Banished from paradise, what does it mean to lose paradise?
Who loses paradise? Only one’s gaze is capable of replying to the sense of loss, only with the eyes one witnesses what goes towards the inexistence of loss. There are, in fact, closed eyes that do not see themselves in paradise, because they die; there are eyes remained open, that, just the same, do not see paradise, because they do not know how to look at it.
Perhaps the tragedy of a lost paradise is in the eyes that, although open, no longer know how to look in a paradisiac way.
Paradise is really lost for the eyes that do not see it, not for the eyes that have died from within: their end coincides, without adhering to it, with the end of oneself as a paradise.
The real loser, for what he has lost, is, then, man’s gaze, which cannot see an otherness which is so intimate and introvert that it constitutes his archetype, thus definable as paradise.
Paradise is, in fact, not a place, but a primigenial condition of place, the birth place, from which one comes, from which one is not separated, to which one returns: paradise is, then, the place where the gaze pursues its mirage, the gaze continues wanting to see as a vision, the closed eyes return to see as nostalgia or enchantment, remembered in what was already seen in the past, perhaps before being born to sight.
In a word, paradise is the condition of intimacy, in which even ferocity is translated with the maternal language of birth and nutrition. It is true: a tiger runs to catch its prey, but the animal that is caught becomes its food, which is transformed into food to be passed on. There are others, springing from her as progeny, which feed themselves in order to go where the mother tiger will not be able to reach them later, not even for recognition.
To lose paradise, therefore, does not mean that paradise is lost but that we lose the condition to live in paradisiac harmony. Without which life is transformed into an aimless search or into boredom without possibilities, or into reality without the connotation of the marvellous.
A society without the marvellous becomes an orphaned mass deprived of paradise: it is its remembering it or its making utopias of it, which makes life a search for shelter, as a landing-place of comfort. There is no image of tenderness that does not refer back to a remembered paradise; there is no reconquered happiness that is not within the refinding of a lost paradise; in conclusion, there is no more frustrating and bored emptiness than that of living according to the reasoning the after day, after paradise which is finished, destroyed.
The human eye has nothing to scrutinise, because there is nothing on which its gaze can remain; it remains on what it evokes, it carries us back to a happy state already looked at, whose span of time, inclusive, dense and similar is temporality which has returned to the eternal return of paradise which has come back and been refound.
When paradise is lost, however, the eye abdicates its tension for looking in order to rediscover: it cedes its quiet and contemplative pulsating to the click of a photograph, which reduces, closes the corporeal like an object to be kept without saving it, to be deposited without bringing it to life, removing it from its environment without becoming familiar with it.
A photograph has the limit of making the object adhere to its condition, necessarily communicating its being an epigone of what is lost without paradise.
Pellicano’s painting translates the immobility of the click of the photograph into a living image, inside which the concrete is overturned in intimacy, in an objectivated attitude: and so it happens that a man’s gaze does not gaze, the photographic diaphragm does not focalise, because the visual eye of the inhabitants of the lost paradise, lions, tigers, leopards, cheetahs, captures the scene.
Thanks to them, as they speak from within the pictorial representation of Pellicano, the gaze recaptures its seeing power, its expressive truth, a calm ranquillity without boredom, without anguish, emotional symptoms of one who looks from without at the paradisiac loss.
If the lion photographed loses its roar, Pellicano’s painted one fails to roar: in paradise there is no prey, but animals to live with in peace, in harmony. The artist gives back to the animals a look of tenderness, in which paradise continues to live not as a landscape, but as gesture; not as exotism but as a familiar place which has never been lost, since God created paradise with the trees, with the animals which lived in it.
Man left paradise, tried to tame the animals so that they at least might repay with their songs of paradise, which he had lost: he fences off zoos, cages, model stables, he films “habitats”, photographs places where paradise may remain at least as dens, nests, the call to live, as it always had been, since its origins, is in paradise.
But the more man fences off, the more paradise conceals itself to the point of not existing; the more he photographs, the more paradise abandons the region, the area, for paradise is harmony, where one can live in a paradisiac way.
Only in art does paradise remain as a trace: it is in the gaze of animals, in the calm way in which they look at man, who replies to that gaze, on the contrary, in the disquieting way, in the discomfort of a lost good and which man wants to possess or fence off.
Observing how the lions in Pellicano’s pictures seem to me to gaze, an existential discomfort is depicted in my soul, typical of someone who has lost the meaning itself of lost. In fact, does not “to lose” mean to make of one’s life a pilgrimage-like research to be once more inside what has been lost and that one wants this to return?
In the opinion of man who has cast out of paradise, even the animals that had never lost it are considered cast out: because they are inhabitants who are never driven out and, therefore, are part of paradise. Man who has been expelled, expels them in his turn. That is the meaning of the calm, questioning gaze in the profound eyes of Pellicano’s animals with the black of their pointed pupils, intensified in the almost oval yellow of the edges of their eyes. A lost or a refused paradise? That is the question.
I prefer to answer: refused. After all, the non-tragic gaze of Pellicano’s tigers does not refer to any awareness of loss, but rather to the indifference, the lack of compassion towards those who are expelled.
The loser is man who goes astray without paradise. In fact, the labyrinth takes the place of paradisiac familiarity of space and time: the labyrinth and feeling homeless are the same thing, like exile and the waste land.
The desolation of the after day, before which man hypocritically closes his eyes so as not to face the depth of the abyss, from whose compassion paradise looks at him without letting itself be seen.
This drama of looks is called non-existence. A way of living one’s responsibility: is it not better to convince ourselves that paradise has never existed, so as to console ourselves in the fact that we have lost nothing?
This is certainly an easy way of thinking, to which modern life accustoms us. After all, is it not with the death of paradise that we wear its fur, with the illusion that we are warming the cold that we feel? The cold that comes from within our being men, now orphans and even superfluous inside the labyrinth.
Carlo Alberto Augeri