The Sign of Art
The art of Paolo Gubinelli has for a long time been the absolute sign of art, its pure evidence without points of reference. In the history of Western painting, he is not the only one in this free-trade zone of painted grounds and abstract or non-abstract configurations, at least since Mondrian sanctioned the idea of the abstract sign, between sky and earth, with his plus and minus signs in a painted rose on a white ground.
In the time and at the pace of his journey in painting and in the painting of signs, the artist has undertaken a continuous advancement of a work in progress that generates and regenerates itself along the route of imaginative coherence, and of a resolute poetics with the constants no less active than the variables. It would not be impossible to distinguish in Gubinelli’s work a symptomatic quality between the sign and the artist’s past experiences, a sort of existential seismograph between the sign, signs and the artist’s biography. And I’m not saying this to charge his expressivity, his personal coupling of abstraction and reality, with the subjective perspective and personal lyricism, but to show how his imagination and poetics of the sign, his practise and declination of the sign have unfolded and continue to do so, in correspondence with the spirit of the time.
The unfaltering topicality of his work, which is graphic for manual skill and lyricism, for project and sensitivity, certainly does not lie so much in the chronicle of days, in the succession of facts, as it does instead in a renewed and communicating reception of an always immanent and present poetry. A topicality experienced and recorded as an image to be then proposed and unfold in the contemporary realities of art, in their succession marked by forms and languages, practises and configurations, since the beginning of his artistic journey in the full 1970s.
For transport and devotion, for creative mania, the mutations he has undertaken in the practise of the sign, a plastic and linear pronouncement of geometrical and cursive weaves on a paper support with transparencies, whiteness and moiré colours, always give in to the present, in the operative flagrancy of the gesture that cuts and draws. Hence, though with a secluded spirit, experience drives the art of Gubinelli into being, into the action of the expressive dictate in the unfolding of militancy in art.
I recall my first encounter with his art a few decades ago at his studio in the Rifredi district of Florence where supports and equipment, paper and canvas, transparencies and cutters, punches and squares all lay in a material array indistinct from the rigour of the sign, its slight motions, its slits and folds, projecting the light of the sheets. In his place of work, Gubinelli revealed himself to me as an architect of the sign, artificer and mystagogue of a theatre in which careful manual skill choreographed the dramaturgy of the sign, the solos and choral quality, the clean drafts and feminine metamorphoses.
The temperature of art at that time was of a rarefied and active objectivity, free from the expressionisms of the informal gesture, the most recent social ironies of pop art, and the various kinetic-perceptive technologies. Between the extroverted exhibitions of the body in body-art and the minimalisms of plastic bodies, between land-art and sophisticated conceptualities, between happening and narrative-art, the years of passage from the Seventies and the Eighties, through this past decade and the next, mark the beginnings and maturity of Gubinelli’s work in entrusting the practise of the sign, its absolute gesture of an abstract image, to perform a mobile and tacit comparison with the trends underway, towards the diverse poetics of art. More than one commenter has pointed out these connections to other artistic explorations, and here with the experience of the search lies the intense otherness of his creative formulation with respect to the usual field of so-called graphic art.
Overall, we can say that until today, Gubinelli has tended to conduct the sign and its plastic and pictorial elaboration, overstepping the conventional field of the apparatus of techniques and results of graphic art, though keeping to the institutional paper support. This vocation incorporates and makes the sign transit between plastic and painting, architecture and the cursive, installation and spatial mobility, manual extroversion and expressive intimacy.
As always occurs when the specificities of technique are sidestepped, Gubinelli’s graphic sign, too, in its autonomous constructive and poetic dimension, establishes its own formal statute, in a full and plural image capacity. We can say with Focillon, author of Vie des formes: “The sign signifies, but once it becomes form, it aspires to signify itself, and creates its new sense”. This, in short, is mental and sensible virtuality, the virtuous dimension of stroke and light, of the spatial script and colour that animate the practise of the sign, its renewed generation of sense between project and induction, rigour and emotional abandonment. The artist has always elaborated the sign in an indistinct and convertible spatial game, between surface and space, sheet and wall. On seeing the bare rectangular leaves that he usually arranges in sequence on exhibition walls and the rolls of paper that he lets unroll down to the floor, we realise that in the transparencies and delicate watered colours that lend it a setting, the sign tends to surpass the usual and frontal two-dimensionality. It tends to catch us in a sort of temporal web, a vehiculating and stereo discursiveness, that is to say according to the perceptive stimulus of a tale recounted by visual-colloquial involvement, by the entangling junction of thoughts entrusted to and revealed in four-dimensional space.
In this light, we can dare say that Gubinelli’s absolute sign, his full articulation of the image aspires to the ubiquitous space of poetry, where manually forming the sheet in folds and segments that project onto the paper’s flat surface, where the cut sign and water-coloured drafts follow and pursue streams of thought in combining with an impulse of pervasive writing, and of total poetry. In fact, there have been numerous and intense relations between Gubinelli’s art and that of poets: between papers, signs and verses dedicated to his expressive story, his conducting and communicating an extreme and inexhaustible junction between vision and poetry. Almost as though a sort of natural magnetisation of spirit and script destines and urges to interaction, a shared dictate, a similar mania of poiesis.
Perhaps it all hails back to an ancestral matrix of the sign, an anthropological primary and remote pronouncement of the sign, which without limits began to signify differences of sense and script. Those distant times heralded the onset of a sensitive and emotional pronouncement, a poetical pronouncement that led to the first articulations, the first grammars and architectures of the sign and of the work in vision and hearing. As only the power of art can regenerate and make topical, the art and poetry of Gubinelli’s sign prove to stir such distant roots, such profound origins between sign and word. His visible architecture of the sign sinks its web in poetry, his measure of the sign and colour in the harmonic metrics of the verse. In effect, according to imminent linguist Roman Jakobson, there is a remarkable analogy between the role of grammar in poetry and the role of composition for the painter.
Sorrento, May 2010
Luigi Paolo Finizio
PAOLO GUBINELLI'S DESCRITION ART WORK...
CRITICAL ANTHOLOGIC...
PAOLO GUBINELLI BIOGRAPHY...
Visit the Paolo Gubinelli's space in "Artists in focus" of the BauForm.Translation by Victor Palchetti Beard
