2014 – MONOCHROME – Galleria Poggiali – Florence
DIARY OF A VISIT TO THE STUDIO OF DANILO BUCCHI
di Angela Madesani
On an unusually hot day in August 2014,1 I was sitting on the sofa in Danilo Bucchi’s studio in Rome. It’s a place awash with stimuli, angles, and intriguing objects: papers, syringes,2 cameras3 and lenses, tidily arranged in a small glass cabinet standing on the table beside the computer. We talked about art, about painting. We were looking at his works when, out of the corner of my curious eye I glimpsed a medium-size painting that had been placed close to the sofa, in a not overly visible position. I was immediately struck by its spatial economy: it was a white painting with an area painted in black, in the left-hand corner, populated with Danilo’s customary characters. It turned out that it’s a work Bucchi is particularly attached to, a sort of pictorial manifesto. I perceived in it, mutatis mutandis, a reference to a famous painting by Jacques Louis David,4 The Death of Marat, of 1793, in which the subject is painted in the lower part of the painting and occupies only about half of the canvas, the remainder consisting of a large dark monochrome area.
The recollection was triggered by the fact that, in both the works, the subject is painting itself, in its most profound essence. And it was precisely his love of painting that launched Bucchi on his journey through art. As a boy he would go with his father to visit Mario Schifano in his studio in Via delle Mantellate, where he was greatly impressed by the artist’s stylistic synthesis and pictorial freedom. This was when the realised that it still makes sense to devote yourself to art. With the force and inexperience of an adolescent, he perceived the love and passion that can drive an artist. Shortly afterwards he enrolled at artistic secondary school, and later at the Accademia in Rome where indeed he chose to study painting.
In all the works of Danilo Bucchi the weight of the void is decisive. He himself explains how his biography is important in this respect: “I am Roman, and deeply attached to my city. Rome is a beautiful old lady bedecked in jewels. It’s almost impossible to add anything. On the contrary, I think it’s more important to take something away.”5 Born in the late 70s – in 1978 – he grew up with Graffiti Art, which he succeeded in metabolising and digesting, evolving his own easily recognisable language, which nevertheless has very few links with that sort of art. Bucchi is interested in simplification. His most famous works are indeed made up of black lines used to build up figures, stylised puppets, little houses and signs. To create them, as we said, he uses a syringe, fitted with needles of different sizes. It is like a species of writing, the starting-point of which comes from the recurrent, daily use of notebooks in which the artist draws: “Drawing and painting have replaced writing for me. It comes naturally to me to express myself through a flow of ink, which runs over the paper as if it were writing. For me it is a sort of healthy compulsive obsession.”6 In a piece dating to a few years back Giorgia Calò wrote: “The Sign nevertheless remains inextricably bound up with an attentive formal and stylistic research; it is constructed around a single, essential line that constitutes its backbone and becomes manifest through the action of the artist.”7
But this is where things get tricky: the canvas consists of warp and weft, and rarely is the weave so dense as to have the same surface as paper – a much-loved and oft used material. And so Bucchi prepares the canvases, rendering them white,8 or rather of a whiteness so impermeable that the paint cannot penetrate the weave of the canvas resulting in irritating blurs. In short, to paraphrase Lucio Fontana, the action of the painting is a sort of battle with the white sheet. The notion of space and the desire for construction are evident in all Danilo Bucchi’s works. His is an authentic obsession for the precision of touch, with a hand at times light and at other times heavier. At some points it is almost as if one can conceive a sense of three-dimensionality. The white of the ground is a need for purity, like a cancellation from which to depart each time in order to move forward. In all this there is a continual play of overlapping levels. The observer can take an active part in his work: the white space admits the possibility of intervening through the gaze, attributing a constructive potential to the same.
Bucchi’s sign is a primary element of the pictorial alphabet, which is revealed in all its nudity. It is like a skeleton waiting to be clothed in flesh. It is like a liberating exercise of purification, a mantra that enables him to be at peace with himself and with the world. Indeed his signs can be combined ad infinitum: the difficulty lies in being able to stop. In most of his work Bucchi uses non-colours: white and black, sporadically joined by red, dramatic and difficult in its preponderant appearance, a colour profoundly rooted in his painterly essence. Furthermore, as he himself says, red is the most sensual colour that exists, and Burri’s red Combustions, for which Bucchi feels a particular attraction, are among the most erotic works in the history of art. Nothing is ever taken for granted. His attitude in the face of every new painting is a mixture of enthusiasm and anguish. It is never a question of craft: Bucchi is moved instead by an overwhelming need to resolve the various spatial and structural problems that come to the fore, giving life to a world of formally closely-related figures that operate as units of measurement from which to start in order to create situations. In all his works it is as if we can perceive a more or less intense musicality. Bucchi loves all good music, and electronic music in particular which offers a beat/bit that is not saturated, leaving space for the intervention of the listener, just like his own works. “The truth of the whites and the truth of the blacks in the right equation offer a possible key for access.”9 The Florentine show will also feature some large paintings with dolls. Here, we find a doll, often in a seated position, set in the middle of the white ground. This cycle was begun in 2005 and completed in 2012.10 It started out as an exercise in style, and then everything took on a precise connotation.
The relation with oil paint, with its almost sculptural materiality, became an authentic poetic exigency. The figures went to flesh out the skeletons, made up of the sign. Here it seems as though we can find links with certain artistic expressions of the 1920s and 30s, with the Dadaist Hannah Höch. But it’s not a precise reference: there are no citations, it is more a metabolisation of what he has seen and continues to see, of what he has studied with interest over the years. “We can all be compared to someone: it’s only in the sign and in the writing that the authenticity is to be found.”11 The dolls evoke female figures. They are psychological portraits, figures plucked from the subconscious that are spawned from within and find an external form in a sort of contamination between the different parts of existence. In them I feel I can also read a sort of profound melancholy: the saturnine melancholy of the artist, but also the more natural melancholy of the ineluctable passage of time. The dolls emerge from an operation of excavation in the memory, the reworking of details of women’s faces. The titles are not a prior choice any more than the evolution of the various paintings. Bucchi does not work towards achieving a precise aim. It is the painting that becomes manifest as it emerges, and hence gives rise to the title. Bucchi’s approach to art is not one of domination, but rather of the wish to let oneself go, allowing oneself to be led into territories yet to be discovered, through which the meaning of things can be revealed to him and to we who observe.
1 In Italy the summer of 2014 offered very few really hot days.
2 “Why a syringe instead of a brush? It is Bucchi himself who explains it to us, when he says that, according to him, the brush is a distracting medium since one is obliged to remove it from the canvas to fill it with colour.” in G.Calò, Segni, ovvero tracce di un percorso insolito in D.Scudero, G.Calò, Danilo Bucchi Signs. The Black Line, Gangemi Editore, Roma, 2011; p.24.
3 Bucchi never goes out without his camera, which he uses to take note of everything around him.
4 J.L.David (1748-1825) was a French painter who, having won the Prix de Rome in 1775, came to Italy where he remained for five years and discovered Italian art – in particular Michelangelo, Raphael, Caravaggio and Guido Reni – and where he began to approach Neoclassicism, especially in theoretical terms. He returned home in 1780.
5 Danilo Bucchi, in a conversation with the writer of this piece in August 2014.
6 Danilo Bucchi, in a conversation with the writer of this piece in August 2014.
7 G.Calò, op.cit.; p. 22.
8 He has performed lengthy research into the materials in order to perform this operation in a satisfactory manner.
9 Danilo Bucchi, in a conversation with the writer of this piece in August 2014.
10 Bucchi works in cycles.
11 Danilo Bucchi, in a conversation with the writer of this piece in August 2014.
