The Night had Vanished’: Vorticism and the Volcano - Volcano: Nature and Culture - page 150

he later wrote.¹4 Atl had published his topic Symphonies of
Popocatépetl in 1921, writing of 'the powerful influence through-
out my life [of the volcano] . . . From the top of the mountain I
have seen the world as a marvellous spectacle without reluctance,
profoundly, intensely.' By an extraordinary stroke of good luck and
opportunism, he was also able to buy the piece of farmland in
which, in February 1943, a volcano had suddenly arisen, spew-
ing ash and lava, and growing within a year to around 300 metres
in height. Useless now to the farmer, Atl gave the new volcano
- Parícutin, named after its local village - a new role as an artist's
model. Dr Atl was a paradox: simple and profound, artist and
activist, revolutionary and conservative. 'I was not born a painter,'
he said, 'I was born a walker and walking has led me to love nature
and the desire to represent it.'
The Neapolitan artist Renato Barisani ( b. 1918) was in the
1950s a member of the Movimento Arte Concreta of Milan, one
of a number of fragile and often short-lived artistic groupings
that ebbed and flowed in Italy in the post-war years. He has
frequently taken Vesuvius and other Italian volcanoes as his
subject-matter, creating images with sand, shells and other
objects, which mix with wide fields of colour to form bright and
burning, or quietly brooding compositions. His Stromboli (1958)
is composed of lava dust from the island, with a central knob of
volcanic rock, set like a jewel. While it is a curiously sombre
piece for so active a volcano as Stromboli, it evokes both a sense
of elevation in the viewer, rising high above the island, and the
excitement of discovery, as of finding a bright stone or shell on
a deserted beach. Thus, the sense of scale is first confused and
then abolished.
Writing about the place of emotion in his work, the play-
wright Eugene Ionesco (1909-1994) used the volcano as a
metaphor not for destruction, but for intense creativity:

Renato Barisani,
Stromboli , 1958, mixed
media, with lava dust,
stone and oil on canvas.

For the moment, I exist. Passions slumber in me that might
explode, and then be held in check again. Jets of rage or
joy lie within me, ready to burst and catch fire. In myself
I am energy, fire, lava. I am a volcano. Most often, I am half