After Robert Chiarito read those lines from William Finnegan’s memoir of surfing as a way of life, he copied and kept them, though he was not an initiate of the surfing world. Substitute “making paintings” for “chasing waves” and they describe his engagement with his art.

     They are not the only element in Finnegan’s book that hits the mark with Chiarito’s work. Surfing “in a dedicated way” means grappling with a complex dynamic of water, wind, weather, and topography. It demands an approach that is both loose and precise. It often brings the urge to paddle deeper. “To learn any new spot in surfing,” writes Finnegan of his first attempt at surfing a confusing arc of reefs, “you first bring to bear your knowledge of other breaks – all the other waves you’ve learned to read closely.” The art in this exhibition represents, for Chiarito, a “new spot” – more reductive, more symbolic, less overtly expressionistic than anything he’s ever done. He brings to bear a deep knowledge of art, decades of painting and teaching experience, and a desire to flounder a bit.    

     Hence what the artist calls his “vocabulary cards.” Chiarito began this work with dozens of sketches on small note cards. Most involve his perennial theme of male and female bodies intermingling in playful, absurd, and rather bawdy ways. The sketches show phallus/breast figures, abstracted, layered, and/or merged with arch-like motifs. Some derive from everyday observations, others from works of art, still others from his imagination. The resulting cards can be shuffled, arranged, and played with. The point is to thwart the facility that comes with long experience and to surprise himself with new syntactic forms.

     Turning to his canvas, Chiarito starts with one or more cards, enlarging the imagery, folding this form into that, losing one visual relationship and finding another. Eventually the cards fall by the wayside. Slipping back and forth between his conscious and unconscious minds, the artist stays attuned to possibilities as they emerge. Some decisions he ponders; others he makes on the fly. Occasionally he thinks he is doing one thing but turns out to be doing something else. “I can never accomplish what I want,” Chiarito quotes the painter Richard Diebenkorn on the subject of this dance between discovery and volition, “only what I would have wanted had I thought of it beforehand.”

     At one level, the resulting paintings are riveted to art’s formal elements. Using borders and quasi-symmetrical centralized imagery, Chiarito visually acknowledges the paintings’ square or rectangular formats. The borders frame or are contiguous with substanceless forms – as in Ortigia – or chunks of color – red and white in Selinunte, yellow and blue in Lausanne Jealous. Where one chunk meets another is, de facto, a line. There are also drawn lines. These tend to change colors as they snake among or intrude upon forms, subverting the usual cues about near and far. In Kasbah and Pink Line, they mingle in dizzying faux-perspectives. In Salampasu and Let Me Be Frank, they incline to the biomorphic. Ambiguous figure-ground relationships hold the paintings in tension. Space is shallow, shifting, and stratified.

     Abstract though they are, the paintings are also bound up with art with which the artist feels a visceral connection. Among them is one he happened upon last summer at San Francisco’s de Young Museum: an 800-year-old Dogon sculpture with both a phallus and breasts. It stunned him.

     Such hermaphroditic figures derive from the creation myth of the Dogon people of the West African country of Mali. In one key episode of that myth, the god Amma models in clay both a phallus and womb and flings them to the ground. One becomes a man and the other a woman. Amma then draws two outlines on the earth, again male and female, one atop the other. The man stretches out on these outlines and assumes both as his own. The woman does the same. Thus man acquires a female essence, located in the foreskin, and woman a male essence, located in the clitoris. For the Dogon, every human being is endowed with two souls, equally potent.

     Chiarito associates the de Young’s Dogon sculpture with Carl Jung’s anima (femaleness in the male) and animus (maleness in the female), a concept the artist has long evoked in connection with his male/female imagery. The anima/animus archetype binds the personal unconscious with what Jung terms the collective unconscious. The latter is the source of primordial and universal symbols expressive of humanity’s shared ancestral experience. Both Jung’s thinking and that of the Dogon reverberate in Chiarito’s integration of male and female bodies, most obviously in canvases like Sicilia, Selinunte, and Bamako. Visually the work is indebted to the sensuality, the distilled form, and the rough sophistication of Dogon sculpture.

     The title of one, Bamako, signals its Malian connections. (Bamako is the capital of Mali.) The painting Salampasu, meanwhile, takes its name from a people in the Democratic Republic of Congo known for their stylized masks. Kasbah evokes the mazes of narrow streets at the core of old North African cities. Other titles refer to Italy, where Chiarito spends several months every year. Selinunte and Ortigia are ancient Greek cities in Sicily, now important, and, for Chiarito, heart-stirring, archeological sites. Porta Etrusca (The Etruscan Gate) recalls a 3rd century BCE arch in the walled Umbrian town of Perugia, once ruled by the Etruscans. Although the artist names his paintings after finishing them, such titles can’t help but suggest historical and geographical frameworks.

     Not only the titles but also the imagery refers to time-worn built environments. In Kasbah and Source, forms that can’t quite be pinned down as phallus/breasts could be read as tangles of passageways, arches, and walls. In Ortigia, Sicilia, and Let Me Be Frank, reductive and layered markings conjure the graffiti that, since ancient times, has enlivened walls around the Mediterranean.

     So too do the palimpsests that are Chiarito’s collages. Among them are those in the recent series Anima Sarda (Sardinian Soul), inspired by the logo for Birra Ichnusa, Sardinia’s time-honored and still popular brand of lager. It features a red St. George’s cross and a quartet of black and white bandaged Moors, both of which appear on the island’s flag and conjure its history. The beer company adds the phrase that Chiarito has borrowed: Anima Sarda. Scraps of Birra Ichnusa labels and cartons show up in some of the eighteen collages in this series, alongside other bits of paper and cardboard, twine, a lira note or two, fragments of ads featuring Italian sexpots, and – once again – the phallus/breast, wall/arch forms from the vocabulary cards. The latter are most evident in collages Nos. 1 through 4. As the artist continued, the collages became more graphically complex. Responding intuitively to process and forms, he caught new visual ideas that propelled him away from the specifics of the vocabulary cards and the beer logo. By the time he got to Nos. 17 and 18, his imagery had moved elsewhere. From the collages then emerged the triptych oil on canvas Sicilian Trilogy. To pore over this work in the order of its creation is observe the artist’s process as if in slow motion.

     Other associations could be made with Chiarito’s art. The work of the modernist abstractionists Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, and Stuart Davis is relevant as are Oceanic and Cycladic figures. But to parse them feels pointless: what Finnegan writes about surfing – “Nearly all of what happens in the water is ineffable – language is no help” – applies here too. To quote another writer, Rainer Maria Rilke, Chiarito’s influences have “turned to blood […], to glance, to gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from [the artist himself].”

     Steeped in art from multiple cultures and engaged in work that is artisanal and profoundly his own, Robert Chiarito bears witness, above all, to painting as a humanistic practice. His canvases’ archetypal symbolism records the consonance between a human mind and a human hand — and between many minds, ancient and modern, and that same hand.

Patricia Albers

Author of Joan Mitchell, Lady Painter: A Life