“En route vers l’Inde” was first exhibited in May 1978 at L’Attico, the gallery run by Fabio Sargentini, widely deemed to have been the most advanced in Rome at the time and reputed for shows like Jannis Kounellis’s live horse exhibit in 1969. Sargentini had traveled to India himself in 1972, organized a Tantric art show the following year, and, in 1977, promoted a collective traveling exhibit in India called “L’attico in viaggio,” to which he invited Clemente, Ontani, and Giordano Falzoni. To my knowledge, there is no photographic documentation of the L’Attico installation of the series, but two months later, the same quadreria was presented at the 38th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, where sixteen objects dotted the wall in a dynamic display, far removed from the white-cube style of hanging works discretely in a row at eye level and instead reminiscent of the experiments of the international avant-gardes: pictures were hung above, at, and below eye level, with two pieces even touching the floor. Over the course of the following thirty years, the series has been exhibited in different combinations, interspersed with always new pieces but in a consistent collage-like hanging style, reminiscent of the 1978 Venice installation and adopted by Ontani for other series, such as his 1970s photo-montage series “Tappeti volanti” (“Flying Carpets”). Recently, different versions of “En route vers l’Inde” have been shown in Italy at the Museo d'Arte Moderna in Bologna and the Museo d'Arte della città in Ravenna.

Ontani calls his impersonations tableaux vivants or quadri-non-quadri (paintings-non-paintings). Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of these works is that they combine the different media of performance, photography, and painting. In contrast to performance trends of the time, Ontani did not use photography simply to document actions but instead intended each painted photograph as a unique work of art, similar to a painted picture. “I liked the idea of a simple pose that could become a painting without being a painting and the idea that photography could allow me to express a possibility of painting that is not bound to the painting medium,” he said (Ontani 2007b). And by that he meant the possibility of constructing fictions and visual narrative, as seen in the paintings by Giorgio de Chirico and his brother Alberto Savinio. One of Ontani’s poses from painted figures is Autoritratto nudo d’après Chirico (Nude Self-portrait after de Chirico, 1978), after a late self-portrait of the founder of Metaphysical painting, who represented himself seated and loin-clothed like Saint Sebastian or other such Christian martyr.

 

 

Luigi Ontani, Autoritratto nudo d'après Chirico (Nude Self-portrait after de Chirico), 1978

 

 

 

In Christian iconography, Saint Sebastian is the figure that more than any other has been associated with homoeroticism. And indeed he is one of the most frequent subjects of Ontani’s work and one with whom he identified early on as “a simulacrum of ambiguity”: both the ambiguity of androgynous beauty, as in a male youth, and the ambiguity of art (Ontani 2009). In “En route vers l’Inde” Saint Sebastian is featured as San Sebastiano JaipurAno (1976). The title’s word play, typical of Ontani and activated simply by capitalizing the letter “A,” gets lost in translation. Literally the title translates as Saint Sebastian from Jaipur, but in Italian, “ano” is both the inflexion to form the name of a country’s national, as in “americano” (American) and the word “anus,” hence the reference to homosexual pleasure, the Orientalist trope of licentiousness, and the conflation of sacred and profane. 

 

 

 

 

Ontani’s first Saint Sebastian was San Sebastiano nel bosco di Calvenzano (d’après Guido Reni) (Saint Sebastian in the Wood of Calvenzano [after Guido Reni], 1970), a life-size color photograph and a self-portrait on many levels, including an association with Guido Reni, a prominent seventeenth-century painter born in Calvenzano, a hamlet of Ontani’s hometown Vergato. Reni painted several versions of Saint Sebastian that have inspired homoerotic fantasies for their heightened sensuality. For example, in the 1949 novel Confessions of a Mask by Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, one of Ontani’s favorite authors, the protagonist’s encounter with a reproduction of Reni’s Sebastian prompts a homosexual self-awakening. And Mishima himself morbidly identified with Reni’s depiction, posing as Saint Sebastian in a celebrated 1966 photograph a few years before his 1970 ritual suicide by seppuku (self-disembowelment).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the 1970s, artists such as Lucas Samaras, Suzy Lake, and Cindy Sherman, began to embrace photographic self-performance to explore issues of sexual and social identity in their photographs. Though Ontani seems more focused on investigating cultural identities via appropriation, and his work stands out for its idiosyncratic qualities, he should nonetheless be acknowledged as a pioneering figure in the context of the 1970s. Early on and ever since, he has taken up the artistic strategy of traveling in time, space, and culture, as, in his words, a way of “undertaking a journey into identity: a sort of mirage where I use my facial and physical appearance as a simulacrum for further identities” (Ontani 2003, 43).