Rogomelec

Painted in 1978, Rogomelec is an arresting example of Leonor Fini’s fantastical visions. Within a barren land stands a king dressed in an elaborate coat of peacock feathers. Light glints off his dazzling crown. He is magisterial, imperious, royalty incarnated in lustrous pigment. The painting shares its title with that of Fini’s third novella, first published in 1979; Rogomelec means ‘he who stones the king’. Written in the first person, the story tells of a traveller in a faraway land, home to a decaying monastery-turned-sanatorium, where strangely scented monks proffer hallucinatory herbal cures, and culminates in an unsettling discovery during a ritual celebration of the king, the subject of the present work. In both text and paint, Fini was occupied by similar themes, including the mutability of gender and questions of power, cruelty, and eroticism.
Born in Buenos Aires, Fini moved to Trieste as a young child. There, she developed an early interest in Renaissance and Mannerist art – the latter’s influence is evident in the elongated figure of Rogomelec – as well as Gustav Klimt, the Pre-Raphaelites, and the German and French Romantics, artists she discovered while riffling through her uncle’s extensive library. Largely self-taught, she moved to Paris in 1931 where she befriended René Magritte, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, and Victor Brauner. Through them, Fini grew close with the Surrealists and participated in their exhibitions, including Peggy Guggenheim’s landmark show 31 Women at her eponymous gallery on West 57 Street in New York. Yet despite aesthetic affiliations and shared theoretical concerns, Fini never identified as a Surrealist artist herself, preferring instead to chart her own course. ‘I always imagined that I would have a life very different from the one imagined for me,’ she said, ‘but I understood from a very early time that I would have to revolt in order to make that life’ (quoted in W. Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Moment, London, 1985, p. 86).
Like her contemporaries, Fini’s paintings too seem wrenched from a dream and across her canvases she sought to reconcile the world that she experienced with that of her subconscious mind. To represent her phantasmagorias, Fini employed small, painstaking brushstrokes to build up smooth pictorial surfaces. Awash in detail, the resulting images are mesmerising. In Rogomelec, every iridescent feather of the protagonist’s cape has been carefully rendered, an effort that would have demanded exceptional control and manual precision. The king’s clothing is meticulous, and the drama of the ensemble was likely influenced by Fini’s work outside the studio. She created sets and costumes for the ballet, stage, and film; collaborated on performances for the Paris Opéra and La Scala in Milan; and conceived of the bottle and packaging for Elsa Schiaparelli’s perfume, Shocking. Such aesthetic awareness necessarily impacted her artistic output and her paintings possess an appreciation for tactility and mise en scène, as exemplified in the present work for which Fini also designed the frame.
Although Rogomelec features a male protagonist, Fini, as Whitney Chadwick notes, ‘refused to accept a world defined by male institutions’ (ibid.). She used dreamlike imagery to upend convention, basing her motifs off both the reality she witnessed and her own invented interiority. Hers, observes Chadwick, was one of ‘magical enchantment, profound feeling, psychological complications’ that drew inspiration from the long history of Western art (quoted in ‘Whitney Chadwick Discusses the Art of Leonor Fini’, Weinstein Gallery, 1 November 2015, www.weinstein.com, accessed on 20 August 2024). By entering Fini’s aesthetic imaginary, one agrees to abandon preconceived beliefs governing social convention, gender, and even gravity. These are feverish realms that embrace incongruity and dissent, where mutation is desirable and the phantoms are hardly unreal.