Introduction: 'Country: "It's Earth"' Special Issue

In the Museo Carlo Bilotti, at the Villa Borghese in Rome, through the second half of this year (4 July-2 November 2014), there is an exhibition entitled 'Dreamings: Aboriginal Australian Art meets de Chirico,' curated by Ian McLean and Erica Izett from the Sordello Missana collection of recent paintings from the Western and Central Desert regions of Australia, housed alongside the Museo's permanent collection of work by the Italian metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico. The exhibition brings together works representing the mysteries and intensities of space, place and location from (at least) two profoundly different aesthetic, spiritual, cultural and curatorial traditions. All the paintings in the exhibition are compelling in themselves, but as a collection or exhibition they bear a further point of interest in the ways they suggest a connection between the physical worlds in which they were produced and those where they rest and from whence they have been drawn for this exhibition. I want to draw on a number of claims made about this exhibition by curator Ian McLean. First, he suggests some plausible material points of connection between the landscapes of central Australia and the Mediterranean:. . . one can speculate that the tastes of [collectors] Mr Sordello and Mr Missana, shaped by their upbringing in the Mediterranean, resonated with the visual poetry of Western Desert painting. The Mediterranean coastline around Antibes was a favourite spot of early modernists such as Matisse and Picasso, whose love of the energy and rhythms of African and Oceanic Indigenous art, as well as the Mediterranean climate and landscape, irrevocably changed the look of Western art. Like Matisse and Picasso, the Western Desert painters respond to their habitat-one also characterized by sun, light and colour-and paint with an intuitive confidence. They have an enviable feeling for the expressive possibilities of paint and its formal properties as a poetic visual language. This taste for colour and high energy in painting is very evident in the Sordello Missana collection. (140)Further, in McLean's view, the diverse cultural traditions of Indigenous artists from Australia and those of artists from Mediterranean locations over the past century have been 'swept . . . into a common trajectory' by 'the global reach of modernity' in dramatic and often violent ways, with modernity working to sever tradition (143) at both sites. The response of all these artists to place or location, to the 'Country' they represent, as well as wherever they are exhibited and viewed, thus also speaks to the diverse shifts of temporality, history and the matter of politics in all its forms. The third claim is that exhibiting this collection of Western Desert art alongside paintings by de Chirico highlights the metaphysical dimension of both bodies of work, to quote Ian McLean again: '[The exhibition brings together] the work of two metaphysical systems. Giorgio de Chirico is the master of modern western metaphysical art. Aboriginal art is also deeply metaphysical. Its every empirical encounter with the world opens onto a much larger cosmological reality, called Dreaming' (142). The dialogue that the 'Dreamings' exhibition stages between the Indigenous artists and De Chirico is further mediated by the work of Imants Tillers, who, '[f]or over thirty years,' according to McLean 'has been developing a conversation with both the paintings of De Chirico and contemporary Western Desert artists' (142) in his densely appropriative and highly verbal art. Tillers approaches the 'Country' in which he works explicitly through particular artworks, including a number from this exhibition. His sense of the metaphysical heft of the European and Indigenous Australian art with which he works is at once bound to the earth, sky and culture of both traditions, and through this to an apprehension of the density and layeredness of both, expressed in part through the characteristic breaking up of the plane of his works into a grid of smaller fragments, each painted individually. …