52

LUCIANO CARAMEL, 1994

Ed. Sale del Monte di Pietà, Palazzo del Comune di Spoleto, 1994.

January, 1994

         "The concept of structure-space-light moves within a rational analytical study in which I tend to reduce the means and modes of operation in a rigorous and demanding meditation." said Paolo Gubinelli about his work in 1975. When he was thirty and in midst of his "rational analytical study." Which aimed at a "rigorous and demanding" level but also of "meditation." And by means of a "reduction" of "means and modes of operation."

         In this statement, we already find the peculiar poly-dimensional aspect of the artist, divided between rationality, factuality and a finalisation not merely demonstrative or objective-object. As is evidenced in the continuation of the above text where Gubinelli insists on the tool: "Paper, or rather, a light cardboard chosen for its softness and docility to the touch." And then on the technical procedure: "... on this surface, using a blade, I trace a cut following geometric lines (projections, planes overturned...)" and then "delicately, carefully, I make folds which create a subtle relief, capable of involving space, giving it structure, making it perceptible, but also arousing emotions of purity, quiet and clarifying purity."

         Consequentiality, but also flagrant processes; physicality of material, charged with values which from concrete incite reflection; goal of acts that do not stop at experience but, rooted in it, are freed in a psychological condition, a timorous and, in its own way, untakable reality. And here, with his first works, we can feel the acuteness of Argan's diagnosis, more than fifteen years later when, in 1991, the artist had developed, but neither betrayed nor abandoned his original co-ordinates. Argan indeed notes, "Your rationality seems to me not deductive, logical, but instead inductive," that "your quest is to dematerialise or dephenomenalise paper, removing its limit as a surface and, by means of fine cuts, construct spatiality without volume and light without rays. In brief, you reduce material and visual facts to immaterial rigor, rational quality. Your rationality therefore consists in attributing geometric value to signs which are not canonically geometric."

         "It is a way to contest the claim of rationality which is so much in fashion today," concludes Argan who, though recognising that "some of the criticisms the post-moderns make at rationalism are not unfounded," declares he remains "a rationalist" always intent on "finding a dimension of the rational beyond logic." And if I may add for Gubinelli, beyond mathematics, geometry and subjection, in general, to abstract moulds which do not create friction with the materials and tools, with the vibrant experience of making art, with the worldly dimension, even in the individual sense, and of repercussion on the individual's consciousness. The project and planning Gubinelli claims and practices have nothing to do with theoretic or ideological assertiveness, nor with an excessively consequential and, in its assumptions, "a priori" method of operating, even if only in the sense of not considering the factual moment, intended as something "a posteriori:" execution invalidating the material with a "modern" idealistic embodiment. This in a certain sense justifies the declined fortunes of so much analytic-experimental art, involved in the much-diffused disaffection for an art proposed as alternative to passive cataloguing. An art experienced as immersion in the reality of today's life, which finds so much credit among younger generations who thus inevitably renounce a propositive artistic practice of mere recording, though intensified by the efficacy of medias such as photography, video or virtual reality so much and widely adopted.

         Here, more than in the undoubtedly new solutions denounced by more recent works, lies Gubinelli's actuality, in syntony with the becoming of history and of art. I refer to the freedom of sign, the capability of restlessly vibrant colours to evoke emotions with painful or elegiac tones, with leaps and starts which go beyond the clarity of the most remote traces and their discrete production of light variations, even entering the surrounding space, modifying and undergoing modification. Not beyond Argan's "inductive rationality," however. As we can already find in the Eighties when Gubinelli introduces colour to the transparent paper he had been using for some time in substitution of a heavy white mat paper. Differently applied — in signs, in varyingly shaded nuclei, also denser though never tending to a homogeneous field — and by degrees charged with a growing, meaningful and expressive importance. Even then, however, without ever rejecting a rhythm which, inductively deriving from interacting signs and colours, with a primary role in realising the image's internal rhythm, its unfolding in time, in an intrinsic need to perform and make elsewhere visible, gives body to something which, though not a preconcept, is exhausted in performing, evoking pulsions and a mental organisation revealed in form and in form invalidated.

         Look deeply into the latest works, as the author recommended with his earlier works ("my 'papers' demand an unsuperficial, careful and prolonged interpretation; their message is not readily perceivable and they require a viewer disposed to meditate on their content, motivations and stimuli"). And you will note a tectonic structure constantly behind the shudders and fits that travel through the images. Never is there an abandonment to an effusive automatism, though what is born on the sheet dwells in the encounter of the hand and a field virgin to occurrences. Gesture seems guided (not halted or constrained) by an intention of order, in the stage of birth, but derives from a sedimented and vigil conscious state which, within the limits we have repeatedly stated, claims the task of projecting.

         In this sense — and this sense alone, without opening up to a concept of life and flow that animates the cosmos of oriental culture that I feel Gubinelli has nothing to do with — can we accept Munari's pertinent reference (if indeed it is so) to the proposition, in the artist's works, of "pre-perceptive stimuli, not yet shapes, almost fragments of signs, apparitions of colours." Consequence of "suspension" and "concentration: before the hand, the body, move towards an action, towards discharging emotions onto objects, suspension comes to know a physical grain, a sensitive opening," as Paolo Fossati observed, pertinently underlining with reference to Munari's explanations that "the paradox of the Zen quotation lies in the fact that the illusion whole is pronounced in the face of a realising, a making, of sheets, paints and works." Munari indeed writes that "these barely marked sheets bring to mind the thoughts of a Buddhist monk of the end of the year one thousand two hundred, by the name of Kenko, who in his book, 'Moments of Idleness,' affirmed: "This world is such an uncertain and changing place that what we imagine to see before our eyes, in reality, does not exist...We can not be sure that the mind exists. All things external are illusions." While a Western Gubinelli, matured between Marches and Tuscany, is not comprehensible outside of a consequentiality of mind and heart created and revealed as it comes into reality with acts based in a timid subjectivity which, though conscious of the precariousness and limit of all planning, does not reject the forming will but is instead convinced of the growing wealth of propositivity, neither abstract, systematic, nor prevaricating.

Ed. Palazzo Pretorio, City of Prato, 1994

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