52

Milan, February 7, 2002

Dear Gubinelli,

         I readily accept your invitation to write a few lines about your work. More than critical reflection, however, I want to let myself go to emotional involvement and describe my most immediate and spontaneous impressions.

         Illustrious critics have written about you including Giulio Carlo Argan who wisely underlined how the rationality that emerges from your investigation, is not deductive but inductive and not readily demonstrable. As Argan said in 1991, a search that gives rise to a spatiality without volume, light without rays.

         Therefore it is not the pure logical process that interests you, but instead the search for the dimension that goes beyond the physical sphere. In this sense, light and colour deposit on the paper, interacting with it, almost making it a graph of the unconscious or, better still, a route with distant roots in the memory of existence.

         In your case, painting asserts itself as revelation, an autonomous mental process where nature acts from within things, maintaining a subtle balance between feeling and reason.

         After all, it was Theo Van Doesburg who claimed that “there is nothing more concrete and real than a line, a colour, a project,” and your work that like photographic plates is capable of absorbing the matrix of painting, is there to show just this.

         In short, you have the rare capability to grasp the invisible trace of the real, breaking away from the excessively rigid schematisation between abstraction and figuration.

         The fundamental question lies in involving space, intended as the totality of sign and material. The extraordinary Bruno Munari, artist and theorist who in large part remains to be discovered, has rightfully underlined how your work proposes “pre-perceptive stimuli, fragments of signs and apparitions of colour,” hinting at the relation between your work and Zen philosophy.

         Indeed, it is Munari in 1985 who reminds us that “only art, by now completely free, can lead us to explore these unexplored worlds at the confines of perception.”

         Gubinelli’s sign becomes physical presence and lyrical evocation, but also memory, intuition and symbol within the confines of an individual and autonomous journey. This bethinks me of a phrase by Maurice Merleau-Ponte who recalls how “ we are dispensed from understanding how painting the body can be felt in the soul” and, faced with a system of contemporary art that tends to freeze feelings, I feel that the vital thrust afforded by your rarefied, though never truly minimalist investigation is an important fact. It is not my intention to contradict the important critics who have preceded me, but I must say that, at least in your most recent works, the parallels with Lucio Fontana or Enrico Castellani do not appear so evident.

         On the other hand – as Giovanni Maria Accame has already noted – yours are not lacerations, but instead slight grazes revealing the control of reason.

         For this reason, I am inclined to place you in the vein of aesthetic investigation that has succeeded in combining poetry and rationalism, lightness and harmony, sign and dream. I refer in particular to Osvaldo Licini, Gastone Novelli, Fausto Melotti and, of course, Paul Klee. It was indeed this German master who wrote “the line no longer imitates the visible, but renders visible.”

         Today at a time when art is increasingly more tied to advertising and the mass-media, it is comforting to have an artist such as yourself who goes in search of the unsaid, the immaterial element, in short, of the dimension of the unconscious that protects the most secret truths of things.

         And it is no coincidence that more than artists, your fellow travellers are poets.

Best Wishes,

Alberto Fiz

Milan, February 2000

Ed. Villa Pomini, Città di Castellanza, 2002

Unpublished poetic prose by T. Rossi

an other: put here..   1    2   3

Paolo.Gubinelli@inso.it

giosue@giosuemarongiu.it

www.giosuemarongiu.it

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