A story-telling artist

Introduction by Angela Vettese, art critic and journalist.

A toy train emerges from the mouth of Jannis Kounellis. No, it’s not a return to one’s childhood. It’s rather a way of acknowledging to what extent the great railroad age, the age that revolutionised freighting, the age when corn used to travel in jute sacks loaded in cars running on steel tracks stretching, far away from where the crop was grown, has become a part of us, of our very bodily makeup even. It was but a century ago that all this took place, a preview of what was to become known as “globalisation”. It was an auspicious beginning, indeed a deliverance for it dispelled famine and apportioned wealth as never before. For one thing, cotton reached far and wide from the lands where cacti dotted the landscape.
The price for all this, a price that with remarkable foresight the artist prophesised would have to be paid, was to be the loss of any certainty in relation to what we like to call Western Civilisation. His Greece, our and equally his Rome, the customary proportions of an architecture even in which the dimensions of a bed are similar to those of a door, would reveal themselves as part of a mind-frame that by reaching out to the world had set the stage for its own disintegration. Kounellis cannot but define himself as a painter, as a champion of the classical tradition. And it’s not so much out of political reasons but simply because he can’t be otherwise. That’s where he hails from, and so do we. It’s enough to realise that even the colour of a live parrot or the form of a wardrobe may be a source of inspiration and the subject matter of painting.
A train erupting from a mouth may indeed be a sign of nostalgia but also of something else besides. It may foreshadow what will one day be history, suggesting that we, here and now, learn to simultaneously cooperate and compete with all that which owing to different histories and even more geographical separation cannot in any way be called Western Civilisation.