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Carmine Benincasa

“A Poet in Times of Poverty” Paolo Gubinelli

A marked awareness of the unique and unrepeatable importance of an artist’s dynamic gesture, the actual act of painting – the emotional expression of the body – was suddenly recognized as the subject of painting (or drawing) language in twentieth-century art. It became the mark and manifestation of consciousness. Even an unintentional trace of the hand, a sketch, was an event indicative of a person’s unique and absolute worth as a subject of history, considered the ultimate foundation of every other value.

An artist does not paint because he has something to say, or to do, to the world, but because he exists. His mark, his touch of paint, is the revelation of his definitive worth, the foundation of all others, and of the absolute uniqueness of his person together with unrepeatabilty of his adventure in the face of history.

Painting with the pulsating freedom of unintentional, non-preconceived, physical gestures is a sign of the supremacy and priority of existence as a physical quality, and even the importance of the body explodes as a value and unrepeatable symptom and as an absolute asset. As such, the act of painting is no longer related to the world or to historical interpretation, nor to designs regarding understanding and will, nor to the morality of a political-social tension whose aim is to communicate values or send messages. The artist accomplishes his work not to say something, but because his “doing” is an expression of his existence, one unique and unrepeatable, in history.

What does change with this new awareness, the difference which happens on this new horizon of awareness, is well-defined in Alice’s words to her kitten: “Because, you see, what is, in my world, is not; and what is not, is” (Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland). Lines, marks and even sketches are the expression of the unrepeatability and uniqueness of an artist’s state of historical existence as a person.

The twentieth-century painting universe turned its focus toward what the body did, produced, described and made happen with a beating, pulsating hand and what that hand wrote and left us, without obeying a preconceived idea or rational intentions. Art which turns history into something different from what it was before a hand transcribed the signs that the body produced in the rhythm of a dropping arm motivated by instinctive corporeal pulsations. Consequently, a new universe appeared, neither proportional nor related to the external universe of our awareness.

Communication of art is not the transmission of a message or of meanings nor the transposition of reasoning. Art claims the right to recognize even the dislocated play of colors and marks that “making” art inevitably may produce as the unique and absolute value, in all ways equal to that of a person’s historical existence. That which is executed is a work, and that which takes place is handed down in as a splinter, a testimony of the unique state of existing. What an artist executes is a historical document. Its message, its communication, is already contained in the movement of the things that take place.

Communication is not the task of art. Art is not a logical but an analogical word, and as it is both analogical and a sign, it does not belong to the realm of reason (in fact, the Western world has always thought of the logos as a conduit of meaning). The word itself is not meant to produce meaning: in the Orient, the sign is also the conduit of an inherent meaning inscribed by the pure motion of a hand, without any other design. In the twentieth century an artist no longer let his rationality dominate him when executing a work, but was guided by the work itself. The work turned into a becoming a work.

The fact of being poets of light (painters) means living in an unsymmetrical and conflictual relationship with one’s era and with the task and aims pursued by one’s world. This means that one becomes a foreigner lingering on the fringes of each and every event.

Remaining suspended on the threshold of events, experiencing the condition of someone in the middle, as Hölderlin wrote, means watching each thing that happens (historical memory or real event in the present time, a beat of furtive perceptions like the heart’s regard or the reasons of the mind lend them form, making them into stories and history) as if through a fog. It means perceiving forms in constant motion, like those see-sawing on a movie editing table, which assume new shapes that immediately turn into other figures, images and signs. A work allows the conscience to see the world and everything inhabiting it, even the chasm of one’s personal history of the conscience.

Yet art is still not the true world of an achieved reconciliation, from one face to another, when we could see face to face: “for now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face[…]” (Corinthians I, 13,12).

Painters, like poets, treat their relation with the world as if it were an autobiographical beat of the experience and totality of an economic plan for salvation, because the time of painting is the time of salvation for the conscience of our era and our history, in an artist’s experience.

Martin Heidegger wrote: “Being a poet in times of poverty” (enumerated by Hölderlin in his elegy “Bread and Wine”) “means, singing, to be inspired by the traces of the gods who have fled. That is why in the nighttime in the world, the poet sings Eternity.” So a painter of times of poverty must deliberately paint the essence of painting. But what the artist paints is not that which exists in the world. Painting is only that which is, without being a revelation of that which is already visible.

The architectonic structure of painting from previous centuries fell apart, and on that incipient and vacillating attempt of painting liberated from form and articulated according to a disordered chessboard of colors, the past century laid its foundations directed toward what was new and future. Painting no longer obeyed harmonious forms and model-compositions of the cultural universe of previous centuries, but became the space of liberation to interpret the conscience of the artist vis-a-vis the world, an expression and revelation of his own inner vision. Color became an epiphany of the heart’s light, subjugated to theological suggestions in the face of creation.

“What else can we do other than betting on hope?” wondered François Mitterand in 1981 about the cultural situation.

The same question persists in the universe of art, perturbing the psyche. Hope is not as vain, uncertain, dilated in the future. It geminates and becomes history in the “signs of the times,” making it necessary for us to discern, decode, and cultivate it.

I find the work of Paolo Gubinelli, an artist of rare delicate intelligence and quality, of courageous and remote intellect, faithful to his roots, whose work pulses with aristocratic signs alluding to the Orient but constructed on Montale’s “lesson of glory,” from Klee, Kandinsky and from the sublime, unrepeatable adventure of the Bauhaus. Gubinelli’s work is “a sign of the times” in this dry, arid season of contemporary art, reminiscent of an amusement park spinning top.

Great work in lyrical and aesthetic art have abandoned our current artistic-cultural milieu over the past few decades. The great adventure of the Bauhaus seems remote these days. A mental illness impedes European culture from reinvigorating its recent past. There is urgent need to overcome “the slumber of memory” as the journalist Barbara Spinelli calls it in her historical-political book. She writes: “The more memory is evoked, the more it is ossified, to the point of verging on sterility. The more its absence is mourned, the more appeals have an empty ring. The gap between reflecting on the past and procedures, between an invitation to remember and the incapacity to react, cannot be clearer.” (B. Spinelli, Il sonno della memoria, Milan 2001).

Paolo Gubinelli is courageous and is no victim of the cult of memory. Horizons and landscapes of all the most noble, delicate and refined art of the XX century flow into his work – like a delicate and subtle stream.

Gubinelli, with his studies, prevents the present time from stagnating by turning it into movement. He drops into time and recognizes it, thereby lending his studies a sense of his times. He regards the present from behind the giants of art of the past century, and from above their backs he gazes far into the distance, reinvigorating the great conquests of the most refined Novecento artists of Europe, with a particular accent on the masters of the Bauhaus.

Gubinelli’s work is a book, a single work recounting a historical period of studies in art by means of his own autobiographical path.

The scattered pages of this autobiography are part of a single roll, in whose every fragment, every page, Gubinelli – with an ascetic outlook – narrates the landscape of art as he sees it and turns a Song into a fragment that is only his personal comment on the Novecento artistic adventure, in which he gives precedence to studies aimed at reducing the ultimate harmony of the universe into filaments of signs and, by choosing geometry over any rough material, he transforms the recount into an echo which dissolves into a vague recollection of the mathematical origins of the universe.

His works are excerpts and echoes of poetry which belongs to a single body: that of subtraction, of the elimination of material to make room only for light. Everything in his studies is architecture of signs in which “one sign corrects another sign” (P.P. Pasolini, in Teorema).

Gubinelli’s regard turns towards the universe and deciphers it in signs-designs, guiding the cosmos back into harmony. His landscape dissolves into rhythms, geometrical formulae, numerical proportions, alchemistic theories about indecipherable paths. The artist’s universe prompts us to seek the center. But is seeking a center possible these days? In tune with twentieth-century scientific and philosophical research, with the most refined poetry of such Alexandrian poets as Edmond Jabès, and with the obscure spiral of mysticism, it is clear that for this artist (as for Paul Klee in “Highroad and Byroads” and in almost all his work), the center is the distant outskirts, shattered dispersion, absence turned into awareness, the oblivion of knowledge, the ritual of anamnesis transformed into amnesia.

These works of his have no center, and without a center there is no margin nor backbone nor form nor seal; there is only that vagueness of a luminous trace of colorful water, only an enveloping and alluding veil.

These sheets record footprints, fragile tracks for a tracing a path in the desert. These works by Gubinelli safeguard the charm of a void, as required by Zen, and therefore are the same sort of testimony as Oriental painting coupled with Chinese-Japanese sorts of calligraphy. They are works expressing an message without using words. They are simply grazed by the life breath of the artist, the murmur of the fragile and modest wandering-oscillating of his hand. A life that rests on the pages painted by the artist, who tries to diffuse a watery veil to check the unraveling and to safeguard and protect the hopeful fabric of his regard.

And if memory surfaces, it only refers to that which no longer exists. These works are always temples of silence, of voids, of primordial melancholic landscapes, harmonies that refer back to the beginning of each and every universe.

All of Gubinelli’s studies refer to a path, his true passion, a pursuit of “the ups and downs” (as it was called in a excerpt by Hericlitus) of a street in the spirit, a labyrinth-like, inconclusive pilgrimage. His drawings recount their story by use of outlying districts of pre-dawn color.

Fragile sheets or delicate material supports, these paintings are the mantle in which the artist encloses his delicate, fragile architectures executed by spun threads of signs. Each of his watercolors, each page of this book recounts a landscape of his world, each sheet is a screen where – as in a frame – the artist projects and records, as if on a matrix, his imagination and his communication with the world.

Paolo Gubinelli looks, scrutinizes, puts into focus, listens, spies like a soothsayer-poet, turns his studies into a lyrical tale of lines swathed in light, concealed in vibrating colored water. Sheet after sheet, page after page, the artist focuses on discerning and describing “the sun of bright light in the middle of night” (Apuleius, The Tale of Cupid and Psyche).

Carmine Benincasa

Rome, September 2002

Dear Gubinelli,

Pleasant thoughts about your work surface more and more often on the horizon of my awareness.

Yes, your work has found its way to my heart, dwells in my soul, and your voice is in intact, unsymmetrical

harmony with everything you do to weave and embellish the mystery of everyday life. Do you remember

those four verses by F. Hölderlin? Where that suffering, melancholic poet wrote: “The lines of life are various – like roads – like the rims of mountain ranges. What we are starting here a God can finish, harmoniously, in eternal compensation, in peace.” ( Was hier wir sind, Kann dort Ein Gott ergänzen mit Harmonie und...)

Harmonies are the life lines of your work, harmonies revealed by subtle marks, small tender wounds in and of the time of history, revelations of the time of Glory germinating , in these days of man still mysterious to a ritual of light. Tracks scratched on the white paper with distended clots, crumbs not of blood but of gravel to soothe the innocence of a cry: life. Life!

Yours,

CARMINE BENINCASA

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