2011 – SIGN THE BLACK LINE – MUSEO MLAC – ROME

A contemporary talent

Domenico Scudero

In Tradition and the Individual Talent (1920), Thomas Sterns Eliot wrote that individual contribution alone cannot account for talent. And that it is fulfilled when it shares the projective concept of self in an extended worldliness, reflected upon tradition. The dominant interpretation of talent in today’s culture is pragmatic, like it was in Eliot’s America. It involves the idea of knowing how to do something that has a long tradition, but knowing how to do it in a manner that is original, unusual and in someway astonishing for the worldly ease with which it transpires.Danilo Bucchi’s talent is probably the dominant feature of his artistic profile, constituted by a real determination of rooting himself in a universe of signs, that refers to the tradition of European abstraction of the first avant-gardes, with the aid of techniques and supports that are strongly technological. In fact, it could be said that the material impact of Danilo Bucchi’s abstract/sign-like forms reaches a level of unrestrained, or talented, alteration, because he reconstructs individually and axiomatically a modernity that is widespread, consolidated and then made liquid. Bucchi’s works convey this world of humanised signs that appear simple, but become more complicated the more that they are observed. The modernity in Bucchi’s painting occurs through a contemporary talent that allows not only avant-garde traditions to emerge, but also a mental reverberation, like painting with your eyes closed, blind, which is so important to post-modern pictorial experimentation. Observing the places in which this orchestra of signs is resized in a fixity that goes past memory, has, for me, the restless meaning of individual talent. The question of how this is possible is the playful blow dealt by the artist to superficial observers.In this book, made for the occasion of Danilo Bucchi’s show at the MLAC, but whose content is not limited to the analysis of the series of works presented, the artist’s shattering force emerges continually, what I would call the triggering theme, the frenzy that reverberates in the pages and the graphics of the text. Texts and interviews, notes and critiques, from Giorgia Calò’s introductory essay, to the impossible interview by Jérôme Sans, it testifies to the feverish creative solution of a young talent of contemporary painting. Work that is not only colour and signs, but also life itself, technologies of transmission, spatial relationships between studios and galleries, human relationships between the individual, history and the worldly sphere, or in short, the profile of a contemporary artist.

Signs, or rather traces of an unusual path

Giorgia Calò

Today, in reference to contemporary art, it is rare to speak of “painters”. Artists, since Postmodernism, have experimented with every type of technique and medium, often excluding painting itself.In this way, ten years since the start of the XXI Century, art has become ever more immaterial, technological and spectacularized, within a society used to using communication, with its traumas and miracles, as a passe-partout, good for doing everything. This is, therefore, the time of postproduction, as Bourriaud calls it, in which the supremacy of the culture of appropriation prevails, the “Art of the Idea”. Or, to use Baudrillard’s words, this is the culture of simulation and not of representation. In this cultural and artistic climate, it could seem anachronistic and obsolete to present a “painter” like Danilo Bucchi, and exhibit him at, of all places, the MLAC, where in general, it is known, the types of research mentioned above are preferred. I was struck by Danilo’s intellectual honesty, his way of painting and transferring ideas and sensations that come directly from the subconscious onto canvas. Observing and following the genesis of Bucchi’s recent production in particular, the cycle dedicated to the Sign, a precise meaning is revealed that explains and sums up the artist’s entire research. Bearing in mind that, starting from his early works, the Sign has always been carefully considered, the subject that emerges within the two-dimensional reality of the framework becomes a physical space, for all its being imaginary. Avoiding shading or backgrounds that would soften their impact, the artist concentrates on the immobility of the scene, fixing the positions of the characters through a stylistic attitude that often does away with perspective. He ties them down with the line of black that becomes light and free, liberated from any type of restriction of movement. Bucchi’s paintings, displayed on the walls of the MLAC’s exhibition spaces, take on the ability of drawing any attention onto themselves. They are sheets of paper and paintings on canvas, in which the sign becomes the absolute protagonist in the search for a linguistic synthesis that recalls the highest traditions of the XX Century, from Action Painting to Street Art. Although his drawing can be considered, as tradition dictates, preparatory phases of the works on canvas, or anyhow larger works, Bucchi insists on a practice that in reality hides a parallel process; considering them so important as to create true installations with the drawings themselves. His video-installations must also be briefly mentioned in this introduction. Centred on technical and formal experimentation, able to unite photography, video and painting within a single discourse, becoming a spatial frame, a hyperframe that invades and penetrates the surrounding environment, presenting itself as media painting in action.

 The Sign

Generally, images can serve as representations or symbols; or they can be used purely as a sign. It is difficult to say which function Danilo Bucchi’s images fulfil, given that although they seemingly present themselves as authentic signs, it is also true that they hide different meanings as well. His signs are often transformed into a trace, a text or a path. The lines are not scared of going against the surface, but rather challenge the white of the background, striking against its pallidity with, an at times ironic and sarcastic, reflexive and harsh mastery.His Pagine di Taccuino [notebook pages] are born in this way. Thoughts and reflections expressed through the word that defines itself on the white page; that same page in which Mallarmé affixed the pure essence of poetry, to become, in this case, the pure essence of the image. The Sign in anyway remains inseparably tied to a careful formal and stylistic path; it is constructed around a single essential line that forms the base structure, and it is revealed through the action of the artist.Bucchi, therefore, unsettles the balance of the white surface through his visual thoughts that become Signs and Music, metaphysical scores of an imaginary melody that is formed in the moment in which the sign is able to emit a sound. In this way, the musical dimension seems to characterize Danilo Bucchi’s theoretic reflection and pictorial practice, which uses it as a reference model, in the demanding process of the definition of a pictorial art completely independent of any naturalistic point of reference, or rather, that is able to find new formal possibilities in its own expressive means.

The Gesture

Bucchi’s Gesture is ruthless, in that it is born from the expressive modalities of a figuration created furiously, suddenly, and at the same time from a slow and meticulous process that always starts, like children’s drawings, from a circle (the head), to which the appendages are added in a continuous flow. All of this becomes expressed through fast drawing, characterized by a continuous line that is sure and steady, but also very synthetic, at times pushing towards a provocative infantilism-brutalism that gives rise to an immediate parallel with the work of Basquiat.Through particular actions, which come close to automatism, understood as an introspective journey, characterized by memory work and long sessions of imagination, the artist represents singular characters with heads that are oversized in relation to their bodies. They are creatures that are born from a gesture, and are directly thrust into the face of the spectator, not allowing them, however, to read or trace a story within them. The gazes lost in the void, full with waiting, the melancholy and sense of solitude that emerges from them creates a mood that both attracts and repels, that provokes both indifference and empathy, in the vision of these images that appear to come alive through a particular expressive intensity. They are characters that appear all the same, fun and inoffensive, similar to cartoons. In reality they are carriers of disorientating messages, they are anything but frivolous in that they express existential difficulty, the isolation of man in the encounter/battle with society. For Bucchi, the human figure is more than anything a presence, at times a shadow between the elusive and distorted scenographic perspectives, animated through a game of gazes between the subject and spectator. For this, the observer is forced to focus on the figures, as there is almost never any other revealing narrative element apart from the characters themselves, within a research of simplification and translation of mental states.Hence the speed of composition and the dynamic essence of the lines allow Bucchi to concentrate on the physiognomic expression, until they are transformed into a sort of physical and emotional caricature.

The Material

Since 2005, Danilo Bucchi has started to use the syringe as an extension of his arm. The artist fills it with paint and, depending on the energy with which he uses it, the black line emerges on the canvas, at times thin and at times full and substantial. In this way, synthesizing the gesture and the rarefaction of the sign that considers the line in relation to the spatiality.Why use the syringe instead of the brush? Bucchi himself answers this question in affirming that he believes that the brush is a tool of distraction in the moment in which one is forced to remove it from the canvas to load it with colour. And here, the reference to Jackson Pollock is almost obvious: not only for the artist’s method of working, who, despite being a “painter”, like the maestro of Action Painting uses neither an easel nor a palette; but also for the fact of both drawing images directly from their subconscious. His way of painting is a fast paced dialogue between his own interior world and the external reality. The pictorial material is in fact crossed by scratched and concentric lines, loaded with the immediateness and speed with which they are executed.All of this is tied to a strong need to return to painting, and it is for this exact reason that the artist, since 2007, has begun to also use charcoal, graphite, watercolours, oil and chalk.

 The Colour

But it is with the colour, or rather its near absence, that Danilo Bucchi’s artistic research is explicated. Choosing black and white, only and exclusively black and white, with the addition, at times, of red, which tends to emphasize particular moments or symbols, underlining an emotion or a focal point of the representation. This is Danilo Bucchi’s choice, convinced that in the end colours are simply superfluous furnishings. And here it leads me to think of the great Sixteenth-Century dispute on whether to assign primacy to drawing (Florence, Michelangelo) or to colour (Venice, Titian). If Bucchi had lived in that century, there could have been no doubt over which position he would have taken.It being understood that it is not my intention to compare a contemporary artist to the great masters of the XVI Centrury, it is however interesting to note how Bucchi firmly places drawing above colour. This is probably because drawing, for Bucchi, is the best excuse to proceed between the meanders of sensations and behavioural facets. Through elemental forms that are easily distinguished in respect to the complexity of the issues that they represent, Danilo Bucchi loves to see something appear where previously there was only the white of the background. And this contrast can be seen best only if the drawing is black. Black on white, therefore, like writing, like the pages of a notebook.

The Stage Space

In Bucchi’s most recent series of works the definitive detachment from real Space takes places. Overcoming its earthly value, the subject looses any showiness, any scenographic and temporal reference, to become a sign, bare and simple. Immersed in a motionless time, the suspended space affirms its own corporeality, between the void of the white and silence, and the fullness of the images populated by muted details and moments; between the foreground and bare backgrounds. Bucchi’s pictorial language therefore slips continually between the rational and psychic planes.But the most disconcerting particularity of this research, is that the more the represented subjects are detached from the world and any semblance of humanity, the more the sign becomes the real and only protagonist of the stage space. The circular force lines take on a propulsive speed and dynamism that goes beyond time and space, but they draw strength and inspiration directly from the subconscious. It is not by chance that one of Danilo Bucchi’s first solo exhibitions, which took place in 2003 at the Palazzo dei Cogressi in Rome, was called Tratto dall’inconsio, ‘drawn from the subconscious’. The space of the artwork therefore becomes an open space, referring to linguistic imagination and the symbolic that vests the subconscious. In the same moment in which this universe unveils itself, narrated by the visual musical scores, it cancels itself out to become painting, pure meaning. Stage Space, therefore, Bucchi’s space, that is lit up by minimal and fascinating signs, inquiring with candour as to the dissension between the individual and society, and walking through the labyrinths of existence made of silences and of “whites” crossed-over by thoughts, by emotion and by gestures, or, more simply, by the Sign.

In the sign of Danilo Bucchi

Domenico Scudero

To emphasize the will of a human being, means the moment of unity of their actions, and that is their subordination under reason.(T.W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 1966)

Reason and will are the logical parameters that affect all of Danilo Bucchi’s ten-years of work, his extraordinarity, and his obstinacy in the search for the distinct sign. The term ragione (reason) derives etymologically from the Latin ratione(m) (from reri, count or calculate). And it describes the rational process of the linear, logical development of a mental calculation, from which subsequently comes the duplicate acceptation of the term reason: on one hand, with the objectifying meaning of determined phenomena, and on the other, faculty, human reasoning, of gathering these phenomena in the centre of intelligibility. Volonta (will), instead, is the determination derived from a desire to achieve a precise objective, in a future projection, a term taken on relatively recently in philosophical language. It derives from the Latin volùmus, which was in use with auxiliary functions. Reason and will, in Bucchi’s work, constitute the centring of time in the search for the sign. Reason is history, ontological construction, the trace of existence up until the sensitive projection of will, the future manifested by the discipline of being. Danilo Bucchi’s sign is, in substance, the demarcation of the force manifested by being, through his internal dialectic between passed and future, and it draws the location of a perpetual present, where the passed and future experiences of his interpretation are sedimented.Thinking about the technical methods used for Danilo Bucchi’s expressed form, one finds themselves investigating the technique of painting. If in the early series of paintings, painting was handled with a large dose of academism, in the sense of the traditional method of applying the colour, in the most recent cycles of paintings, the characteristic is that of displaying all their materiality and a lack of brushstrokes, resulting from the use of a particular technique. I am not sure if it is correct to call this method a real painting technique, as the artist has abandoned brushes, and applies the colours to the canvas using syringes. Of all dimensions, from micro syringes that allow thin filaments of paint to flow, to veterinary ones that leave large and doughy tracesThe symbolic significance of the syringe used as a brush can immediately lead one to think of the clinical, pharmacological side, or even narcotics, but also to the idea of the kitchen, and confectionary in particular. Although the first symbolic significance could seem more immediate, as an artist committed to unravelling his particular obsessive viewpoint could be likened to an abuser of signs, in Bucchi’s case, I would lean more towards a harmony with the culinary symbol of high confectionary. For now, let us observe that the verb iniettare (inject) has a semantic root similar to that of oggetto (object), both coming from the paradigm iectare/iacere, which had the meaning of to throw or hurl. Iniettare, therefore, is throwing inside, whilst oggetto is hurling against. Consequently, we can state that already in the initial gesture of injecting there is the substance of the object, here, to be precise, of the art object. But letting be similar Machiavelian semantic plots, I can guarantee that when coming face to face with Bucchi’s real life works, in particular in his studio, my initial sensation was that of finding myself in front of an immense confectioner’s workshop. Therefore, I concentrated on this similarity with some perplexities. Firstly, I felt that it could be disrespectful to compare an artist’s workshop with that of a pastry chef, even if they were good. However, hinting at the question, I realised that the observation did not goad the artist, who, I am certain, smiled thoughtfully. The difference between a work of art and a sweet pastry consists essentially in the functionality. Nobody would ever eat an acrylic painting. Nevertheless, the mental perception of the object, its iectare, its complex visibility, has, for the visitor, an obvious similarity with the soft attraction of confectionary food. And, on the other hand, using anthropological terminology, the socialized “cooked” is the interpretative base through with Claude Lévi-Strauss investigated the meaning of representational culture (The Raw and the Cooked, 1964). A hypothesis that, above all in the last twenty-years, has represented a theoretical reference point often cited in the criticism of contemporary production. The difference, therefore, between the function of socialized nourishment, which has visual connections derived from the myth of nature, and art, consists exclusively in their goal; as it could be said that the object has the same apparent natural characteristics, in form and objective content, and different physical connotations, only because the culinary product nourishes the identity making visibility of the myth, and is ingested, whilst art takes on the visible in its totality and is scanned by the gaze. Lastly, we could say that art is like visual nourishment and is ingested visually, but, unlike the culinary product, it does not distinguish between visibility and invisibility. As in its presence, for instance in Bucchi’s studio or in his overall stagings, one finds themselves immersed in a socialized edibility that one senses is not digestible, but that enshrouds the self and its perception. If “confectionary pastry” completes its function, it wastes quickly or is consumed; artwork wastes slowly and cannot be assimilated, only reasoned upon.If will and reason are the qualities of an individual in achieving a goal, the form of the object is the ultimate aim of the artist’s project. Working on the sign, however, involves a voluntary diversification, up until the full realization of a dominant one that appears both unfamiliar and personal. Danilo Bucchi’s work is without doubt born from a distortion, since the construction of a personal sign is always the breaking of a hypothetical dominant coefficient, which I would say is the ideal objective form. A fork, for example, has a recognizable form, but becomes an object of design when a balance between form and function is achieved. Meanwhile, as Magritte would say, it is not a fork if it is depicted by the mimesis of painting, by its fiction, as it is the product of a visual distortion. It is not by chance that surrealist painters distorted the subject, as they were aware of the hallucination of painting to which they delegated the task of deceiving the spectator, even in the perfection of form, highlighting not so much the function form as the object form, separated from usability. The history of the Twentieth Century in art is without doubt a history of the widening of the visual action of objects, practiced by subjects who varied away from common actions. The myth of the damned artist is a complicated admixture of his vision through the invisibility of the individual consciousness of things. Kandinskian spirituality, Mirò’s unknown groan, as well as impressionist alienation, all foresee the non-scientific distortion of the depicted subject, such as to make its painter recognizable. I do not believe that it is by chance that Bucchi’s first series of paintings in some way foresaw distortion as a detail uncovered by rational will. A necessity for the realization of the individual sign, the absolute trace, the need to discard, which, in the contemporary artist, reveals the understanding of being knowingly in the heart of things. His mark is the essential object, and will and reason submit to it. As, if it was simply an action of power, of will, it would produce, according to Edgard Wind (Arte e anarchia, 1963), something forced and artificial; whilst, if will was directed only at the criticism of consciousness, it would lead to a linguistic constant to psychoanalyse, and not an exclusive form of the thinking subject (Susan Sontag, Stili di volontà radicale, 1966). The blurring and distortion in the first few series of works by Danilo Bucchi register the tension between the visible real and the subjective invisible real, the interweaving and the chiasma of Merleau-Ponty, and the opposition to the place of conventional feeling, substantivized in the idea of standardized beauty. Bucchi’s dolls have the slightly dazed beauty of the models found in glossy magazines, but this beauty is rediscovered with a careful, methodical gaze, that retraces the exact truth of the softened lines of a hazy and out-of-focus painting in the style of something digitally processed in Photoshop.The sign is therefore the “working plan”, the spectacularity of Bucchi’s work, his volitional statement, his divination. His identity is reached through the reason of history, the will of production aimed at the interpretation of the future, through a drawing done in the precision of the present, with a technique aimed towards objectivity, and a radical disharmony that identifies an irreproducible sign. It is not a profanation of beauty as described by Rosenkrantz, between amorphousness and disharmony (Aesthetic of Ugliness, 1853), but rather an aesthetic ingestion by means of pictorial layers that stretch out from the viscera of modern history, the cited abstraction, surrealism, informal art, action painting, nouveau réalisme, with the singular goal of representing the identity of a unitary perception with the sign. It is not by chance that on first seeing Bucchi’s works I saw something of a syntony with the morphological abstraction of Arshile Gorky, one of Jackson Pollock’s teachers and masters of that American pictorial fluidity.At this point, one can ask which hypermodernity is dealt with by those artists who today, through the sign, follow a path so dense with historical-critical references, if the hypermodern perception fluctuates between Guattari’s caosmosis, Bauman’s liquid life and Lipovetsky’s emptiness? What does painting have to do with any of this? In my opinion, in the consciousness of contemporary artists there is a study of the globality of feeling. A legitimate sense of general representation, as Husserl sustained (Logical Investigations, 1900), that results in orchestrated spectacularization, like Bucchi’s pictorial-musical performances, and exists precisely in the distortion of the spectacularity of the world, falsifying it. It is not in fact a staging of painting, nor is it a theatre of the sign, and we are not in front of a play of drawing, on an illuminated stage. Instead, it has to do with determining, through the depths of painting, a vast surface that invests the sensibility of the spectator and draws them in. In the case of Danilo Bucchi, the incision of will is in time transformed into a structure of the ulterior, from a scratch on the surface, to the fluid injected onto the canvas and successive canvases, superimposed upon the skin of the environment until it frenetically reconstructs it. And ultimately, a strong and substantial difference, between that which has been the sign in the recent history of modernity and that which it is today, consists precisely in its diversification from the object of tiny feeling, from the emotional secrete of being. Contemporary art today offers, in any case, a scenographic representation of the world that doesn’t fear any concealment, and that remoulds vision as though its action was titanically the only other possible place. The outdatedness of a technique in relation to telematic hypermodernity disappears as soon as the artistic action is produced in its vast complexity, its striking extraordinarity in the face of time, its attractive unusualness and its visual edibility.