Italy Arts Part 3
Critical interpretations are different: M. Calvesi, a ” heretic ” supporter and first exegete of the trend, deepens, like M. Vescovo, the idea of anachronism, underlining the importance of the resumption of long time in the artistic operation as research of value as opposed to the ephemeral timing of the frantic anxiety of the new. Moreover, he connotes this laboratory experiment with psychoanalytic and alchemical implications, allegorizing in iconographic nostalgia, restless in iconological fantasies, melancholic in the simulacral attitude and solitary in the conscious “dream perception” of forgotten art. Other readings, together with other results of new followers, come from Italy, diminishing the citation factor as a Duchampian residue and instead privileging the parallel aspect of interpretation as a means of introducing the myth of art into a suspended, non-existent present with a more marked metamorphic visionarity in the “mystical ascent to absolute form”; by Italy Mussa who proposes the definition of cultured painting, by G. Gatt who speaks of a new way towards the grand way. And it is precisely on the dimension of time that the 1983 exhibition Il tempo immagine, in Spello and Foligno still insists, leading to the review Art in the mirror, as part of the 1984 Venice Biennale, curated by M. Calvesi.
These painters of memory, in particular the plethora of followers, play a heteronomous role of ” copyists ”, beyond a philological rigor, inclined to stop the epidermis of the image rather than its cognitive substance, regardless of the possible relapse into a style that becomes a stylistic feature, enhanced by a specific and exclusive operation. To find a center, they hypostatize the past and give foundation to their iconic fabulation with esoteric allusions with a strong semantic charge. In an inverse journey to the projective vectoriality of the avant-gardes, they revisit a distant past re-proposing its ” figure ” with a neo-metaphysical flavor, albeit filtered and altered in its conservative intentionality.
Again as a reinterpretation of the past, but with opposite thrusts, the movement called Transavanguardia in 1979 is characterized.
According to Timedictionary, the movement finds rapid development in the organizational system that underlies it consisting of a close strategic relationship, then dissolved, between the critic-theorist A. Bonito Oliva and artists of various backgrounds: S. Chia (b.1946), F. Clemente (1952), E. Cucchi (b.1950), N. De Maria (b.1954), M. Paladino (b.1948). By exposing the art system founded on the programmatic coalition of artist, critic, gallery owner, collector, museum, mass media and public, it appropriates them by propitiating profitable paths with the immediate official launch in the Venice Biennale in 1980. With the assumption of overcoming the ideology of “linguistic Darwinism” of the historical and recent avant-gardes, beyond the optimistic confidence in the frenetic experimentation of unusual materials and techniques,trans-avant-gardeadvances the reasons for a fragmented subjectivity and the recovery of an artist’s manual skills, activated in the resurrected categories of painting, sculpture and drawing, practicing with loaded or superficial tones, convulsive or light, aggressive or bizarre, shrewd or naive. The idea of a unitary style and the search for invention, while a phenomenon of destructuring reconversion and an unbridled drive flow, attentive more to hearing than to seeing color, spreads. Having overcome the obsolete distinction of abstract and figurative, through the uncritical attitude of capturing and altering portions of history detached from their formal and semantic contextuality, any judgment in favor of avant-garde or tradition, of high or low culture, is suspended. The incessant web of often irreconcilable references, offered mostly with an expressionist sign (exasperatedly accentuated by the followers) and with marked archaism in primitive reductivism and regressive degradation, emphasizes an image open to the free will of the symbolic and to the random flagrancy of the present.. Crossing the avant-garde in an indifferent journey towards the past and towards the future constitutes the essence of a ” weak thought ” that makes weakness its strength.
With a view to phenomenological openness without compact theorizing but, sometimes, with associations fueled by contiguous work spaces, in other areas we expect to combine materials, techniques and languages almost with the intention of exorcising the presumed outdated wear and tear of the means of expression. highlighting the positive inactivity of painting and sculpture. Creative practice and linguistic tools are exhibited in a non-univocal brand formalization process that adds and stratifies its own references (abstract, informal, minimal, figural), concentrating the perception on the plastic-pictorial interweaving, as emanations of an individual conscience and an emotional state.
To escape the standardizing pitfalls of arbitrary groupings, functional only to a conciseness of exposition, it should be pointed out that the elements that distinguish the exponents of this multifaceted orientation are disparate and sometimes divergent. Of these exponents, some of which have already been active for some time, we recall: D. Bianchi (b.1955), B. Ceccobelli (b.1952), G. Dessì (b.1955), G. Gallo (b.1954), or otherwise Nunzio (N. Di Stefano, b. 1954), G. Limoni (b. 1947), E. Luzzi (b. 1950), P. Pizzi Cannella, S. Ragalzi (b. 1951), M. Tirelli (b. 1956), or also D. Benati (b. 1949), S. Coccia (b. 1942), E. Consolazione (b. 1941), M. De Luca (b. 1954), P. Fortuna (b. 1950), A. Garutti (b.1948), F. Guerzoni (b.1948), G. Guidi (b.1942), V. Messina (b.1946), A. Morandi (b.1958), A. Pandolfelli (b. 1934), Renzogallo (R. Gallo, b. 1943), L. Vollaro (b. 1949), etc. In fact, according to individual needs, each time they privilege an archetypal dimension in the essentiality of the images, an archaic ritual in the frontal presentation, magical-mystery suggestions in the symbolic allusions, fabulous components in the personal memory of the myth, a subtle sensitivity in the material substance or a more marked expressiveness with larvae naturalist atmospheres and accents, a discontinuous spatiality, shattered by caesuras on the surface or moved by three-dimensional projections, or even a more explicit design order, with different degrees of results and internal consequentiality.
