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Techniques of the Invisible

Francesco Gallo

Paolo Gubinelli is an artist with a fine poetic vein particularly evanescent, subtle and transparent. His work consists of minimal traces, molecular wastes, with interventions only where strictly necessary for leaving a significant mark and creating a visual event charged with energetic potential by dilating the idea of abstraction which turns into an intuitive infinity and by dispersing the essences of what is visible, as if it were virtuous stardust.

What we perceive is an unpredictable scenario, a dream-like set, in a reciprocal crisscrossing recalling the visionary capacity of a symbolical exchange, with an expressive atmospheric quality yet lacking all explicit links with a defined historical system.

This constitutes a pursuit, a intrigue of signs and disengaged chromatic fibers in a nebulous solidity made of rhythmic articulations like those of a spontaneous harmony, always in the making but accomplished little by little like stages in the construction of a universe, a unique expansion of tiny specs of signs and colors dominated to differing extents by light which penetrates and compenetrates, traverses, diffusing its characteristic weightlessness and seemingly suspended in a gravitational void, thanks to its intrinsic fleeting and elusive nature.

Pure spatiality of light and color free of any and all possible references, of all seduction of a bodily nature and of its mythical and narrative qualities and, therefore, devoid of weighty rigid significance, which react unpredictably to stimulations coming from numerous directions, to vibrations imparted by an invisible clash of molecules. As if in a daydream where the linguistic coordinates, independent of common sensitivities in the adventurous world of colors, are unable to reach a precarious or temporary equilibrium other than that of the resistence of the paper, of the support that translates the “fantastic” into “reality,” which is the manifestation and expression of the eternal conflict between mind and matter.

For its strong point is precisely the fact of small gestures of the hand on “poor” supports which are “subjected” to a somewhat alchemic treatment which deletes their origins from the mind in favor of what they appear to be at the end of the treatment, forms of space rather than forms in space. These subsist in an experimental key which seeks to attain a state of calmness, of infinite contemplation while always still suspended, a state made possible precisely by having attained a materiality/non-materiality, having learned the lesson of spatiality from those artists who annulled the quantitative sense of representation as being inside and outside a precise place, yet retaining a precise connotation of identity which makes it a specific one, a sublime suspension of the capacities, the rhetoric, of -verbal language, in its unstoppable, whirling contamination, with that of the imagination…

Gubinelli is a director attentive to the invisible which, in his hands, is transformed into informal tension, into diagonal, contaminating traversing of all the poetics of Minimalism originating with Fontana’s slashes and the drippings of Abstract Expressionism and ending up in a different pictorial mechanism, an offspring of Conceptualism but open to ad infinitum expression, passing by way of all the nuances and automatisms that such an unfettered horizon allows as free exchange between being and not being, each contaminating the other.

The folds of the support, reminiscent of combinations by Bonalumi, Castellani, Simeti, act as faint maps of the voyage of the spirit (Toniato) undertaken to avoid any obstacle not residing in the self, like scraps of an inner monologue taking place like a secretum in which the Ego encounters itself in a narcissistic atmosphere and offers a wordless poem whose content lacks form since everything is dawn-like, almost Eden-like and in that sense, universal, tied to the making of a language which pays penance to the essence and phenomenology of tradition yet includes them in its thrust toward what is new, unseen, in a reciprocal correspondence with the rich originality of a new genesis, as possible as it is necessary.

Gubinelli endows his commitment to working with an Eden-like language in our Babelish world, where the loss of truth and of originality become the soul and matter of multiplication, of the drifting preceding the nature of architecture, with a sense and design of construction, such as the conjugation and syntax of solids and voids, such as tracing a route where previously there was an indefinite expanse of potential, of a new beginning.

Paolo Gubinelli, in his secret writing of a book on the world, on his fragile, poetic way, learns from his signs to the same extent that he bestows his instinct for life on his movements, translated into a personal interpretation of dreams of contemplation and traversing, as if in an absence and a presence where he accomplishes the extreme virtue of silence and the unspeakable, were it the essence of an inner monologue which is the secretum of a mirror to which he confesses the facets of an enigma and the aspirations of a Hermetic.

A study of poetry in nuce is at the origin of all verbal elaboration, when inciting wonder, in an asymmetric dialectic between the Dionysiac and the Apollinian inclined toward the impalpable and luminous filtering oriented toward the latter, as a purifying emotion.

His treatment of this lends itself to continuous, unexpected, apertures, his practices unencumbered by the slightest discountable term, for his work is not intended to reveal a precise idea but to develop an idea in an etymological sense (see Mario Nigro), like an open work, an architecture of desires, a philosophy of feelings, where architecture and philosophy reflect desire and feelings and have a catastrophic effect on common sense.

Everything in this work welcomes any ulterior and unexpected addition, an unsettling poetics of abstraction, which coincides with elements of amazement toward an initial work unknown even to itself, for it may have suddenly appeared as an effect of the arrangement of the qualities of air and matter, brushed by a wind of genesis and a threatening premonition of an Apocalypse.

Sicily, April 2003

Ed. l’Arte Grafica Gubbio

Comune di Rimini, Musei Comunali

Galleria dell’Immagine, 2003

an other: put here.. 1 2 3

Paolo.Gubinelli@inso.it

giosue@giosuemarongiu.it

www.giosuemarongiu.it

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