52

PIERRE RESTANY, 1993

The Last Spatialist

         Giulio Carlo Argan wrote little on Paolo Gubinelli, but what he expressed in a letter of April 25, 1991 is illuminating: "I feel 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."

         Spatiality without volume - light without rays. With Argan's analytic rigor, this expresses the key for interpretation of Gubinelli's entire exploration.

         From the cuts-folds on white or transparent paper of the Seventies to the coloured incisions and water-colours with cuts and holes, Gubinelli's work appears as the great spatial progression of graphic art since the end of World War II.

         Indeed, at 48 years of age, the artist can claim the supremacy of spatial paper. Will he be the last of the spatialists or the pioneer of a second spatialism? This question ultimately has little importance before the stubborn insistence of the space-light question. Making energetic fluidity tangible, along with its unlimited flexibility, is an almost heroic undertaking in the times we live today. This spatial trend, more alchemical than conceptual, was the golden way of Fontana and Manzoni and particularly of Yves Klein.

         Gubinelli uses paper not only as active substance of thought, but also as the place of his existential destiny. To engage the entirety of being, the capacity for gesticulation does not need the great monumental formats of "Action Painting" nor the ritual formalism of oriental calligraphy. On paper, Gubinelli lives the drama of gestual transcendence: space-colour (like the folds of the paper or the cuts of incisions) is only the momentary fixation of a route for vital energy, a second of exacerbated sensitivity. The artist's existential and poetic drama is played on a tiny piece of territory, a handkerchief: Gubinelli is modest but his modesty is the modesty of the great, his definition of space is tied to fixing a fragment of cosmic energy, an act of pure sensitivity. This sensitivity the artist uses with the utmost and discrete precision is the catalyst of poetic language. Gubinelli is doubtlessly a sensitive man but his instinct convinces him that sensitivity is not an object to be possessed, but rather only a fragment of vital energy that abandons our body at the moment of death. Sensitivity is the source of all poetic language; whomever controls a fragment of it imposes himself as a master of language, but this sensitivity does not belong to him: the artist is only its tenant.

         Yves Klein had decided to rent an immense slice of the spatial pie because he believed in the ultimate finality of the blue revolution, the world's general salvation. Gubinelli's vision has not yet reached architecture of the air and perhaps it never will, but his transparent papers, cut or pierced, illustrate his existential approach of modern space. Gubinelli has just been born when Gagarin went into space, he was 24 when Aldrin was the first to step on the Moon. He was in time, however, to experience the space adventure as a legend, a wonderful human legend. From its beginning, the spatial adventure unfolded under the sign of technological humanism. The cosmonauts were entrusted with a planetary humanistic mission: to remain men in the cosmos, to assume the pure normality of being human in the exceptional setting of the cosmic void. To take on this same mission in his art, Yves Klein went into the heart of the Void in search of the alchemist's fire which shines and at the same time burns.

         Paolo Gubinelli has understood the sense and weight of such a message: his voluntary modesty reveals the rigour of a strict self-discipline of visual and moral hygiene.

         The artist between Yves Klein and Lucio Fontana has been initiated onto the secret and demanding route of integral spatialism.

         He knows the destiny and destination of his work: the long walk towards the immaterial.

Milan, June 1993

Ed. A.I.C.S.

Church of Saint Francis, City of Gualdo Tadino, 1993

Palazzo dei Consoli, City of Gubbio, 1993

Sala 90 of the Museo Palazzo Ducale, City of Mantua

Soprintendenza per i beni Artistici e Storici, Mantua, 1993

Paolo.Gubinelli@inso.it

giosue@giosuemarongiu.it

www.giosuemarongiu.it

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