"Neysa Grassi's paintings are difficult, but they are worth the trouble". That was Sid Sachs's conclusion in the introduction to the catalogue of the 1996 exhibition at the Locks Gallery of Philadelphia. And I am immediately tempted to take up these words to say that, while I agree with what Sachs means about the difficulty of her paintings, I did not find any particular difficulty, not even at this first reading. If difficulty is a structural part of the things one does, it certainly cannot be removed, and the same thing goes for painting; the good thing about Neysa Grassi is that this difficulty which otherwise is camouflaged as easiness has been re-established.
Instead we realise that we are dealing with painting again, at last. Today I can see Neysa Grassi's canvases and water-colours here in Italy as well, even if it is only in some little photographs and recent publications that she has kindly sent me, and so I take this opportunity of thanking her, by writing a few notes to her works.
With Neysa we find another kind of painting and another time. I don't know if it's that time for reading that is so often complained about, but in any case it is a time that we have often seen cancelled and kept out of the canvas, as has unfortunately happened so often in much contemporary art. So, her painting is painting that is no longer minimalist, no longer POPular, and therefore no longer for everyone, no longer already done or already seen, deja vu, and not even, as we say in Italy, revisited. These notes may seem strange and exaggerated, or the wanderings of someone talking about macro-systems, but I cannot keep back my enthusiasm when I say that this seems to me to be real painting. This is absolute novelty. With a play on words which is possible in Italian, we can call it pittura dal vero (painting from the real) or pittura davvero (really painting), or yet again a very special form of painting en plein air, in which we feel the breath and inspiration which make us intuit at last this other time of painting, made up of a humble gesture, but a humility that is not minimalist. I think that she has a Renaissance touch of real writing and sublime painting, subtle, with particular finesse in her technical mastery, which burns all bridges with the decadent period, our period, where ideology is all poured out on to the writing of the body, on tattooing, this decadent extension, in all the various forms of body art, on conceptualism taken to its irremediable extremes.
One day, while navigating in the great network of the Internet, I found, almost by chance, two of her works, photographed in miniature (it is curious how the electronic age has managed to force even works of art into the restricted spheres of miniaturisation), which made me immediately looked for other links. So today I am able for the first time to appreciate her nets, networks and knots, because she kindly sent me more photographs and catalogues, published on the occasion of exhibitions since 1996, material which, although not exhaustive, gives some idea of the excellence of her recent work, in which, if some people have spoken of silence, it must be a very eloquent silence indeed. Her work might indeed be imagined as paintings by a pianist or concert-player who can easily play without an orchestra. It makes you think of a work by John Cage called Silence, where from a specifically musical sphere he encroaches on other arts and other instruments borrowing from them, thus arriving at works that seem literary or visual, or just musical. But here we are dealing with a completely different kind of music, with all due respect to John Cage. The art of silence that brings music and painting together. Neysa musician or painter, then? Let's leave the question open for the time being.
Now, as is only right, I am forced to make use of some references and quotations, widening the field to try and make sense of the material that I have here in front of me and which intrigues me so much. What do these works suggest, what do they evoke, what lessons do they follow, who are their precursors? It is not necessarily the case that there are any in the case of Grassi, let's not jump to that conclusion. Who can be the precursor of works like these? Is there really a precursor?
Let's start from Leonardo da Vinci.
I'm thinking in particular of the treatise that deals with the question of the body and writing. Grassi's painting suggested, among many other things, that I should read those passages of the writings where Leonardo speaks of the splendid art in distinguishing between bodies and surfaces, and reflect on some of those anatomical drawings of his whose precision and rigour are accompanied by notes on the point, the line, nothingness, surface. Specific and decisive elements about impossible geometry and impossible figuration; so, nothing to do with organicism. In Neysa's works we find the same elements again as benchmarks through which she is able to explore the absolute in her painting; this is the research that she seems to conduct around the anatomy of the image and aperture, surface, drawing near to excellence, silence, rigour, the absolute, solitude and sobriety. What other way, what solemn way, is there to celebrate painting and the issue of the object?
For me, who thought that I had already been converted on the road to Damascus as an almost maniacal admirer of a certain kind of Italian painting, the expression eloquent silence (which in rhetoric is considered an oxymoron) has been useful in this case, as the best way of describing the work entitled The tell! Pleasantly surprised to find something really interesting in the recent painting scene in America. Because we have the distinct sensation that we are not in front of the usual art that feels it has to shout something at us, here we are beyond art that is spoken, proclaimed.
It is just painting.

The way of painting is the difficult way; a difficulty that, as I was saying before, does not invest a reading of her water-colours and canvases, but is innate in the structure of the work, a difficulty that the painter transposes into simplicity for the reader, a difficulty that stands at the source of the reading, leaving us just the pleasure of reading, and, if we are really forced to do it, to mention the precursors that the works suggest; which is why we were spoke of Leonardo.
Going back for a moment to her research, her drawings of floods have been written about, bringing to mind Leonardo da Vinci's drawings of floods and water. It's true, there too, as in the anatomical drawings, Leonardo always refers to the anatomy of the image, apart from the discourses on the human and iconology, to this interest in the anatomy of the image which is the same in the works of Neysa Grassi, and endorsed by a specific trip to Florence, on the occasion of some research at the La Specola Museum. Her masterpiece forces us to an absolute decision, to make a clear distinction between what happens in painting, bearing in mind the anatomy of semblance - for the precise reason that in painting we cannot be interested in omnipresence, an age winking its eye at us - and abandoning ourselves to the appearance of things, to presence, to the automaticness of being.
I quoted Leonardo in order to reflect on the importance not only of the anatomy of the image but also of the figure and figuration - even if impossible - in abstract art, usually completely neglected, and in this way to understand better and more specifically why, in the case of Grassi, we are dealing with real painting and in particular with real abstract painting, as has been said so rightly by Barry Schwabsky in his catalogue of 1999, when he refers to this "fine incongruence" between titles - apparently referring to something naturalistic - and manifestly abstract works. This might seem to be a comparison with informal painting, but it is not so. Neysa has a special way of celebrating surface and its properties. These properties require a writing time that could not otherwise be found in the pure formalism that is usually to be met at the height of informal painting or in compositions created from a flat surface, from a tabula rasa in all its infinite expressions or from the ideology innate in conceptualism and installations. She does not proceed in an algebraic manner, so the surface is not flat. Free from formalisations, her material cannot be rendered semiotic, that is, the medium is not the message, the sign does not signify and does not supply references to the natural cause, but to the nature of the artifice, to artificial nature. Semblance, not appearance. That's what I find on this path. On the surface we have for a long time come up against the question of skin and film, as it is signalled to us in the presentation of her catalogue. There are not many artists who in the modern period have been particularly interested in the question of surface, but we should mention at least a couple.
What direction is her painting taking?
Neysa Grassi's works made me think when I saw Kandinsky's Abstract water-colour of around 1911, for the first time (unfortunately only in photographs) many years ago. This water-colour not only takes us back to the issues of abstractism and the unfigurable, already in the title, but actually turns out to be, and deservedly, the first real abstract work in modern history. We must say that this we know only now, after many things happening. What could you have experienced looking at that painting, not today, but in the year in which it was painted: the pleasure of novelty, not scandal-mongering novelty, but the sense of extremely rigorous research, the authenticity of the work, absolute innovation, colour.
The water-colours inspired by the La Specola Museum are splendid. But they are obviously not the same water-colours as Kandinsky nor should we make comparisons - different approaches, another time, other research, etc.
With these 1997 water-colours (without a title) opens the book of painting, which I personally consider in this case classical; as we leaf through this "book", every detail - which we might also call ideogram, sign, symbol - emerges from the work to lead to consummation, starting from the details, the margins, the strips, until a web, a pattern, a network, is created, and to a point where a centre and a background are created, right up to the conclusion. These water-colours, and in particular no.2 and no.3, stem from the Baroque and Renaissance, and re-invent it. A propos, a painter once said this to me: the greatest influence on modern abstractism in the question of signs was to be attributed mainly to the different stylistic experiences of the Ornate in the various ages, especially patterns, (wreaths, flourishes, spirals, animal and plant motifs), in a word, the various typologies, more than typologies, of the Baroque period.
But that's not all, if there is also a trace of evident homage to the painting of the Florentine Renaissance, and in particular with no.2, which refers to Florentine painting, evoking even if from a distance the symbol of the famous Florentian lily, which takes on here also the structure of a simple spring bud.

The critical and virtual leap from Leonardo to Kandinsky may seem the fruit of an exaggeratedly elliptical interpretation and hence not very orthodox, but it is only a pretext for digressing around the Italian Baroque and Renaissance, for better understanding what we mean when we say classicism; for example, I would like to remember another artist of note whom I consider classical and who, like Neysa, is very interested in surface, even if with different approaches: Lucio Fontana, the essential painter of modern history par excellence. Those who have had the chance to explore his work in its entirety can understand the specific reference to his work on surface in terms of him being the prosecutor of the notion of the classical in modern painting: the road taken by him must be considered still open for the great work that he has left to be completed in the future.
Does classical painting exist today? Leonardo - classical painter, Kandinsky - classical painter, Fontana - classical painter, Neysa - classical painter, without doubt. What is this classicism? This classicism functions more or less like this, I'll give you an example: imagine that you are standing now, for the first time, in front of Kandinsky's first abstract water-colour of 1911, or in front of Neysa's Red Room of 1998.
First, however, you must get your position right - stand like an opera singer when he or she is getting ready to sing, that is, don't go around jumping up and down as if you were a pop star, but position yourself with your feet firmly on the ground, ensure that your body is balanced properly, etc. - that is, do everything to be able to read the work with composure. At which point our reading must go above all in one single direction: to understand if we have a classical work in front of us or not, and to see most importantly what we have to do, and so to speak with "nastiness", which means: judge if the work is classical or naive, because you always want a little nastiness, even when you enter a museum! - following on which, you need to understand how authentic it is: trying to understand if what you have in front of you is an abstract work, if it is modern, and if that work is really humble enough to have not thrown away what had been done by its precursors. If it has not repressed tradition, history, civilisation, culture. If it is clear that behind and in front of that work there are still masters, that that work, so abstract, is also so figurative, so classical, if it is really that work that, exactly because it is classical, bears in mind the teaching of Leonardo, Kandinsky, Fontana, but not only them, obviously: then a first step has been taken. If we realise this, then the work is, yes, abstract, but also authentic. Let's be clear about this, all these ifs are to be considered virtual; in reality the reading of a work should be a question of an instant.
And that is what happens with this work entitled Red room: a question of an instant, and we enter the classical room of painting, when things happen.

Neysa Grassi's technique leads us to highlight the surface, not being content with superficiality and not being interested in those prerogatives for which surfaces, as generally happens, are usually a temptation: that is to say, the morphological, epidermic, naturalistic elements. In fact her painting is produced through a stratification and modelling process, layering and patterning, which is a very noble process and extremely ancient to boot: it used to consist and still does in proceeding with the application of layers of colour, or films, as they are called, so as to obtain large and also small background paintings of colour, for example a sky, a gown, flesh, etc. without that effect of woodenness and uniformity which we would have from the application of a single layer of colour. So what happens is that every colour is always a question of layers of colour, more or less transparent. Let's think, furthermore, of the use of this procedure also for drawing or the preparation of a support - the same rule applies - and we obtain the principal method for any kind of production or product created by man.
We could stop here. It is already enough if we wanted to say something about technique. It's not really that useful, on the other hand, entering into the merits of an artist's technique for the purposes of reading, if not to transmute this technique into an occasion for tale and fabula.
I'll return for a moment and take up again the question of the importance of painting in the gesture, when we affirm in the case of Neysa that her paintings are free from ideologies and commonplaces.
Let's consider abstract expressionism. A lot has been written about the production of what goes under that name, and which certainly has had the merit in these last fifty years of acting as a counter-balance to the other current of modern art which is behaviourism and popular art. Abstract expressionism has given some fruits here and there, thanks above all to those precursors that had conducted that massive elaboration of ideas around figuration and the un-figurable, in particular Austro-Hungarian artists. In other words, in my opinion abstract expressionism felt that it had to detach itself from its expressionist precursors so as to suspend and hide the question of the figure and the image to the detriment of abstractism itself, creating a gap which in most cases always favoured that ideology which then developed straight towards the watershed between figurative and non-figurative and that ideology which then decided to make abstractism and the informal into a new nihilism.
In this sense there are many distinctions in abstract expressionism. Neysa stands out in that she is not worried about signification, the morphology of the work, the stamp. Nor even less about her liberalisation in the modern canon. So it would be enough to do something very simple: give her back her dream: "Her art is about the desire and ability to make things happen, and she succeeds at both by keeping paint and the dream of paint alive", as Jonathan Binstock points out in his introduction to this year's exhibition. I believe that these simple and precise words contain something of Neysa Grassi's manifesto.
Neysa's works are here witness to another important thing, and she does it with class: the enigma of painting can never be resolved and so it would not even be interesting to try and resolve it; she points out that this enigma continues to exist thanks to painting, it is written, a trace remains, even without giving explanations and facile solutions, in a word it makes it happen that there is always this incessant gesture of the painter, who, with sobriety, finishes something to read every day.
Sick Rose, 1999, is a canvas of 16x16 inches, that is, 40x40 centimetres, and reflects the title. Is it a sick rose or withered rose? Or live rose? We know that in Italian the genre of portraying objects is normally called "natura morta", while in English the same genre is called "still alive" or "still life", which in Italian is translated literally as "ancora vivo" or "ancora in vita". All this is curious, because for each one it must be a question of life, and therefore live nature.
This rose harks back to how things are disposed, their rhythm, their dispositions, ordering, tranquillity, with all the artistry necessary for reaching a disposition of life and writing. And where do these combinations, these dispositions, lead, if not towards quality? If not to the quality of painting? This rose seems sick, but carries with it a not-irrelevant detail, which can be noticed constantly in each of the other works: the colour in this work is never approachable and recognisable, it remains above all untouchable. And invisible. Peculiarity of colour, after all. It forms part of a theorem of its own, untouchability. To the detriment of light? It would seem so, but no, it highlights it.
Neysa has no fear in her works, and she puts us up against a paradox: she insists on saying that her work has to do with feel, with touch. To understand this better, I would place this other statement of hers next to it: "where I end and you begin", which is as if she were saying: I need to take the question of touch to the extreme, manual skill, closeness to my work, but only up to a certain point. From that point on, anyone who looks at the work will be forced to admit the presence of this unapproachable and untouchable colour; after all, the most you can do with a rose is admire it or brush it with your hand. And with Blue rose what happens is that she generously gives us an idea of how the slanting light, very special, which is never full, which does not overwhelm the painting, intervenes not to illuminate us or bathe the picture with light, but to announce the invention of the blue rose, in a sort of absolute preview. Let's remember the Renaissance criterion when the artists' studios had to deal with a new order: keep invention and art together, the machine and technique, without ever splitting this duality, as an essential issue in each production system: for something to remain, technique is not enough; you also need the machine.
Neysa's colour can just about be named, as it is right that it should be, as happens for the red that is just barely glimpsed in the work. Dissolver of sugar, which through the figure of the knot, of loosening, opening, with the light background at the centre of the canvas. In this work there is something that is not resolved or dissolved, that remains indissoluble, I say this perhaps going against what the title seems to suggest. Here we do not assist at any dissolution, the knot is not loosened, but remains in the opening, there remains the open question, reinforced by constant use of chiaroscuro. This is again a theorematic work! Again a work that has a centre; like all Neysa's works, it lays itself out and articulates around a centre, a focal point, so it also has its chrism of perspective, rigorously perspective, where chiaroscuro intervenes to trace in the surface the design of the knot.
Yet again, a knot that is not unloosened.