2012 – Danilo Bucchi – PALAZZO COLLICOLA – Spoleto

PALAZZO COLLICOLA ARTI VISIVE
Danilo Bucchi (20 Novembre 2011 – 26 Febbraio 2012)
a cura di Gianluca Marziani

POINT. LINE. CIRCLE.
Gianluca Marziani

Point, line, circle: these are the very foundations of drawing. From the Lascaux caves to the Cy Twombly writings, from the cave findings to the advanced writing, from Giotto to the artists who nowadays privilege essence within innovation, the perimeter of the primary activity (drawing) is marked by the three passages through which the mental vibration (conceiving) creates two-dimensional visions. In the light of recent changes, drawing and painting seem to belong to each other with that same fluidity connecting rivers to the sea: drawing points out the origins, the direct and essential idea flowing down into open horizons; painting brings blood into play, creating the inner circularity of drawing, a biological motion boosting the endogenous needs of the idea. There are no distances left; if anything, it is all about belonging. Belonging gets even sharper in front of the demiurgic power of digital technology, so integrated into the essential lines of hand drawing, so “post-” by nature, so close to the nucleus of every shape. The opposites (manual skill and electronics) flow into a limbo where linguistic ideology is annihilated, so that the attention is drawn back on the real contents within the aesthetic fluidity. Thus, manual skill retrieves the hybrid echoes of cosmogonical talents, such as, in particular, Joseph Beuys and Mario Merz, who have ennobled paper with the blood of painting and canvas with the oxygen of drawing. Swapping codes is the emblem of a future in the present tense.

Speed, synthesis, control: these three stages define the attitude of the gesture, the nature of the sign and the visual approach of the artist. The link between cerebral process and technical execution is particularly significant: there is an uninterrupted flow between the idea and its development on the painting, based on a concentric automatism which prevents painting from being broken and fragmentary. Using a syringe instead of the brush results in the fluid movement of a quick yet calibrated gesture, an action influenced by the Gutai group (the Japanese avant-garde movement which introduced the muscular strength of competitiveness into painting), but also by Jean Dubuffet and Wols, Jackson Pollock and Maria Lai, as well as the street culture, of whom Bucchi seems to be a talented and unclassifiable representative. The combination of different influences results in a formula: a linguistic code, a lexical imprinting through which the artist turns those mental bodies into a “Bucchi-style world”.

Bucchi’s black circle is a building module, an edgeless brick through which human stories are built within the white theatre of surface. The sign rotation becomes a tangle of figure, mass and narration. A sort of organic perimeter that develops physicality through negation, through the dull white of the backcloth. The void fills up through the squirted thin black line, while red only peeps out in some of the works, between folds and corners, on interstices which confirm the flowing of haematic lymph, real oxygen to warm up the black sign and the white of warm organs. That biological thought linking drawing and painting is confirmed once again. Bucchi – dare I say it – is crossing a threshold which deserves some general remarks. I am referring to the linguistic limit which has always separated paper from canvas, pencil from brush, sheet from frame. That historical gap (drawing as sketch and prodrome, painting as execution and definition) loses its own raison d’être by virtue of the electronic die lying in the middle of our biorhythm. Digital technology tore the duopoly sketch/execution apart, assimilating the thread of historical languages, but filtering it through the selection of the materials of technology: similar yet different tools, the screen colours which differ from oil or acrylic colours, the printing paper absorbing ink in its own way, a display interposing a filter (the screen) between our eyes and the created shape; these and other identities are changing perception and execution, creating a metalanguage which goes beyond every dogmatic division. It should be borne in mind that digital language blends the essential line (the Apple school, represented by Steve Jobs, has always followed the principles of subtraction and synthesis) with the plurality of the Baroque (the historical development of digital graphics is characterised by accumulation and virtuosity) creating that metalanguage which conceives unique yet not univocal models, free to range widely, but well defined in their general structure. It is not true that electronic language is a sort of anarchic door to a world where everything is allowed. There are rules, and they represent the “critical mass”, an ideal constitution, which indicates and denotes, allows and binds. The current game revolves around a minimal balance between addition and subtraction. The new millennium is a weighing scale moulding its own calibration according to the historical moment and the specific context, providing the metalanguage with a centrality which is rewriting the rules of art.

The circle is the primary figure of childhood drawing, but also of the Giottesque developments, of Paul Klee’s and Vassily Kandinsky’s abstraction, of Gilberto Zorio’s and Eliseo Mattiacci’s poverist installations…We could go back and forth through art history, finding references which would increase our interest towards the circle as a brick for elaboration. A process of deep synthesis, which is reminiscent, in its structure and its execution models, of the principle of some electronic music, that of Warp’s or Minus’s school. Bucchi creates physical painting from the synthetic sound: initial matrix, repetition without mechanism, cleaning of the perimeter (the single digital sound). The link which Bucchi creates between execution and sound performance is no coincidence: the environmental circle is squared; gestures involve the plastic space of physical places. Also, it is no coincidence that each work is based on ideal figurative staffs, following invisible grids where figures interact, touch each other, overlap, always in the virtuous circle of whiteness as cerebral geography. Paper or canvas turn into a liberating laboratory, which authorises otherness and short circuits, adapting to each single creative action.

I feel Mario Schifano, the Italian master of a painting style which was pure freedom between gesture and colour, an artist who narrated the appearance of obviousness and turned banality into a deep crack. I feel Cy Twombly’s and Sol LeWitt’s rhythmic gestures, two ascetics of the cardiac sign. Two creative monks who put motor biology within the control between body and spirit. I feel Jean Dubuffet’s poetic brutality, his material and entropic competitiveness. I feel Andrè Masson’s warm automatism, Wols’s incisive cryptography, Jackson Pollock’s rhythmic drip, great masters of deep instincts, programmers of new abstractions, cosmogonical visionaries looking for interior galaxies. I feel the metallic power of Futura 2000’s and Rammellzee’s writing, their metatribal writing and their hypnotic cybergrams, between the Assyrian symbol and the alphabet which has not been invented yet…

I see the black colour widen or narrow, thicken and leave faded areas: a way to go back to the therapeutic power of art as interior exercise, as a system of order and watchful warning, a moment of controlled speed and speedy control. I see the synthesis turning into reinvention of the world through the plainness of the primordial trait. I see black men who, instead of frightening us, induce us to think. I see the white of the backcloths, which is the new black of the revealed darkness. In the sign I see the soul of a special eye…

Feeling folk memory as a factor influencing the elaboration process.
Seeing the physical state of pictures as a synthesis of metabolic memory.
Feeling and seeing as states to understand the spirit of the endless sign.

Artworks produced until now suggest some recapitulating observations. The thread of consistency unravels without any interruption, and this is what has been argued so far. If anything, we have to identify some passages from a pictorial object to the other, always bearing in mind the expanded vision of the elastic body, main and great interest for Bucchi. The term “elastic” identifies a changing body, which follows the directions dictated by inspiration and visionariness, somatising the artist’s attitudes, memory and conscience. Expanded or compressed, poor or rich in details, expressive or undefined, harmonious or disjointed shapes…there are no thematic or contextual limits among the bodies of the different cycles. If anything, we see independent variations of a matrix body (the artist himself) that metabolises alien bodies, aggregating them in a similar yet always different way.

Each cycle is an idea of the humanised body.
Each body is an action on the canvas.
Each cycle is a story made of autonomous fragments.

Pictures turn into a liquid narration, not made of any actual text, but of hidden drafts opening inner gaps. Bucchi paints following the open rules of the inner flow, channelling instincts into the tameable boundaries of reason. His movement is cathartic, an outward pressure exploding into inky circumferences. There is something orchestral in the crowds he paints, a strange resemblance with the culture of the social networks and of the Web in general, which play a central role in the present-day liquid vision. Nothing is shown explicitly in this sense: Bucchi’s human landscape is based on mechanic manual work (the syringe creates rhythm, pause, speed) and electric vibrations. The sense of networking is expressed by the apparent harmony of the painted mass, the relation between full and void, the homogeneity between long and medium shots. It is as if everyone spoke a common idiom (the computer language) and floated in the same context (represented, in the world of the Web, by Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Tumblr…), thus annihilating all differences through the appearance of the virtual identity. Entropy spreads out, keeping order and maintaining relations, an extended dialogue which goes beyond the single picture, turning the artist into an open workbook full of mental notes.

In the dialectic margins between liquid and solid, I think about the movies “Tron” and “Tron: Legacy”, so virtual in their geometric perfectionism, a digital touch in the style of Leni Riefenstahl where edges dominate, in a blaze of neon light which draws surfaces through perimetric shapes. Bucchi follows the opposite reasoning, turning the straight angles into circular flows, defining surfaces through the thickness of the perimeter. As has been previously argued, the narration of objects is liquid and flows into the intimate spaces of private geography. The sign vibrates with gravitational currents, following the inner rhythm like a wild electrocardiogram. Bucchi’s world resembles the liberating palmistry of the main character in “Tron: Legacy” (interpreted by Jeff Bridges), that Kevin Flynn who moulds a parallel world on the neutral base of purely private visions. Form and contents of the two movies blend together in the fixed short circuit between real and virtual; something similar happens to Bucchi in his complex short circuit between languages, genres and styles.

Danilo Bucchi does not have any affiliation to illustration and comics. I wish to conclude with this denial which turns into an assertion of identity, in order to avoid the for