The Art Corner: Cecilia Granara
this month’s conversation weaved into talk of beauty, rape iconography in art, and finding poetry in pain.
In the summer, I visited the house of Tonino Guerra, a poet and scriptwriter who wrote most of the movies that made the Italian cinema of the 60s and 70s what it is considered now: a work of art. Invited by his wife, an 80-year-old Russian woman with the deepest and child-like blue eyes and bright red hair you can see from a mile away, I went back as an adult to a place where I had been as a child very often. As I drove in the countryside of Emilia Romagna, between yellow fields of wheat and cypress hills I told my partner, “I don’t really know what we are encountering here, I haven’t seen this person since I was six”. But I trusted that the poetry that followed Tonino, who died in 2012, would also find me there.
In his twenties, Tonino came out of a concentration camp where he had been imprisoned for fighting with partisans against fascists, and wrote one of his most famous poems: “I have been happy many times in my life, but never like the time I got out of prison in Germany and looked at a butterfly without wanting to eat it”. This phrase has encapsulated the idea of using poetry and beauty to describe hardship. He dedicated all his life to advocating for beauty and joy.
Beauty is a tender response to oppression, it catches the oppressor by surprise, for it speaks in a completely different language.
This search for joy and beauty in life is also something that feminist writers like Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Adrienne Maree Brown, and Rebecca Solnit explored in their writing about social change. Beauty is a tender response to oppression, it catches the oppressor by surprise, for it speaks in a completely different language.
The same theme prevailed as I looked at the paintings of Cecilia Granara, an Italian painter based in Paris that mesmerised me with the softness in the way she deals with issues like identity, body politics, rape, mental struggles and femininity. Granara embodies her art, she is humble and delivers words that carry mountains in a soft, posed tone. Her work is filled with deep research and knowledge, driven by a curiosity rooted in humility. She cares about her community and tells me that one of the things that makes her most joyful is her friend’s paintings, and to have a shared experience of being painters together in this era before they die.
During our conversation, Granara sent me one of her paintings entitled Salvarsi (to save oneself or to save each other). On a bright orange and yellow background, at the extremes of the paintings, two figures hold their hand towards each other in a gesture of solidarity. “I was depressed”, she says, “like many people were in during COVID, I was isolated, I was feeling lonely. I wanted to talk about the relationship you can have with yourself, of just pulling yourself out of that loneliness”. In another painting, a woman is crying on the floor of her bathroom, leaning into the toilet, and a rainbow is coming out of the toilet bowl.
I find this juxtaposition between dream, beauty and pain in many of her paintings. Many have described her art as existing in the realm between reality and imagination, yet dividing the two makes less sense to me than seeing imagination as a way to see and accept reality, in a more colourful way, and resonate with it.
“I’ve obviously never seen rainbows coming out of the toilet,” she says, talking about the second painting she sent me. “That’s imagination, and then there’s this act of being naked on the floor, crying into a toilet, and that’s something I hope many can relate to”. Play becomes a fundamental way for humans to accept harshness and oppression because, she says “we need refuge from harshness, and paintings are spaces, mental or emotional, where we can find respite.”
Granara’s work is very much based on her experience as a woman, and as a woman who is a painter. She acknowledges the fact that for so long women were systematically excluded from canonical art history; unless they were muses (objectified) they were not allowed to study art or to paint. Inevitably, our conversation brings us to a topic that has been very present in her art: the woman’s body, and violence. “The most radical way that feminism has impacted my understanding of life is the representation of women’s bodies,” she tells me.
Both Granara and I grew up in Rome, where often the inherent beauty of art distracts from the narrative the art is communicating. A classic example is that of Galleria Borghese, one of the most beautiful art museums in the city, enclosed in a Villa in the middle of a green park, where the meticulous sculptures of Bernini sit next to paintings of Caravaggio and Da Vinci, in these stunning rooms with intricate marble floors. Most of the paintings in the gallery portray mythological scenes. When I went for the first time, after twenty minutes of awe I had the realisation that most of the stories told in these works of art were stories of rape. I was very conflicted, caught between pain and beauty.
“The longstanding tradition of rape in iconography is something that revolts me to my core” .
“The longstanding tradition of rape in iconography is something that revolts me to my core,” Granara says. Rape has been mythologised and aestheticized in Art, the Western tradition of painting is steeped in violence, war scenes, rape scenes, it is part of the vocabulary of painting. “The shocking thing is how people don’t see it. They walk in and they’re indifferent to what they’re seeing because it’s so beautiful.” The marble statue of Daphne (nymph of the Olympus) and Apollo, God of war, by Bernini is mesmerising. As you look at the meticulous detail of how the marble was worked, you think of the patience of this man and the hours of work that were put into this. As a feminist, I could not, however, ignore the narrative. Apollo was cursed by Cupid, the God of Love, to love a beautiful woman (Daphne) though she could never return his love. What happened is Apollo essentially stalked Daphne until one day, to escape his rape (driven by lust and love of course!) she turned herself into a tree and died. It is clear what is going on here, a perpetuation of a narrative we know all too well. No means, “I’ll try until I have to force myself on you”.
One of the questions I have always asked myself is how gallerists and curators can play a role in reversing the perpetuation of these narratives. What if gallerists acknowledged what is going on in these paintings and helped spectators understand what they are seeing without taking away its beauty? I believe they have a responsibility to hold Art more accountable in its context, “I think it would be amazing if today’s 16- or 15-year-old, had a document or a mediation with someone that explained: What are we looking at?” Granara tells me.
As an artist, she says, “One of the positions that I humbly tried to take is, there’s been so much visual iconographical violence against women. So how do you break that chain? Perhaps painting something like body confusion” she tells me whilst referencing one of her pieces. “Men have been painting women being raped for hundreds of years. And it’s a totally accepted trope in the art world. Perhaps my response to breaking that chain is representing myself in contact with my body in a way that shows ownership or that shows something that isn’t aggressive”.
There is also a softness in the way that Granara tackles difficult subjects; her beautiful and colourful paintings always evoke a sense of joy. The conversation flows naturally and I listen as Granara brings me through the research that accompanies her work; she has a deep knowledge of women artists who have grappled with themes of rape and violence and tells me something I find very interesting. Most of the iconography of rape show moments before the rape, where women are portrayed like victims. “If you’re made to believe for centuries that you might be attacked, you will carry that fear with you and it will make you feel like you’re vulnerable”, she says.
How can we shift the narratives? Granara tells me about a painting called Touched by Dana Schutz, where a woman, who seems to have been sexually abused, stares at the spectator looking furious. You know what she has been through, but she is not a powerless victim of it, her fury makes her powerful in this situation. “I thought that was a really interesting way to respond or contribute without perpetuating the narrative of showing the woman only as the victim. She’s just glaring at you. And she looks so angry. And I think that changes the game,” she says.
“Perhaps my response to breaking that chain is representing myself in contact with my body in a way that shows ownership or that shows something that isn’t aggressive”.
When it comes to Granara’s paintings, there are multitudes at work, there is complexity in the simplicity of what she delivers, and it feels joyful and tender. “The best way to oppress people is to starve them from feeling joy. So if you feel joy, towards your body, if you’re feeling that way with your body then it’s a huge act of resistance,” and this is what drives her work.
In a world that prizes misery and burnout, joy becomes a revolutionary tool, just like the erotic, the poetic, the spiritual. Granara contributes to this narrative beautifully, humbly, and with great talent and knowledge.
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Find more of Cecilia’s work on https://ceciliagranara.com/
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