Italy Arts Part 4

A further, articulated sector of research is that formed by artists who interact organically with various modalities of abstraction or informal but to proceed towards other compositional outcomes.

According to Transporthint, some of these artists are of more distant, mature and accredited experience, such as G. Napoleone (b.1936), M. Bottarelli (b.1943), R. Boero (b.1936), CG Morales (b.1942), L. Gardini (b.1935), E. Montessori (b.1931), G. Cittadini (b.1933), O. Piattella (b.1932), P. Casadei (b.1931), F. Giuli (b. 1934), E. Gallian (b. 1941), etc.; others of a younger and more favorable season, such as L. Romualdi, S. Sanna (b. 1950), F. Angelini (b. 1946), P. Jacchetti (b. 1953), P. Coletta (b. 1948), A. Violetta (b. 1953), etc. They do not aspire to different repetitions, they do not attack or venerate history, but continue, in temporal continuity, to restructure the visual perception marked, as GM Accame indicates, between “reason and hazard”, to organize a spatial syntax, to manifest a feeling measuring with lyrical tones of inner resonance, to compose drafts of strong chromatic substance or to create fades of distant phenomenal echo. The ways in which they implement this are very different, geometric, sign or gestural informal. Some more rigidly programmatic in the controversy with respect to certain postmodern emergencies, with a radical abstract project and with evident references to specific historical avant-gardes, aim to effect an almost ascetic reduction of linguistic elements, with a chromatic scale concentrated on black, white and gray, in a subtractive poetics between emptiness and absence, named by F. MennaPoor abstraction for an Abstraction-construction, as pointed out by M. Carboni, dialectic between contextuality and rejection: A. Capaccio (b. 1956), M. Rossano (b. 1955), R. Salvia (b. 1953), G. Asdrubali (b. 1955), Annibel-Cunoldi (b. 1950), etc. Others instead focus their attention on the energetic clash of primary colors for an archaic abstraction, according to the meaning of G. Cortenova: A. Celeste, Miresi, G. Olivieri (b. 1937), A. Uboldi, etc.

From this variegated range of proposals an environment increasingly inclined to stage limelight has emerged in the last few years, with a proliferating multiplication of young actors (sometimes also active as gallery owners and critics) and exhibition venues. With an academic intellectualistic exercise, in the wake of the more or less highlighted reinterpretations, we insist on combining contrasting elements with ingenious arrangements, to systematize given morphologies in an eclectic syncretism, to represent the chronicle of ” announced images ” in the archive. labyrinth of memory, the city or nature.

Ornate ways intersperse with cold thoughts, rigid structures with chromatic preciousness, combining post-abstraction and post-informal endings with a neo-minimal geometry, an ostentatious manual skill with mechanical procedures and alternative materials, while the use of ready-made in the installations that mimic the space of external reality, and in the recycling of the objects of the so-called cold Transavanguardia. Furthermore, still with a multimedia approach, a refined concept is imposed on works created with the use of photography, writing, seriality between new technological seductions, microcircuits with computerized memories and primitive narrativity. In short, we are witnessing the spectacle of the conciliation of opposites, as confirmed by the titles of some 1988 exhibitions: Dionysian Geometries in Milan, Order and Disorderin Rimini, respectively edited by L. Vergine and R. Barilli who suggests a critical cataloging based on the rhetorical figure of the oxymoron. The plurality of options, the flagrant nature of the events and the fluidity of the material make it difficult for any more precise clarification, sometimes even within the individual protagonists. However, it can be noted that some, such as eg. C. Ambrosoli (b. 1947), S. Astore (b. 1957), M. Barzagli (b. 1960), M. Bindella (b. 1957), L. Bruno (b. 1944), S. Cardinali (b. 1951), G. Cerone (b. 1957), V. Corsini (b. 1956), G. D’Alonzo (b. 1958), M. Dompè (b. 1959), A. Fogli (b. 1959), M. Folci (b. 1959), Italy Gadaleta (b. 1958), P. Modica (b. 1953), C. Palmieri (b. 1955), A. Pirri (b. 1957), E. Porcari (n. 1951), A. Zelli (b. 1957), are variously started on more fertile land.

There are numerous showcases offered to young people, from the Open section of the Venice Biennale to exhibitions promoted by public galleries, by the culture departments, or by the Quadriennale of Rome, or to the pressing private initiatives, up to Italia 90 – Young art hypothesis, promoted by Flash Art magazine, or even to the futuristic projections of the Nineties of 1991 review, staged simultaneously in Bologna, Rimini and Cattolica. However, the indiscriminate coexistence of all practices, styles and genres, under the banner of ” irony of neutrality ” or ” complexity ”, insinuates the suspicion of a permissive strategy.

The synchronic articulation of opposite tendencies, in fact, rather than reflecting a vital dialectical plot, seems to reveal the epochal anxiety to show, as in a catwalk, the undifferentiated possession of “ known images ”, hybridized between narcissistic desires of delectatio and kitsch inflections, between demystifying or complacent, weak or strong, neo-futurist or pataphysical ways, baroque or austere, who live the present by leafing through the past distractedly but forbitiously. A sort of uninhibited exaltation of the occasionality of the manneristically artificial work leads, in the fall of ideologies, to a conscious reduction of the “ work of art ” to a common object of worldly packaged consumption, a rhetorically aspiring fetish in the last resort to a oleographic contemplation, but in fact aimed at achieving a possible surplus value no longer inherent to its intrinsic ” quality ” but connected to the economic circuit in which it manages to insert itself. Even the oscillation of taste plays on minimal ” ideas ”. Already neuroticized by the internal dynamism of the avant-gardes, its irregular trend is now more than anything else governed by prolific production and unbridled consumerism, above all psychological, willing to engulf and reject in an indiscriminate and frenetic way ” idol ” wandering in the aleatory supremacy of a promotion inclined to favor accelerated market cycles, in tune with or even incentivising the very acceleration of fashions, and alien to the need for slower and more selective knowledge. On the other hand, the exponential growth of operators and “ aesthetic ” products appears to be related not so much to an explosion of creativity or to an effective market demand, as to an epidemic venture into the indefinite paths of art and to the enticements aroused by ‘medium and functional to the mercantile philosophy: it is the attempt to take the field to live the ” aesthetic ” experience as an economically seductive venture. And the young artist / product becomes an indispensable factor as it is instrumental in the profitable planning of the times and ways of making a profit.