2013 – ANTONIO MARRAS + DANILO BUCCHI insieme siamo altro-Palazzo Collicola Arti Visive
TOGETHER WE ARE SOMETHING ELSE
Gianluca Marziani
Drawing as the origin of the figurative vision The body as ever-changing organic geography
Antonio Marras + Danilo Bucchi: two interior attitudes, two complementary methods of dealing with formal elaboration and with the imaginative threshold of visionariness. An eclectic designer, who strays from the field of fashion into other territories, and an Italian artist who is constantly in the ascendant meet on the Piano Nobile of Collicola Palace. An alchemy of the material and spatial senses, a dialectical fusion generating the archetypes of primordial drawing, the figurative inspiration of the shared origins, the gestural expressiveness as emotive “technology” of the liberating control. The sequence of small and large rooms provides a suitable environment for the project: the journey becomes an aerobic breath, permeating each single area, spreading variable percentages of “oxygen”, now with deep breaths, now with short, syncopated puffs, now with momentary flashes of apnoea. I like thinking of artworks as lungs in the areas of memory: oxygen is not to be seen; yet, it is a necessary nourishment which moulds to surfaces, a variable flow circulating through our own bodies and integrating us into the surroundings. This is actually the role of the artworks on the Piano Nobile: shy, yet generous in front of the majesty of such an illustrious past, mimetically arranged without any emphasis, like the fluid footprints of a contemporary archaeology. I conceive this exhibition as a diary catapulting us into a journey of hypnotic moments, through the poetry of unfolding details which discover temporary shelters: expressive sinusoids among tables, drawers, chairs, walls, other pieces of furniture, other surfaces, in the heart of a silent scenography, in the suspended limbo of a shared house for symbiotic ideas.
On the one hand, Marras, with his masterly handicraft and his plastic sense of the raw material, the anthropological energy of his generative visions and the poetic quality of his installations. On the other hand, Bucchi, with his black line between instinct and method and the narrative nature of his figurative language, his hybrid bodies between dream and discipline and his synthesis of childish drawing which turns into a random diary. Two approaches to building, two elaboration strategies which resemble and complement each other by virtue of the models and structures they adopt. Two planets choosing common galaxies, as to share sliding experiences.
For Marras, fashion has always been a sort of intimate diary, where clothes are used like scattered sheets, ideal sheets of worn-out paper, through which inspiration is transcribed into fabrics, seams, cuts, layers. While handicraft has a syntactic function, the ancestral memories, the culture of the artist’s original territory, the idealisation of recycling, the cultural mixture build the grammatical structure. I hardly ever witness a propensity for volume and sculptural contents in fashion; instead, it usually pursues formal goals (Haute Couture) to process a drive which is intrinsic to the structure. Marras, though, adds an inventive element, based on abstraction and key concepts, supplying us with clothes which evoke stories, hint at themes, point out specific contents. The designer sews his inner worlds in a pictorial way, turning them into a defined (and therefore finished), but never definitive cloth, in accordance with the archaic nature of drawing.
Bucchi’s art has always been a diary available in many formats, a sequential itinerary which follows the emotional urges, the temporary inclinations, the atypical face of everyday life. His characters mirror the sensorial and sentimental perimeters of the inner world: they resemble dynamic projections through which what is inside the painting is taken outside, transpiring marks mapping surfaces like a necessary root. Within the black perimeters “clothing ceremonies” take place, rituals of the memory are celebrated, while whiteness turns into a germinating container. A pictorial propensity shows through, which covers instinctual nakedness using rationality as a narrative binding agent of the image. Bucchi implicitly but knowingly sews the figurative elements around the filaments of his perimeters, around profiles which are intrinsically characterised by the methodology of control and the freedom of palmistry.
Drawing as the origin of the figurative vision Drawing, Bucchi’s primary code, is Marra’s alive matter, his creative source, his loyal memory. Significantly, the designer fills his notebooks with figurative notes including memory and intuition, introspection and imagination. A sort of motionless journey towards that fateful cloth with the sculpture canons. Thought and drawing penetrate each other without any distance. There is no industrial process in the visionary moment, in the abstract instant of a suspended, fatal, incandescent thought.
The body as ever-changing organic geography. Dressing bodies, which is a natural attitude for Marras, becomes an implicit urge for Bucchi, a subtle sartorial painting, which puts the emphasis on surfaces as the container of its signature code, its emotive alchemy, its psychoanalytical key behind the details. Bucchi’s pictorial drawing adopts the approach of the artisan, who deal with heterogeneous materials, with dissonances which are to be blended together without any breakage. The artist seems to resemble the designer, who looks for answers in the added embroidery, as if manual skills implied the biological sense intrinsic to the fact of belonging to the chosen world.
Sensorial rooms…because each active rooms awakens our senses with an insightful palmistry. The scenic rhythm includes aesthetic actions which can be regarded as installations; each room is a domestic hypothesis for the temporary Spoleto-based life of the artworks. These series of six drawers, complemented by as many paintings, the large round table, the spinet and the writing desk, the dressing tables…A prosthesis of the place, representing the dumb army of the Palace, memories of woods, marbles and fabrics, to listen to the destiny of the present day. Here, Marras’s and Bucchi’s works show the soul of the passers-by, but also the alchemy of the inhabitants. They rest where they find peace; yet, they seem to be an organic part of the place. Therefore, we have dismissed the frontal logic of the canonical vision: works needed an arrangement which took reality into consideration; they had to belong to the plausible code of life. Hence the idea of the exhibition: the arrangement of the rooms, the key to pushing the imagination beyond the image.
An exhibition which is meant to be a dialogue about identity, a reflection on the canons of drawing, on the relation between image and materials, on the passages which constitute the inventive process. Seams, layers, implosions, absorptions, coverings, overlaps: the paintings combine complementary ideas of the body, as though each silhouette was a geography of interior wars, a restless map, a high-sentimental density area. We see raw natures and colours, decisive fragments and cathartic gestures, crazy vortexes, dripping shades and stains, dystonic elements and oneiric perspectives…we see variously-sized sheets resting on pieces of furniture, other works which seem to be flying, minimal works, refined paper but also plain pieces of notebook…we see sculptures which are emblematic of Bucchi’s expressive pathos and of his amiably empathizing characters…we see surprising combinations, scenic apparitions, empty spaces filling up without any emphasis…a mimetically arranged and silently elegant project, which moulds to the volumes of an ancient habitat, where the materials take part in the special ritual of a “clothing ceremony” of the inner world.
Some might wonder what the works “talk” about. Obviously, this question can only be answered by the paintings themselves: the solution belongs to our own eyes, to the way we use our inner binoculars. Yet, some common obsessions resurface, unfaked instants which point out the deep reasons behind a dialogue where two brains, four hands and three hearts (Antonio, Danilo, and the place itself) interact. The body is a common universe they both refer to – no doubt about it. The passage to extraordinariness happens through violent and expressive emotionality, through gestures, hugs, pulls, flash tangles. The cathartic expressiveness of femininity throbs, along with the maternal archetype, the unbridled eroticism, the emotional mutilation, the emptiness which often cannot be filled. The savage beauty of pain, the animal fierceness, the bloody red of passion, the ecstatic violence of private power. Here there are no gangways, but only junctions, invisible structures connecting two visions, two approaches, two attitudes to creation. This is not an epilogue, but rather the new beginning of contemporary beauty: hybrid, metamorphic, disjointed, pantheistic, incoherent, oneiric, romantically furious, deideologised; the child of memory and the mother of our future.
When the cloth becomes habitus When the painting becomes plastic volume When the dialogue becomes project
