Lo sguardo ritratto. Thomas Bernhard tra parola e immagine

The book "Lo sguardo ritratto" focuses on one of the densest novels by Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989), Old Masters. Comedy (Alte Meister, Komödie), 1986. Around the desecrating gaze, the eye that searches for failure, of the protagonist of Bernhard's novel, a constellation of motifs tightens: the relationship between existence and death, between art and life, between love and hate, between artifice and nature, between truth and lies or between original and false, between comedy and tragedy. The reflections carried out by Bernhard in Old Masters also involve the dimension of ékphrasis ex negativo, the problem of the auraticity of art in the world of technical reproducibility, the polarity between totality and fragment, and the dialectic between perfection and failure. These are just some of the theoretical knots woven into the plot of Bernhard's novel, which is to be understood as a global reflection on art, or rather as an "apology-affossession" of the artistic dimension. But above all, at the center of this work of Bernhard's, dedicated in the trilogy of the arts to figurative images, is the device of vision: a geometry of gazes, the pendant of that orchestration of writing on three points that constitutes the most proper seal of Bernhard's narration.