52

TOMMASO TRINI, 1994

Sinopite for the Blind

         A history of the material evolution of the modern art object is lacking. We note this in particular observing Gubinelli's work implode onto the surface: it neither accumulates nor crosses, but instead ramifies inside. And with the drifts of material and space, of energy and light, the stories of art also lack an analysis of structuring the gaze. Why the art object investigates seeing and rarely blindness, remains obscure.

         A story of the work as body. Where the material identity of the art object would prove first armed and then violated, colonised and intrusive. Where we would see painting as a water-colour domestication of surfaces; the Cubist collage as an object colonisation of painting; the lines of Boccionian force as an embrace with universal electromagnetism; Dada-Surrealist assembly as a corporal annexation of art to reality; Duchampian raising of dust as a surrender to time and ageing. Where exploring whether the Fontanian hole and cut have also opened in the canvas of art a passage for the definitive intrusion of machines and sondes into its intimate reality.

         Awaiting a better understanding, I note in the work of this very sensitive Florentine artist, the most apparent outcome of his obsessive cutting of a normal drawing surface: the scarification of the painted surface. Like sutures that carve the ritual identity on a tribal visage, this painter's incisions insinuate their tactile and visual identity into the body of a refined abstraction. A good part of Paolo Gubinelli's cut surfaces can extend the aesthetic experience to the tactility of the blind, more than a few of whom are curious about art and would have the eyes to observe it well.

[Drain the gaze?]

         An architect designs constructions or tools. He draws blueprints and perspectives with pencils and cuts. He works especially in the conception of models. He prepares a scene. Here we have the case of an architectural designer who is also a painter. While the project evolves in its uncertain destiny, on the designer's table remains a cascade of signs and, before the painter's eyes, the action of the cutter resists.

         I do not know how, about twenty years ago, Paolo Gubinelli began to incarnate the minimum remains of cuts in the dignity of art. I do see, however, what he has not thrown away: the rock salamander of the gaze. He must have raised the background surfaces where he traced his projects and, seeing the residual manual drawing, returned to us the art that was already there, so that we too, could see it.

         What was once background and fragment, is now figure and body. A derma first veined with grooves and sense, then folded to significance and construction. A corporeality strewn, in more recent times, with the fire of water-colours. The surface that this rational artist sets between his vision and the viewer's gaze is only a Mayan veil.

         Other critics have written everything possible about the strong and delicate expressiveness of his cutting on supple or transparent surfaces. But this Florentine artist is not a fine reciter of expression, or rather, no more so than Fontana and Castellani whose wounded spatiality and tensile structure he follows. No more than Burri, whose derma I feel he most approaches. No more than the Zen meditation Munari rightly recalls for the younger artist; where the master's staff or the verbal image of his "koan" strikes the original obscurity of minds into consciousness; likewise, it may happen that the cutter sacrifices not only the candour of the surface, but also light.

         In the Seventies, Gubinelli cut and at times folded the pictorial surface with a geometric ordering that lightened space. He did not descend from the destructuring of Fontana (whose organic cut, let us not forget, prepares the intrusion of artificial neon)but instead went back to Cézanne the builder; to setting image in an autonomous site between nature and the eye; to the cube's angular cut. The water-coloured cuts from the Eighties till today have become the container of a vascular liquidity, an organic cutting rhythm, a more manifest scarification of the pictorial body. Its colouring does not recall Klee, but again Cézanne. Its epidermal wounds — never cauterised like Fontana's veiled cuts or Burri's burns — are like writing.

[Yes, with Braille frescoes]

         Be not deceived by the wisdom of gesture that carves the body of things to lodge the flora of meaning but also that of criticism, the seed of light but also that of doubt. Primordial gesture that cuts the fruit and the plant before the rock. An evocative cut that gushes forth an art we want to see better. The epidermal action of the cut is cruel. This work opens its way between suffering and beauty.

         Oh! I forgot to say: Paolo Gubinelli's work is on paper, made of paper. To say that it is work on paper could generate the misunderstanding that it is limited to drawing. But no, Gubinelli designs portable frescoes. His dematerialised architecture is neither of sign or material. Then why insist on paper? I suppose that it is to indicate that is only a precarious stage of the gaze towards a clearer construction.

         For years now, Paolo Gubinelli has built light Braille frescoes with a fearful touch. Synopites for the viewer of art who does not yet know how to see it.

Paolo.Gubinelli@inso.it

giosue@giosuemarongiu.it

www.giosuemarongiu.it

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