Flash Art Exhibition review

LA MIA STORIA CON SAMUEL BECKETT A PORTOBELLO

Alessandro Bartolini

Is there such thing as love at first sight? Who knows whether a single glance, exchanged in a bustling city street, full of people, traffic and loneliness, can be enough to make two perfect strangers fall in love? Perhaps it doesn't really exist. Perhaps it is just an invention, or one of those devices used in literature or films to appeal to the incurably romantic and make sickly sweet love stories a little more interesting.

 

Samuel Beckett and the Spice Shop June 2007 Copyright Margherita Lazzati

One thing is for certain: possible or impossible, real or not, love at first sight is a furtive and indissoluble meeting of eyes that, in a tiny fraction of time, says absolutely everything that there is to be said. So, what might Margherita Lazzati have said when, walking along Portobello, she was suddenly struck by the wistful, proud eyes of Samuel Beckett? It was a graffiti immortalised by Alex Martinez, on an ordinary wall in Blenheim Crescent, right there, in the heart of Portobello. Perhaps the only words that the unconscious harmony of that look can have elicited in her were: I was looking for you. At which point that great, lined old face, depicted in black and white and ignored by the thousands of passersby, would surely have replied: I was expecting you.

Almost as though that encounter, on a teeming street in a busy and distracted London, were stripped of the ordinariness of chance, instead taking on the guise of preordained complicity - a complicity based on silence and affection. The meeting of two people: the last act in a tale of destiny drawn on a Portobello wall. And, as often happens when people fall in love, Margherita Lazzati, too, allowed herself to be drawn into the abyss of obsession.

But hers is not a morbid and unhealthy obsession, one of those obsessions that pierce souls and destroy hearts. On the contrary, in her there developed a pure obsession, driven by curiosity - thanks to which this photographer sought to get right to the depths of that look, wanting to be the last custodian of the anguish of a man who, sadly, had an intimate knowledge of war, death and sickness of loved ones. A man who drew, from these dramatic experiences, the essence and shape of his literary and theatrical works, which were penetrating representations of a troubled twentieth century.

Love stories, if they are to be more than just sporadic adventures, need to live intensely over time. It matters little that they begin in the certainty that sooner or later they will end because one of the two involved will leave. Margherita Lazzati knew this would happen: she was aware that sooner or later her Beckett would go away - that some day that tag would meet the same fate as other similar works, that it would sink into oblivion, beneath new layers of spray paint applied by some other artist. So, all she could do was preserve him in her reflections, experience him through her photographs, visit him every time she was in London, documenting, through her pictures, the static vitality that the decaying influence of time and of the city were leaving on that patch of wall. Everyday shots of a mural, faithfully depicted and showing all the honest rawness of its state: from the height of its splendour to the start of its decline, its inexorable extinction and finally its replacement with another tag. During the daytime Beckett pitilessly observed the comings and goings of the people, but in the stillness of the night, broken by the light in the window of the house above, he seemed absorbed. He seemed not to notice the abandoned sacks of rubbish before him.

All this is captured in Margherita Lazzati's pictures, which, in themselves works of art, have the main merit of having guaranteed this mural that kind of immortality that a work gains not so much through its material existence as through its existence as an experience that has been lived and is recalled.

Margherita Lazzati's work has given rise to an exhibition of photographs entitled 'My Story with Samuel Beckett in Portobello', which, shot after shot, traces her relationship with the Irish writer, from their first meeting through to its end - an artistic relationship that lasted three years (from 2007 to 2010).

The exhibition can currently be seen in the exquisite setting of the Fortino at Forte dei Marmi (2 April - 5 June).