WE ABANDON THE USE OF KNOWN ART
Routes through Italian art from post-war to the present day Elena Forin
ARTURO VERMI Untitled, 1968 (detail) Mixed technique on wood 12 1/2 x 8 3/4 in (32 x 22 cm)
Piero Atchugarry has chosen to display a brief synopsis of Italian art alongside works by Eugenio Espinoza, Pablo Atchugarry, and Louise Nevelson in the sizeable space of Miami’s Atchugarry Art Center. When talking about this project—which he has been working on through the foundation and galleries— he told me how important it was for him to connect three worlds that differ in terms of geography, culture, and politics through the search for space, material, and visual experience; three worlds that have often sought each other out and been brought together: Latin America, the United States, and Europe. Used to a life lived constantly between these three settings, Piero has assembled works by an extremely diverse group of Italian artists that, when looked at as a whole, allow for a reconstruction of some of the dynamics affecting art in the peninsula since the end of the Second World War. These profoundly different visual approaches offer an interesting counterpoint to the other projects in this gallery exhibition cycle: space, the main protagonist of the research on display, reveals some of its infinite and most extraordinary possibilities in these three exhibitions. There is no doubt that the starting point for We Abandon the Use of Known Art is the climate of the post-war period: a clean break produced by the conflict, both in Italy and elsewhere. Proportions, distances, actions, strategies, and interventions were broadened out to include unthinkable interests, expanding geography and contacts, as well as the field of action and its methods. Nothing was the same as it had been before, and, although this is definitely not the place to explore the complexity of the impact generated by those clashes on culture and society across the world, it is clear that, in addition to the human factor that emerged dramatically, the war completely changed the conception and representation of space. The environment—destroyed and torn up by death— and the human gaze—profoundly tested by exterminations and attacks on dignity—united in a single vision and gave life to the wide-ranging overview that was Arte Informale. Spirals by Roberto Crippa (1921-1972), for example, can be found within this scheme, describing a world of continuous movements in which the sign shakes up the surface of elliptical circuits: patches of color, as in the painting on display here, and a continuous tangling of structures that break through the space are the absolutes of a linguistic code destined to develop over the coming years, confirming the idea of a painting focused on the concept of evolution through this change. This takes us to 1951, the year of Lucio Fontana’s (1899-1968) Technical Manifesto of Spatialism, which Crippa had also supported: “We abandon the use of known art forms,” said Fontana during a speech given at the Milan Triennale,1 “and turn to the development of an art based on the unity of time and space [...] We conceive of the synthesis as a sum of physical elements: color, sound, movement, space, completing a unity of idea and matter. Color, the element of space; sound, the element of time; and movement, which develops in space and time. These are the fundamental forms of the new art.” It was also in 1951 that Fontana collaborated with L’Age d’Or, the gallery-bookshop founded the previous year in Rome by Piero Dorazio (1927-2005), Achille Perilli (1927), and Mino Guerrini (19271 Speech delivered by Lucio Fontana at the conference for the Milan Triennale, 1951, in Lucio Fontana, Manifesti Scritti Interviste, ed. Angela Sanna, ABSCONDITA, Milan, 2015, p. 47).
13
