Among the hundreds of characters portrayed by Tullio Pericoli, Samuel Beckett is undoubtedly one of the most recurring, having been depicted by the artist (born in Colli del Tronto in 1936) in at least eighty versions. In addition to playing a central role in one of the most significant books dedicated by Pericoli to the art of portraiture (“L’anima del volto”, 2005), some of his variations on the Beckett theme have been exhibited in the most significant cities in the writer’s life, namely Dublin (“Drawings, watercolours, and paintings of Samuel Beckett by Tullio Pericoli”, 2007) and Paris (“Samuel Beckett, le plus beau visage du XXe siècle”, 2019).
Yet, as the artist has clarified, his figurative preference for Beckett is not directly proportional to his literary one: he has never placed the work of the Irish playwright at the pinnacle of his personal pantheon, finding it poetically less akin than that of Robert Louis Stevenson, for example, or Italo Calvino. Rather, what Pericoli finds most stimulating about the author of “Waiting for Godot” is his face (the most beautiful of the 20th century, in his opinion), furrowed as it is by a tangle of “speaking” wrinkles, as if it were “a mesh made of his words”. Looking at him, in fact, Beckett gives Pericoli the impression “that he has carved his face out by writing, that his writing continues on the surface of his face, as if his words were drawing his features”.
But how can a face tell the life and works of its owner, be a sort of living biography? According to Pericoli, this is possible because the interiority of people has a strength that can challenge the boundaries of forms and languages, producing ideal cracks through which fragments of reality shine through, hidden beneath appearances. If the observer is a figurative artist, these fragments of hidden life enter into a relationship with the intrinsic subjectivity of their points and lines, which Pericoli (following in the footsteps of Paul Klee and Saul Steinberg) considers vital elements in themselves, endowed with an autonomous existence, thus giving rise to a potentially infinite combinatorial game. A composite exercise (where the thoughts of the eyes, the thoughts of the mind and the thoughts of the hand are mixed, using terminology dear to the artist) that investigates the dynamics between above and below, inside and outside, before and after, part and whole: always tension-filled elements that disrupt the purely physical dimension of the object-face, which becomes the terrain of research that, far from seeking a Platonic “essence” of the thing, aims to find ever-changing relationships, discover unexpected affinities, and constantly move between archaeological excavation, unauthorized appropriation and arbitrary attribution. It is both true and false to assert that Pericoli always remains within the realm of anatomical fidelity in relation to the subjects he portrays.
In this sense, the yellow eyes assigned to Beckett are revealing, and a longstanding anecdote circulates about them. When Stephen Joyce, who contacted Pericoli to ask for permission to use a portrait he had created of his grandfather James Joyce for a philatelic issue, asked him why he had decided not to realistically reproduce Beckett’s eyes, known for the intensity of their blue colour (which Joyce-grandson knew well, as Beckett had been his wedding witness), Pericoli replied that never having had the opportunity to observe them in the black-and-white photographs he had at his disposal, he had imagined them to be yellow, like those of an eagle. An eagle is an animal inherently endowed with keen and panoramic vision, whereas Beckett, as Pericoli himself emphasized, was among those who stressed the necessity of knowing how to observe, lamenting in one of his letters how often one tends to give in to the “poorly seen.” An invitation that these “arbitrary” yellow eyes extend to us is, therefore, to cultivate the art of seeing beyond appearances, striving not to squander the enigmatic cognitive potential that our gaze possesses.