Near and Far: The “COVID, Uncovered” Project

I’ve been fascinated and moved by the “COVID, Uncovered” Project, based in Italy, as that beleaguered nation has endured tragedy upon tragedy amidst national lockdown.  Initiated by the well- known illustrator Emiliano Ponzi, the project seeks to make possible classical live model drawing, at a time when direct physical proximity between artist and model is prohibited for public health reasons. A male and female model are viewed and sketched remotely through digital video links by far-flung artists in their individual studios, who in turn auction the resulting works on line to raise funds for the Italian Red Cross.

(Ponzi explains the project in a short video.) 

Direct sketching from life models had been foundational to studio art education for generations, although the practice has in many quarters fallen off, to the detriment, many would argue, of the integrity and richness of painting and art more broadly.  This point is advanced quite eloquently by the marvelous painter Paul Resika (my father’s first cousin) in a recent, spellbinding video clip from Jack of Diamond Productions/Bookstein Projects, shot in his studio.

By working with a live model, the gaze constantly moving back and forth between a tangible person’s body and the sketchbook or canvas on which the charcoal stick or brush moves, the artist learns to engage with “near and far,’ seeing "what the camera cannot get." All this, Resika insists, is foundational to serious painting.

What kind of live drawing or painting, then, can be pursued when the camera is inserted into the equation, and a screen is interposed between model and artist?  A flat screen eradicates “near and far,” in Resika’s sense: the model’s head, torso, and limbs are the same distance from the artist’s eye and the challenge of reducing dimensionality and sensed physical presence to the pad or canvas is  undercut.

Nonetheless, the resulting images are still pretty interesting. (See the list of auctioned images: here )  The whole project works, I think, because the organizers introduced a new kind of “far-ness” into the relationship between model and artist. Each model is asked to wear, over the course of a sitting, several different kinds of facial protection devices, from clumsy gas masks to surgical masks. The challenge for each artist in a sense is to re-humanize the essence of each sitter, to capture each body’s distinctive curves, areas of tension, tautness, and relaxed flesh, to bring precisely back to us what is obscured by the face mask.

Along the way, I suggest, each model’s body comes to signify more than just a solitary individual. We are in a sense getting a glimpse of the Italian national body, which these days is invariably covered, hidden away, fearful, half-suffocated with anxiety, under siege by a ubiquitous, invisible enemy. (A condition which so many of us in the United States are now learning first hand, as our country becomes the global epicenter of the pandemic)  The job of each artist then, is to find a way to “uncover” this besieged national body, to allow bodies once more again to breathe free, even though, paradoxically, we can only encounter, for the moment, this art, and these subjects, through the mediation of the digital screen.

It is fascinating, in this light, that Ponzi writes of the Covid, Uncovered Project as "exorcising" the virus. The demonic power of SARS-COV-2, it would appear, lies not solely in the physical illness and death it causes, but more pervasively, and perversely, in the total scenario of fear it engenders, as citizens of the world find themselves cowering in corners, necessarily hiding themselves and their bodily beings away from another. The Covid, Uncovered Project seeks, it would appear, to demystify the virus, first by explicitly representing the terrifying masks, which separate us from one another,  and then "unmasking" the virus's terrifying power, by resolutely bringing  bodies, and souls, back into the light.  Out of far-ness, we regain our lost sense of nearness. Relations of simultaneous presence and absence, foundational to the full experience of being human, are reintroduced, and thus art, and humanity, once more have a fighting chance.

Note: Emiliano Ponzi has kept an evocative diary, for the Washington Post  integrating text and drawings, documenting life in Italy during this past heart-breaking month.