. A cup on an altar. A roman
freeze. Blood and redemption. Hope and the light green sea.
Other images,
however, are the sword; sometimes feverishly so. All cut out.
The hard edges of stained glass or patchwork cloth. They cut.
Take this sword. More blood than wine. Male. Vertical. Swift
justice. Firey vision. Glory. Irrational image in a rational
suit. The next is more benign. The sword devides the canvas.
Fire on the left. Green earth on the right. Three pink windows
perforate the sword. It is the sword put to rest. These last
paintings are all roughly life size and vertical. Doorways. Their
brush marks have spring in them, carrying lightness and darkness,
color and feeling. They dabble, and dapple; shimmer and sparkle;
march and marry. They swim in the canals created by Didonna's
curving lines, steering left and right, and sometimes flooding
the painting. When they join together and offer the chalice,
we cannot refuse them; the sword, and we tend to shy away.
One of his very last paintings says it best. It is a lightish brown vertical vessel with those sweet fast curving lines containing each side. Around it are thumb-sized flecks of blues and browns and ochres clustering and dispersing, space and light. The form is suspended in the center, hovering closer to the top, as though levitating. It is looking at us. It is him. It is her. Christ and earth mother. Buddha and angel. Self and selflessness. It is tree, fish, bird. All things. It is us. There are those who believe Porfirio DiDonna said what he had to say before he died. If it is possible, I would have to agree. Porfirio DiDonna had arrived.
Copyright:Addison
Parks,1988
Reprinted courtesy of ARTS Magazine
Cover article for the January 1989