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PAOLO FOSSATI, 1992

         It is probably true that there are painters who work all their lives on the same painting. We should add that that painting they work on all their lives, like Penelope's web, is something more than a single work. It is the painting, totality par excellence. It just so happens that this host of painters, to which Gubinelli belongs and which is not as numerous as a first glance would lead us to believe, has the not difficult task of hiding their extreme intentions, decisive of their work, within the terms of more pacific considerations. Often, social; didactic at times; methodological. Rigorous experimentation, conducted in such a manner that from single whims or inspirations, episodes and contingencies, emerge general rules and systematic indications, shared models — just such experimenting comes under defensive duties: it is a weak announcement of the definite message on which one is working. The rationality of these attitudes and procedures sounds like an alarm bell: our author aims at a page of total poetry, radical, fondly packed with all the moments of his artist's voyage and in which he recognises himself with continuity.

         In the meantime, here are traces, signals, routes. Excellent tests, in any case, because certain extreme fusions, light and movement, colour and space integrated in a coherent image (coherent for the eyes and mind that reach it) will be neither static nor definitive. Artists like Gubinelli do not aim at a pictorial image or figure which contain all the poetry distilled from their author, but instead at a work, a painting, at works and paintings in which painting has become experience, evidence.

         Argan summarised the work of Gubinelli very well: "You," he writes, "have found a dimension of the rational beyond logic; your rationality is not deductive, logical, but instead inductive."

         Allow me to attempt to explain the words of Argan: the reaction the reader (viewer) of Gubinelli's sheets experiences before this painting does not escape his truer, more attentive and intimate experience; at the same time, it goes beyond, moving on a more articulated horizon. Gubinelli reduces, minimises the characteristics of the means he employs, the materiality of the support, the physical quality of light, the vibratility of colour, to obtain a sensitive interpenetration which has characteristics of its own, which is something other than the sum of techniques and methods. It touches the terms of a quality. In the traditions of our century (which our painter knows very well) label-words have been searched for to run through studies of the kind of butterflies to the classifier. For example, it has been said at length that something belonged to that evaporating sphere with indirect illumination which goes by the name of lyrics, and hence derives the adjective lyrical. Which is what goes beyond, emanates, pursues action, operation. (Bruno Munari has chosen a more sensible manner to describe all this; evoking the spirit of Zen, he underlines the illusions of the mind). Or else, somewhat more roughly, the formula of conceptual has been selected, and here we are at the concept opera. Lyrical or concept as it may be, we remain at grips with a suspension and a concentration: before the hand, the body, move towards an action, towards discharging emotions onto objects (the Buddhist monk recalled by Munari has warned: things external do not exist), suspension comes to know a physical grain, a sensitive opening. (The question is not philosophical, let not the term "concept" lead us off track: the suspension we are speaking of here and the consequent attention is a matter of the artist, between sheets, small bottles and pencils or pens. The paradox of the Zen quotation lies in the fact that the illusion whole is said before a realising, a making, of sheets, paints and works).

March, 1992

Ed. Meta, Logge di Palazzo Pretorio, City of Volterra, 1992.

an other: put here..   1    2   3

Paolo.Gubinelli@inso.it

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