2011 – THE BLACK LINE – INTERVIEW WITH DANILO BUCCHI BY JEROME SANS

THE BLACK LINE
INTERVIEW WITH DANILO BUCCHI BY JEROME SANS

JEROME SANS. When and how did you start making art?
DANILO BUCCHI. I remember that from a very young age drawing was a constant playmate.
During my academic studies I began to get myself noticed in unconventional spaces: from street mural painting to small shows in clubs and discos, to set designs, etc.
Encouraged by my teachers, at around twenty years of age, I began to consider dedicating myself fully to this “profession”.
J.S. What did your first painting look like?
D.B. It was monochrome, black with a red line across it, small format, similar to a slash by Fontana, an artist that I was not yet aware of. I was roughly thirteen, and I had found two lucky canvases in the basement, outlined with drawings by my father and some tubes of oil colours.
J.S. How did the experience of being born and growing up in an ancient city like Rome affect your contemporary painting process?
D.B. You know, Rome is a city so full of everything, so baroque, there is really so much that all I could do in my work was to simplify.
Rome taught me to seize the moment.
Rome feeds your need for what is essential.
J.S. How would you describe your work ?
D.B. My work is liberty…. a personal necessity…. it is selfish and intimate.
It is also the product of a path of the greatest possible intellectual honesty. I went down many roads, particularly when I was younger. I wanted to experiment and I did.
I knew that I had one certainty, my own sign… but I wished to call it into question through various phases of research that could be defined “cycles”.
With time, I naturally returned towards the certainties, in other words the sign, which allows me not to loose any of the suggestive sparks that light the fuses of my works; using white, black and the sign, I have all I need to express myself. But if I really have to give an explanation, I can say that, in reality, my work is what happens between me and the canvas.
J.S. Your work contains many characters of a playful type. What are the sources for your figures and what kind of meaning do they have for you?
D.B. The origins of the characters are essentially mysterious to me as well. I think that they are the product of a stylistic synthesis between life lived and imagined, between real and unreal.
J.S. Do your single line works have any historic antecedents? What are your feelings about the automatic surrealist drawings artists such as Andre Masson, the abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock with “dripping painting” or even the famous Italian animation TV program “La Linea”?
D.B. Yes, certainly… they have historical antecedents… being children of the past is inevitable….
Pollock and Masson were great masters of their time, able to produce masterpieces of timeless value. I respect them greatly.
I share Masson’s idea, who believed that working in a reduced state of consciousness helped the artist to liberate themselves from the control of rationality, and to enter into full contact with the creativity of the subconscious, and, as a painter, I know that it is a very hard state to reach…
I admire Pollock’s way of working.
In terms of the television programme “la linea”, I find it brilliant, and I think that it is an incredible encounter/synthesis between language, content and music that is able to communicate universally.
J.S. What is your relationship to monochromatic painting history ?
D.B. I have great respect for the masters of the movement.
It was an important part of the avant-garde, a great split in the Twentieth Century, and I foresee that it will be in the future.
Painters have created the exploration of a colour, the study of the change in values through a surface, the expressivity of textures and shades that express a large variety of emotions, intentions and meanings in different ways, methods and surfaces.
My work has an affinity to monochromatic painting, with awareness and intellectual honesty of what has already taken place in the history of art. But I am, in fact, a figurative painter who has developed his own figurative genre.
I feel the need to go further!
J.S. Do you find yourself to be in a kind of mesmerized trance-like state while you are painting? Do you feel that this process allows your subconscious to convey secret messages through your work?
D.B. It all starts with a circular movement of the arm that draws the first line, which then continues on and on and begins to construct itself an independent mental state. I don’t know if it is a trance, autism or other, I know that at a certain point the balance of the white on the canvas is broken, and the construction of a new balance begins. When I come to, the painting is finished. It is in that moment that I look at it, and the painting explains itself to me. When I paint, I separate from myself, from reality, I no longer care who I am, what I am, I allow what is inside of me to come out, I liberate myself, then when I reread…I understand.
J.S. You frequently produce live performances created in collaboration with musicians, technicians, scientists and engineers during which you link your traced line to sound. When and how did you start making these performances and what role do they play in your painting process?
D.B. The idea comes from a painting entitled “tratto da onde sonore” (drawn from sound waves), which is a work that I created whilst listening to extremely loud music through headphones. The tempo was very high tempo, 140 bpm. I was interested in how much the music influenced the development of the painting. Inevitably, I asked myself: what if it was the sign that emitted sound? This is how the project “Retro azione di un segno di suono” began, but we call it “sinfonia di immagini” (symphony of images).
I draw live, in real time, onto glossy paper attached to glass. A complex system of video recording is able to read the pictorial action, reading both the line and the speed of the movement.
In the studio, the sound engineers receive the data, which they process using an algorithm created by them for this project. And, at the same time, they restore the sound, which is added live by a pianist, and the video, which is projected onto a screen.
The result is that the public sees the execution of a painting from my exact point of view. They feel and see what I feel and see, whilst they are musically engaged by rhythms and melodies generated by the actual pictorial movement, experiencing the entire creative process.
With this project, I am able to make people understand how much music is contained within a work. But, most importantly, we were able to create music that is “internal” to my work, and to let the user experience that which is felt in the creation of an artwork.
J.S. What is your approach with street art that you put back to back with the great masters of monochrome painting?
D.B. My relationship with Street Art is concrete, real life, but I find that there is no great connection to the masters of monochromatic art.
J.S. Which artists have been influential for you and who are the contemporary artists that you feel close to?
D.B. I have an academic background; I would say that the entire history of art has influenced me.
I would have to reference many!
I have a treasured memory… one day, with my father, who was an art lover, we visited the studio of Mario Schifano. I was about fourteen years old, it was a great experience; I was struck, in particular, by his synthetic style, his pictorial freedom….the magic of an artist’s studio, and this inspired me and made me realise that “it could still be done”.
I feel close to many contemporary artists, I very much like the portraiture of Francesco Clemente and Antony Gormley’s sculptures.
J.S. Have you ever thought of making animation video painting?
D.B. Well..yes, I have thought about it and done it!
I am referring to Retro azione di un segno di suono, the performance that I did in Rome in 2009; the perfect balance between analogue and digital.
J.S. Is there a project you never realized that you dream of doing?
D.B. Yes.. many!!!