Light does not only serve to see: the secret of shadow between Caravaggio and Turner.
Light does not only serve to see.
It seems a simple, almost obvious statement, and yet much of the history of painting could be told starting precisely from this idea. Light shows things, certainly, but at the same moment it transforms them. It decides what we can see and what must remain in shadow. It draws near, moves away, reveals, hides.
When I paint, I never think of light as a decorative element. For me light is a presence.
I learned to know it very early, before the sea of Portopalo. Those who grew up by the sea know that light is never the same. It changes continuously. In the morning it can be sharp, almost cruel. In the afternoon it becomes heavier. At sunset it seems to hold things back for a few moments before letting them disappear.
As a child I did not know, of course, that all this would have to do with painting. I looked.
And perhaps a painter begins exactly like this: looking at something without yet knowing why he will keep remembering it all his life.
Over the years I understood that light does not simply illuminate a face, a wall, a door or the sea. It questions them.
Let us think of Caravaggio. His light does not enter the scene to allow us to see better. It arrives like an event. It touches a face, a hand, a body, and suddenly that detail becomes necessary. Everything that remains around it can sink into darkness.
Turner makes almost the opposite movement. Light no longer strikes things: it seems to dissolve them. The sea, the sky, the ships and the horizon slowly lose their boundaries. What remains is an atmosphere in which we no longer know for certain where the world ends and where light begins.
They are two very different ways of painting, but both remind us of something: light is not neutral.
It is the same in life.
There are moments in which we suddenly see something that had always been in front of us. A person, a place, even a familiar object take on a different meaning. They have not changed. What has changed is the light with which we look at them.
Perhaps this is why, as the years have gone by, my relationship with painting has changed.
For a long time I painted the figure. The body was at the centre of the scene. I needed its presence, the gesture, the flesh, the gaze.
Then, slowly, something shifted.
I began to be more interested in what remains when the figure is no longer there: a room, a half-open door, a wall, a trace, a strip of sea.
And it is precisely then that light became even more important.
When we remove the figure, in fact, we do not necessarily remove the presence.
A blade of light crossing an empty room can tell of someone we do not see. An illuminated door can suggest a waiting. A wall struck by the sun can hold a memory. An almost erased horizon can make us feel a distance.
Painting must not always explain.
On the contrary, I believe that one of its deepest tasks is to leave something without an answer.
We live in a time that claims to show us everything. Images come continuously before our eyes. They are bright, immediate, perfect. They tell us where to look and often even what we should feel.
Painting can do the opposite.
It can ask for time.
It can leave a zone of shadow.
It can allow us not to understand immediately.
When, in front of a painting, we wonder where that light comes from, what lies beyond a door or why part of the canvas has remained almost in darkness, in that moment we have already begun to take part in the work.
We are no longer simply spectators.
We are looking.
And it is an enormous difference.
Today I look for a light that does not erase the darkness. I need both. A completely illuminated canvas risks having no more secrets; a completely dark canvas risks granting us no possibility.
Between these two conditions there is a subtle space.
It is there that I am interested in painting.
Karam Sebastiano Cannarella