Antithesis to Futurism Analytical essay on head and mouth in Enrico Baj Patricio Alvarez Aragón
Since always I have concentrated my painting on the motifs of the head and the mouth, I always thought that I could manage to provide my mouths with all the beauty of Monet's landscapes. Although every time I realize that I have not got it ... I think it is due to the lack of color, I should have been able to shape the interior of the mouth and its magnificent colors. Francis Bacon
Perhaps the greatest achievement and contribution of E. Baj together with Sergio Dangelo (Milan, 1932) was the founding of the Nuclear Movement in 1950, since it changed the model and paradigm to be followed in contemporary Italian Art, it meant the definitive rupture and the overcoming of the historical avant-garde of futurism that in 1909 canonized "the new modernity", the industrial advances and the social dynamism, always following its ultraistic and "apparently anarchist" discourse where it matters nothing more than to reach the "plus ultra" of everything conventional without consider the magnitude of the circumstances. On these ideas, Baj not only turned “the tortilla”, but being protagonist of these horrors of the war denounced this imagery proposed by F. T. Marinetti 40 years ago, representing his work a clear antithesis and refoundation of the theory of contemporary Italian Art. Moreover, thanks to his intervention, he was able to rebuild the "Italian Artist" more focused on the people, more socially conscious and although "playing" to protest, gradually helped to overcome the uneasiness of neorealism by opening the gap to the youngest generations with the Movements of Povera Art and the Transvanguard between 1960 and 1970. Similar to his contemporary, Francis Bacon, who also represented but in an unconscious way, the horrors and the existential tragedy of man. It is the use of the motifs of the head and the mouth, two iconographic motifs that in both cases are repeated to satiety to become an inherent component to the work of both artists. I call it “Apology to the displeasure” of having existed in that historical moment full of spiritual death and uneasiness. An awareness that gave another great contribution within the "imitative arts", that is, a preference for these motives of the head and the mouth above the eye, represented as the main motif within the most symbolic movements more than two Centuries, gaining its pulse and thus entering the select group of conceptual motifs, leaving to the side to give way to taste and palate as new ways of appreciating art and life. This is another of the great contributions of Baj, the reunion with man and the taste of what leaves existence and its materiality that despite the ugliness of its moment still retained a singular aesthetic and carnival, in the purest fellinian style the only place that exists is the temporal abyss where acts take place. Enrico Baj (1924-2003) could for many reasons be considered as one of the most exemplary artists of "the new Italian avant-garde of 1950" and unavoidable figure of the European Experimental Movements of the mid-twentieth century. It is for this reason that the members of CAPA we pay a well-deserved tribute and we celebrate its plastic explicitness in the Museum CoBrA of Amstelveen.