The answers

Is there an experience of truth in the artistic process that involves the artist in the creation of his works?

There is a question that has been cropping up in the philosophical debate on art over recent decades: Is there an experience of truth in the artistic process that involves the artist in the creation of his works? If so, what kind of truth are we talking about? Can this truth be conveyed to the beholder of the work?

The dominant aesthetic culture, that is, the ideas innate to the artistic process and to artworks in general, is centered on a conception of the work of art as production of the beautiful. For centuries the majority of art historians and critics have based their considerations, criticisms and evaluations of the specific technical-compositional aspects characterizing various artists over the various ages, on their own idea of the ​​beautiful. The framework of their research and mental constructions has been limited to these aspects, linked to the artist’s biography, the historical-cultural and social context in which he was trained and came to maturity. They focus on the evolution and technical-pictorial transformations that came about in the course of the artist’s life. On their classification into rigid and abstract aesthetic directions, which is to say conceptions of art and the practical realization thereof. Art historians converge, divide, compare and collide in this limited and narrow thematic area. In all but the very rarest cases, most of them have never attributed to the process of artistic creation a dimension of experience or production of truth on the artist’s part. They have confined themselves to the aesthetic dimension, meaning correspondence to the determined canons of beauty they draw on. Different canons that change in historical-cultural becoming.

The culture of art historians has exalted the person as artist, cancelling out the artist as person set within a specific historical-cultural context. They have limited their ideas on the artist, forgetting him as a person with his own political and religious beliefs, his adherence to specific visions of the world and of man. The artist as a person characterized by the flow of experiences that have influenced the emergence of his own truths, his own moral convictions.

They have overlooked the fact that man, the person, the existing, intertwines and interacts with his artist’s being which translates, transfers, symbolically transforms and fixes his truths, feelings, beliefs, hopes, expectations, bitterness, disappointments and alienations in his works. In most cases, artworks fuse and combine truth and beauty. They are a transposition of the artist’s truth experiences, dressed in the clothes of beauty.

All research is guided by a methodological rule that could be summarized as follows: "You can find what you are looking for, therefore the objectives that modulate and direct your research are fundamental". There are many examples that can be found in everyday life, especially in certain hobbies. Those looking for mushrooms will focus their perceptive attention on this intent. They will develop particular skill in identifying these delicious natural products. Their eyes will observe with accentuated attention and ability to distinguish. From small perceptive elements they will be able to detect the presence of mushrooms. In many other cases of our daily life we ​​experience this ability to find what we are looking for. The same applies to scientific research, artistic research and so on. If we assume the premise that the artist, in realizing his works, does not limit himself to complying with preset aesthetic canons but wishes to translate a personal experience into a painting, a sculpture, a poem: ideas, feelings, beliefs, his personal experience of truth, then he will communicate his truth, which he will dress with beauty. If this is the objective of our research, we will proceed accordingly by equipping ourselves with that knowledge and those techniques which allow us to reconstruct, albeit in an approximate way, the beliefs and feelings that the artist injects into his works. If we stick to given facts, to artists’ histories, their conceptions of art in general; if we avoid deforming these facts with elaborations and interpretations on artworks of an abstract and theoretical nature; if we adhere accurately to the facts, then we shall bring to light a quantity of objective elements in which the activity of embodying experience of truth in one’s works will flow and shine forth. We have examples galore in the history of art: in the period of Florentine artistic humanism painters such as Botticelli and Leonardo, sculptors like Michelangelo, transferred into their works the fundamental assumptions of neo-Platonism as developed by Marsilio Ficino. Pictorial expressionism is another example of artistic transposition of the existential dimension experienced by these artists. A transposition of their experiences of a society and dominant culture that they did not share. A garment of beauty into which they poured their intimate feelings of unease or exaltation. A translation of their interiority in accordance with specific painting techniques. How can we not feel, read, interpret, in Munch’s famous The Scream, a passionate denunciation of the distress of the artist as a person? A distress produced by extraneous and rejected customs, values and dominant social practices.

In artistic processes, set in specific historical-cultural, political, economic, moral and value contexts, different experiences of the artist's truth combine, become and emerge. A construction where the artist’s being shines as a physical person immersed in his time. In the Classical, Medieval, Humanistic and Enlightenment periods, representation of the natural, historical and social world dominates. Central themes which are partly reprised in the Romantic period, and with greater attention to historical and social themes of Marxist aesthetic. With the advent of Dadaism, Surrealism, Abstract Art and Cubism, the artist's experience as a person becomes dominant. Personal experiences become part of artistic content and its expressive form. The artist-person’s conflicts, torments, illusions or disappointments acquire centrality. Their alienations and extraneousness to their time, their rebellions and refusals of a certain conformism, compose various arabesques of “experience of truth”, which influence and change both form and content of the artworks. Although in different ways and forms in the varied artistic fields, they affect artistic techniques and artistic language. Certain artistic forms become central to others, for example, poetry to painting and sculpture. Some literary genres, such as the historical or autobiographical novel, take on a centrality with respect to the fantasy novel. The cinema bursts in powerfully, gaining a new centrality with respect to the traditional types of artistic expression. The same applies to the use of new technologies introduced by information technology, cybernetics, the digital world and sophisticated computer programs. The nature of the experience of truth changes, but its presence in the artworks remains the same. Most art historians, blind and deaf to objective and factual elements, clear or obscure, manifest or adumbrated, sought something else. They were as if blind to certain perceptual contents that stood out in front of their eyes or their senses. Yesterday as today, they go on stubbornly and obtusely, seeking, composing and interpreting from a technical-aesthetic point of view only. They wholly lack the idea that there is a truth in artworks that is intertwined with the aesthetic, technical-implementation dimension.

If there is an experience of truth, what kind of experience is it?

Answering the question “What kind of truth is there in artworks?” is a difficult exercise, full of obstacles. First, we must put the term “truth” in the plural, since the forms of truth that artists inject into their artworks are multiple. The nature of these truths constantly undergoes changes in the course of history and in the conceptions of art. In the specific way in which the artist conceives and practices his association with this beauty that dresses the truth. The element that links these different visions of truth in art consists precisely in this word “truth”. With which I mean a relationship with different degrees of correspondence between an expressed thought and the thing to which it is addressed. The latter being a real entity, present in the natural and historical world.

Historically, these truths, as correspondence, appear in two forms: one reflects external reality, the other refers to the internal processes of the artist, of a sensitive, affective, cognitive, ideal and value-related nature. Both kinds of truth run through the whole history of art, appearing in multiple and heterogeneous configurations. There are different factors that affect them: the historical-cultural and political-social context in which the artist lives. The specific beliefs, feelings and experiences of the artist as a person. Tas the artist’s particular conceptions of the nature of art and the role of the work, and his related practices. Another important factor refers to the limits and manners of transmitting these truths, which are related to the specific forms of art: from painting, by way of sculpture and right on down to music, poetry, literature and theatre, to arrive at the new artistic expressions embodies in cinema and the forms of contemporary art. Albeit within the diversity of these compositions, the two types of truth residing in the artistic process are: one that is centered on the external world, and one that is focused on the man-artist’s specific lived experiences. And they never appear absolutely separated or opposed. On the contrary, they coexist and merge, through a changing movement that modulates on the artist’s existential and aesthetic mutations. A movement where the two truths which, with regard to their object, would appear to be antithetical and separate, coexist in various fusions and interweaves in which both maintain their nature. A fluctuating seesaw where the one does not radically deny the other or affirm itself in an absolute and unique way. These theoretical results and this apparently abstract vision are the result of in-depth research on the life of artists, their conception and practices of art. A thesis that has a strong factual basis. From the Greek tragedians Aeschylus and Sophocles, by way of the great Renaissance-- humanistic artists to the miraculous Romantic poets. And continuing with Baudelaire, Dadaism, Surrealism and Futurism, on to committed art of Marxist and existentialist matrix: Brecht, Sartre, Camus, Celine etc. etc. right on down to contemporary art, the two types of truth are always present. In some cases, the truth with its center of gravity in the external reality dominates, in other cases, the truth with its pivot in personal experiences and multiple interior motions. These truths, often hidden and symbolized in artworks, have turned out to be invisible to art historians.

Can these truths be conveyed to the beholder of the artwork?

The transmission of "experiences of truth", represented by the form of the artworks through which the artist gives materiality to his artistic creation, takes place in many ways: in painting, by using images, lines, colors; in sculpture, by giving form to the rough material available; in music by the language of musical language; in poetry and literature by means of the word; in cinema, by frames in movement etc. As already stated, the truths concerning the external world and the others relating to the existential and intimate dimension of the artist, produce multiple arabesques. The same goes for the ways in which the painter, the sculptor, the poet, the novelist, seek to communicate them.

In the course of the history of art in general, and that of painting in particular, there have been a myriad of forms of truth, among which the symbolic. We need only think of all the pictorial allegories embodied in human or ideal beings: virtues, values, individual types that hark back to “flesh and blood” persons. Paintings aimed at transmitting divine truths, at elevating us, at strengthening religious feelings. Caravaggio himself, albeit with some variations, had to adapt to the rules written by the Church after the Tridentine counterreformation. Consequently, he portrayed events from the life of Jesus, the Saints and the Martyrs, bringing forth a great pathos aimed at striking, evoking, reawakening and strengthening religious feeling in the beholders of his works. He did it in his own way, but he did it. In reading or listening to certain poems, lyric poetry in particular, linked to personal painful or joyful episodes experienced by the poet, a spontaneous emotional participation comes about, an identification with the experience from which the artistic creation sprang. A sharing in his joyful or painful experiences which are akin to those of his readers. This experience of subjective truths, this intimate closeness, lies in the universality of feelings such as love, hate, melancholy, sadness. Cultures, civilizations, political forms, customs and morals change, as well as the ways in which feelings are experienced and manifested, but some fundamental moods remain constant.

When we hate, we try to hurt the cause of our hatred. When we love, we seek to care for the object of our love. The universality of poetry, music, painting and art rests on this commonality of natural experiences, beyond race, culture, religion and so on.

Art offers experiences of truth, relived by those who come into contact therewith. An experience of truth, different from that rational and impersonal one of science, from the abstract and conceptual of philosophy. Artworks carry multiple types of truth within them, and those who share the experience of an artworkwill drink from the source of these eccentric and diverse ways of being, of truth.

These communications of truth that the artist introduces into his works are often hidden from the gaze of those who seek or take part in an artistic experience. For example, many painters have made use of symbols and have used colors as elements that gush forth emotions and images. They have used signs, numbers, letters, tiny messages hidden in the recesses of their own pictorial compositions. The same applies to sculpture. We need only think of Michelangelo’s last suffering, tormented Pietà, or of the unfinished Prigioni. Into these sculptures Michelangelo poured his torments, his philosophical and religious ideas and his fear of an imminent death.