SEBOO MIGONE
At Woods’ Edge

by Alan Jones


Every artist establishes intuitively his own chart of point-by-point navigation out of predisposition, the ingredients of chance, inspired encounter, circumstance. This progression toward an etiquette of destiny, with all its twists and turns, shapes itself into something the painter becomes: his job, to paraphrase Ezra Pound, being nothing less than to ‘cultivate his virtue’, to be understood in the medieval sense – his essence.

The Bermuda Triangle of Surrealism, those comings and goings which were to make visible the beaten path of a generation of adherents, lay between three points: Paris, London, New York, a migratory route for artists from Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Andre Breton to Leonora Carrington, Key Sage and so many others. Each individual artist comes to locate his own triangulation, aesthetically speaking, and in this Seboo Migone is no exception.

Tuscany, London, New York: the Italian-born, London-based painter has been granted by the Muses a particularly fortuitous itinerary. The word ‘curriculum’ could perhaps just as easily stand in place of ‘itinerary’, as the lessons learned earliest are always deepest and most enduring, and in the case of Seboo Migone these were absorbed in the Val d’Orcia, that enchanted land stretch southward from Siena. Superimposed onto this topography was a precocious affinity for the gestural abstraction of the New York School of painters who arose out of Surrealism – DeKooning first and foremost, Gorky, early Pollock, Kline.

But it is at this point in the chronology that there occurs what I have always believed to be the most intriguing twist in the tale of Seboo's Migone’s peregrinations: the addition of the third essential element in his formation, and that is his decision to pursue his study of painting not in New York or Italy, but rather in London, thus coming into contact with a rigorous set of strictures by which to balance innate Tuscanyty with his adopted Ab-Ex allegiances. The apprenticeship in the high halls of British painting provided Seboo Migone with a set of measures by which he could weight patrimony and proclivity, in order to arrive at a procedural discipline which is, if one looks, apparent in all his decision-making on canvas.

I first encountered the work of Seboo Migone in an exhibition at Casteluccio di Pienza which had been organized by that mythic impresario of the Italian avant-garde, the late Plinio De Martiis, pioneer promoter of artists from Cy Twombly and Jannis Kounellis to Tano Festa and Mario Schifano. Standing before the paintings of Seboo Migone that day I was at once struck by the highly accurate translation from the actual mood of early summer landscape beyond and the testimony rendered on the canvas: the murmuring undercurrent of some unspoken crepuscular anxiety lurking in the stillness of the receding hours of the day, the exact humidity, temperature, the single simple lamp mutely glowing from a house all but hidden against the darkening profile of a hill of cypress trees. It was the suspension of promise, the freeze-frame of Giorgone’s ‘Tempesta’, wherein rather than depiction, the painter stalks the embodiment of the fleeting moment itself.

If for De Chirico the metaphysical touchstone was a deserted city square, or for Warhol an airport lounge, the locus of Seboo Migone’s recurrent reverie would be that specifically Tuscan landscape which he seems to carry within him as the geographic precincts in which the drama his imaginative process is played out.

Mentor of Gorky and DeKonning, the painter John Graham launched the term ‘Minimalism’ in the early Thirties, calling it ‘the line made when one passage of pigment is laid against another one’. This ‘boundary’ between day and night, between the ration and the subconscious underpins the inner world of Seboo Migone’s paintings. Paintings can possess temperatures and humidities, even visual aromas. ‘I can always smell a painter’, Malcolm Morley once told Seboo Migone: salt brine for Tuscan bay. The qualities in the light and air of Umbria are just as essential to understand Piero della Francesca as is the countryside of Aix en Provence for Paul Cezanne.

By car from Chianciano to Casteluccio di Pienza, I couldn’t keep from declaring however lamely: ‘What a beautiful landscape!’. To which the jovial driver replied: ‘Yes, we’ve been working on it for three thousand years’.

To seek out the immaculate conception of Modernism we might do well to re-read the ‘Illuminations’ of Arthur Rimbaud. Within its sequence of serene hallucinations one phrase occurs again and again: ‘a la lisiere des bois’, at woods’ edge, there where a narrow road passes along the woods to one hand and the open fields to the other, the demarcation between dark and light, chiaro-scuro, chaos and geometry, the wild and the cultivated. Along with Rimbaud, Virgil’s ‘Georgics’ would be another good companion when venturing into Seboo Migone’s terrain.

Henry David Thoreau could have been speaking of Seboo Migone’s paintings when he described himself in 1842 as one who loves ‘forest as well as field, darkness as well as light’. Seboo Migone, no matter how far he may go from it, like Klee or Nolde, keeps the landscape as his starting point and prime field of endeavor.

I have seen the bright vista from the doorway of Seboo Migone’s darkened studio, and I have also seen him paint enormous backdrops for his daughters’ local school plays, which, like those commissioned by the Ballet Russes, merited preservation; I have seen local farmers at a midsummer festivity approach his table and tip their hats; I have seen New York gallery-goers gaze quizzically at his paintings at Earl McGrath’s on 57 Street, straining their inner ears perhaps to hear the first quiet flirtations of melody as the nightingale begins her endless variations, as the moon comes up at woods’ edge.