WE ABANDON THE USE OF KNOWN ART

ARTURO VERMI Untitled, 1968 (detail) Mixed technique on wood 12 1/2 x 8 3/4 in (32 x 22 cm) WE ABANDON THE USE OF KNOWN ART Routes through Italian art from post-war to the present day Elena Forin

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 (1927-

1 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).

1990). Dorazio—a key player in Italian and international abstraction—was, among other things, one of the figures that formed a “bridge” between Europe and the United States, where he lectured from 1953, taught continuously, and exhibited his art as part of the system of that period: on this occasion we see one of his lattices, an acrylic on paper from 1962, in which it is possible to measure the meaning of the composition that is a unique distinctive trait of his work. The lines are arranged precisely in the space, alternating with emptiness, both articulating and cutting through it; they overlap continuously until they almost completely cover the surface, which emerges only between the lines and at the edges. Like Crippa, he immediately embarked on a solid and extremely active career, and by 1962 had already participated in the Venice Biennale 2 and documenta in Kassel, 3 as well as founding and joining the various groups that sprang up during that brilliant season of Italian art. 4 Here he shows us, among other things, a direction that would later be studied and explored by many: geometry. Leaping forward in time, Curva di Peano from 1991 by Bruno Munari, Dinamica prataiola from 1995 and Dinamica triangolare bianca from 1997 by Alberto Biasi, as far as the untitled diptych by Paolo Minoli from 2003—all exhibited as part of We Abandon the Use of Known Art—bear witness to some of the possibilities explored within this great universe. Rigor, form, repetition, and the destabilizing of the equilibrium seem to be what this research has in common. Each element is thought and elaborated within the work in such a way as to create unexpected frictions and outcomes. Furthermore, Munari said in a collection of aphorisms 5 that “A rule alone is monotonous / chance alone is unsettling. / The Orientals say: / perfection is beautiful but it is stupid / you have to know it but break it. / The combination between rule and chance / is life, is art / is fantasy, is balance”. His Curve di Peano, as well as other works different from this cycle, reproduce shapes on the canvas almost by saturating the space, while the insertion of powerful two- and three-tones creates a sort of visual shock, a perceptive instability that provides a sensation of continuous movement; it is almost as if nature, even one of geometrical and regular images, has unimaginable resources and an inevitable propensity for change. We also see this in the PVC structures of Alberto Biasi (1937), which, with minimal changes of direction in the layers, break the monochromy and introduce color according to the movements of the viewer; or in the punctuated spaces of Paolo Minoli (1942-2004); or, thinking of examples from the new millennium, in the concentric colors of Ugo Rondinone (1964). The variation of color, like the repetition of a module, takes shape in a different way, offering a perspective on the dynamic of time that is always personal. Light, which from movements to colors is the absolute protagonist of these pictures, is its activator: in Minoli’s art, it results in a line that creates intense flashes on the canvas; in Biasi’s art, it is the reverberation of the relationship between the surface and what lies beyond it; for Rondinone it is the fading of color and form; while Munari mixes it with color to break perfection—and this generates new visions.

2 In 1956, 1958 and 1960, with a whole room dedicated to his work. 3 In 1959. 4 In 1947 Forma1, Origine (which later became Fondazione Origine Art Club). 5 Published for the first time in 1982, Verbale scritto is a heterogeneous collection of texts ranging from aphorisms to verbal invention and Japanese haikus.

Light in relation to geometry and the study of material is also a vital crux of the research of Getulio Alviani (1939-2018): a tireless investigator of aluminum, he places every element in a condition that is always “at the limit of vision” in his paintings. In the encounter between lights, the treatment of surfaces, reflections, and forms, the eye is lost in an infinite number of possible interpretations: every atom of the painting seems to be able to transform itself second by second, and this balance between permanence and transformation is ultimately the latent value, form of delicate and poignant poetry that liberates every work by the artist. One particular type of painting translated the most inaccessible tensions of humans and their environment through sign, material, and color: Emilio Scanavino (1922-1986), master of the lines and knots through which he brought anxieties agitated by dark or blood like shades to the canvas, is another unforgettable name. At the same time, geometry showed infinite potential for going beyond the rules, but there was also someone who combined the rigor of form with the extraordinary power of light through a minimal linguistic and poetic alphabet: Arturo Vermi (1928-1988), whose analysis of time carried out using essential signs brings humans back from the present time to their origins, and then from there to eternity through the use of gold leaf. The direction taken by painting, however, has also encountered that of concept, providing absolute evidence, as in the case of Alighiero Boetti (1940-1994), of both how incredibly surprising the act of discovery can be, and how extraordinary the power of language can be. Beyond his medium, 6 Boetti reveals a universe we can learn about slowly, reconstructing letter by letter, sign by sign, element by element, the meaning of existence, fragmented and fragmentary, yet capable of fragile moments of unity. His embroideries—Tra l’incudine e il martello (1987) is on display here—have a pictorial density that goes far beyond the specific use of painting as an expressive medium, and describe the identity of time by entrusting the surface with translating minimal yet unprecedently powerful concepts through single units (the letters and squares that contain them). Thanks to his visionary genius and invitation to constantly go beyond the established canons and visual habits, Lucio Fontana became an undisputed point of reference for generations and generations of artists all over the world. As such, his teachings could also be found in painting’s increasing propensity towards the dimension of objects as Italian art proliferated. With this in mind, Gillo Dorfles had brought together a group of artists 7 who favored a vision of painting as an “integrating element of the living space, which acts as much as a modulator of a dimensional situation as simply an exquisite plastic-chromatic element created by the encounter of shapes and colors, always generated, nevertheless, by a careful and preordained structural design.” Paolo Scheggi (1940-1971), in his short and intense life, had given form to this vision: his Intersuperfici curve, the result of three overlapping and carefully cut canvases, construct shapes that penetrate deeply. The space that results from this action is created by a void in which color and form play a fundamental role, transforming the resulting surface through cuts no longer as an absence, but rather as an exceptional three-dimensional body that is lyrical and even theatrical, consisting of elements that are the absolutes of painting.

6 In this case embroidery, but also pen drawing, wood, photography, cement, postal envelopes, etc. 7 Agostino Bonalumi, Paolo Scheggi, Enrico Castellani (who never identified particularly with this definition, however) and Lucio Fontana, whose inclusion “aims above all to be a tribute to someone who was so far ahead of anyone else in Italy when it came to discovering some of the constant fundamentals of modern art” (G. Dorfles, Pittura-oggetto a Milano, Arco d’Alibert Studio d’arte, 1966).

When it comes to going beyond the canvas, in addition to Turi Simeti (1929), who works in a similar way to Scheggi—but by disturbing the surface with protruding shapes, confirming it as a restless entity, moved by tensions and forces that act beneath and beyond it—we must mention Piero Gilardi (1942), who, with his polyurethane Tappeti natura has been reproducing nature in a realistic way since 1965. He creates small sections of the environment—woods, riverbeds, fruit, vegetables, and so on—which could come from anywhere; colorful and joyful compositions, they have an immediate impact on viewers, who cannot help but smile when they see them. Yet this initial empathy is followed by a sense of inexorable fragility: not only of the material that tends to crumble over time and exposure to the light, but also (and especially) a condemnation of life’s increasingly artificial direction. In 1969, this research led him to take a long break from art, which he set aside to devote himself to theory and politics; he returned to art in 1981, and since then his commitment has combined aesthetics, the environment and community. His exhibitions are often supplemented by workshops with the public, and, as well as various projects on technological and environmental development, he has promoted the PAV, Parco Arte Vivente [Living Art Park], 8 a place that synthesizes his experiences linked to the nature/culture dialectic.

We abandon the use of known art forms. 9

As we come to an end of this analysis of generations, languages, geometry, formless matter, concept, object, color, light, and time, all that remains is to point out that the many directions travelled in the works on display are united by a shared background found in the desire to profoundly analyze the nature of things. Whether a human soul, existential conditions fragmented and distorted by history and time, rules called into question, absolute pictorial forms, words, or nature, Italian art of the second half of the 20th century has shown that its aim is always to penetrate reality and thought to glean new readings and interpretations of the present, humanity, time, and history. This same is true of Arcangelo Sassolino (1967), who attempts to focus on the tensions hidden in society, time, and the human soul, as well as Riccardo De Marchi (1964), who pierces the surfaces he encounters in his work and life (from Teflon to steel, and even the sleeves of the CDs he listens to), generating a poetry of minimal elements (the holes) and a writing literally made out of nothing, yet so intense as to distort the space it inhabits. This intense analysis— his and that of all the other names listed—, the alteration generated by these works in the contexts in which they are displayed, their ability to absorb and reflect space, and the inevitable approach of asking continuous questions all serve to write some of the most intriguing chapters in a history of visual research that has always tended to bring itself and the present in to play. It also demonstrates how much a country of differences, marked by constant criticism, shapes minds predisposed to research and to questioning acquired values, as well as demonstrating how the teachings of Lucio Fontana are still the lights guiding the gaze of those who search today.

8 PAV opened in Turin in 2008. 9 See note 1. PAOLO SCHEGGI Intersuperficie curva, 1965 (detail) Acrylic on 3 overlapping canvas 27 1/2 x 23 1/2 x 2 1/4 in (70 x 60 x 5.5 cm)

GETULIO ALVIANI Superficie vibratile, 1972 Aluminum on board 28 1/4 x 28 1/4 in (72 x 72 cm)