Italy Arts Part 2

According to Ejinhua, the quotation of the ” past ”, already reinterpreted by Salvo and Ontani, alongside the sampling with change of register and with the detachment inherent in the simulation, finds further ironic, light, archaic or decorative declinations by L. Mainolfi (n. 1948), G. Maraniello (b.1945), L. Bartolini (b.1948), M. Jori (b.1951), A. Spoldi (b.1950), F. Levini (b.1956), G. Pagano (b.1954), G. Salvatori (b.1955), E. Barbera (b.1947), B. Benuzzi (b.1951), AM Faggiano (b.1946), Wal (b.1947), ending then in branched paths of different importance. Barilli himself, mentor of the New-News, sees their linguistic technique mature, regardless of the quotation, even within a line that, originating from analytical painting, had modulated its minimalist essentiality with chromatic amplifications, free from two-dimensionality and invading the space-environment (as highlighted in the exhibition Painting-environmentin 1979 at the Palazzo Reale in Milan), and, in other respects, within a sector represented, for example, by G. Notargiacomo (b.1945) defined by F. Caroli of the ” magic-primary ” in what an attempt to rediscover the primary magic of the seduction-pleasure of color and mythical-metaphorical instinct. On the other hand, decorative variations are carried out in contexts of evocative or subtle narrative, pictorial and graphic, by L. Alinari (b. 1943), P. Echaurren (b. 1951), etc.

In such a juncture the New-News, not closed ” uniquely ” in painting or sculpture, exempt from archaeological revivalism, merge, with differentiated experiences, iconism and aniconism in a free and errant combinatory exercise of heterogeneous elements, with an ornamental and playful, symbolist and decadent, without romantic impulses, in osmotic interference, as argued in the 1983 exhibition A Postmodern Generation in Genoa and Rome, at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni. In an inextricable Pirandello plot between real and fictitious needs, between anxious and bizarre manifestations, between mental and figural sophistications, the journey into the past to find a future converts the aspiration to ” purification ” into a contaminating practice.

However, the spectrum of ” citationistic ” solutions is broadly configured in an opposition of often controversial fields even in the claim of primates. A different orientation is that which makes use of a more direct and congruous version of the quotation in which the referential act to the past occurs by literal transposition.

For this type of projection into the past, which blocks time and recovers previous figurative systems, meaningful, alongside other warning signs and more distant sources, such as G. De Chirico and A. Savinio, is the particular reflection on art, on its qualitative value as a vertical apex and on its ” pure ” existence led by G. Paolini: he, with intellectual energy, reintroduces an almost ritual awareness of the very idea of ​​art by supporting his own thought with an image constituted precisely by reproduction mechanics of a classical work. This reproduction, while denying the principle of uniqueness of the work of art, provides a visual contribution subordinated to mental assumptions: symbol of a beauty conceived in the past and offered to the most motionless present as a veronica-object of consumption, it is the solitary sign for an active meditation on the re-proposed work of art, with austere scientific methodology, as an ancient simulacrum, mirroring, historical event. Also precursor is the position of CM Mariani (b.1931) who, starting from a singular mimesis of reality originated by D. Gnoli and sensitive to photographic systems, in the mid-seventies, escaped the hegemonic principle of the new, exempt from ‘ ‘citationism’ reflective of the conceptual tendency and any type of external tracing – as in other ways implemented by the ” anatomical ” dissections of C. Parmiggiani (b.1943) and A. Trotta (b.1937) – considers the copy,

On these assumptions, from the loss of the concept of quality, from the discomfort for modernist experimentalism, from the absolute identity crisis, from the refusal of scattered fragmentation, paths based on the conception of “ art as history of art ” are launched., a project whose destiny is already in its history, and on the “ feeling of memory ” as a reintroduction, through images, of the themes of existence and the collective unconscious such as myth, life, death, with the prospect of rediscovering the unity of painting, while being aware of the relativity of such a recovery.

Guaranteeing the autonomy of the individual choices in the reuse of rigorously ” pre-modern ” styles, between Renaissance and Romanticism, not without controversy reactions from various quarters, among the archetypes of the museum move R. Barni (b. 1939), O. Galliani (b. 1954), L. Bonechi (b. 1955), U. Bartolini (b. 1944), and with a more unambiguous physiognomy especially A. Abate (b. 1946), S. Di Stasio (b. 1948), F. Piruca (b.1937), who exhibited their works together with S. Marrone (b.1948), N. Panarello and P. Pizzi Cannella (b.1955), who soon dissociated himself, in An exhibition of six painters in Rome, in 1980. In the introductory note, entitled The inversion of time, a new idea of ​​time is enunciated as the arrest of an unconditional becoming, as a privileged inactivity of anachronism, as an experience of the past extraneous to the present but reincarnating a primitive model, the place of the original.