52

MARCELLO VENTUROLI, 1990

Paolo Gubinelli or The Icons of Disorder

June, 1990

Ed. A.I.C.S., Palazzo dei Priori, City of Perugia, 1990.

         In my encounters with artists, a barycentre extends from existence to painting, from finding myself shortly, but gradually, in medias res; let us say, I the critic, though peripheral and fugitive, they the messengers of visuality, whereby never, or almost never, am I a notary or do I see the result as the only reality of the encounter. After writing Paolo Gubinelli of my impressions on the splendid exhibition he presented at Fabriano (previously, in September 1989, his "Opera su carta" had been hosted in the Palazzo dei Consoli of Gubbio), I visited the two-storey house in Rifredi, an outlying area of Florence, which he himself built, with paintings on the walls by abstract artist friends of value and masters, flashes of long-lasting dreams on the walls, the bedroom of Jacopo, his son, two lustres old, medals of tenderness and obedience, his wife Paola, teacher and loving daughter of a distant father, she too, from the Marches, her face as calm as a portrait, with no other ornaments than itself, Moronian, black curly hair over an olivaceous complexion, astonished and attentive of Paolo's words as though just awaken, her eyes open, she contemplating her husband's thought of images, while her husband disentangles for her, for them, cycles of signs in rolls and papers, materials and colours inside a universe the perimeter of which is her heart.

         I spent an evening in Gubinelli's workshop with the artist, his son seated to one side in silence, while Paola downstairs held dinner for us and I had the impression that the artist was presenting his work with the confidence and discretion of a confession and, at the same time, with the pride of a wonderful artisan, a maker of jewels, while he opened papers, drawers, note-pads, rolls, diaries of rapture for the few. For though the stylistic ambition and sign consciousness remain very high — from Fontana to Castellani to Manzoni to Bonalumi to Bompadre, like the experience of colour from Fautrier to Wols, from Rothko to Dorazio to Licini — that subdued "voice," communication of the person who lays the sheet to cover on his lap, was a monologue of the most humble Narcissus. I say Narcissus and I say humble because this figure without adjectives, an adoring self, fascinated by his dream of beauty, is not explosive: neither for the dimensions of the works, for the most part from medium to small, nor for the evidence, as though each image were to be read like an open book on a table, almost accepted in its identity of something grazed, of a sufficiently explicit spot and sign, but always within the difficulty of being born. The humble Narcissus, resolutely and unmistakably born to contemporary art already with cut white papers in line with Castellani's whites (the artist who made the perspective of the Renaissance encounter on the wall that of abstractionism derived from cubism, to give the formula of Castellani's art which is, before all else, poetry) is so pure in communicating that he speaks to no category of public, in a kind of Limbo di Morandi, he speaks almost totally for himself.

         His condition in the relation with expression is also given by the means employed, initially almost uncommunicative, cryptic, hazardous, allusive — I beg the reader's pardon for such an assorted choice of adjectives — anxiously human incisions on paper, almost wrinkles barely educated by geometry and therefore in the world of presence or of the signs left by man (perpetual cave-dweller of the image); incisions and folds on paper where the millimetric three dimensions or paper polystratum, pursued with shapes and their reiteration, "mentisce" a geometric construction without ever accepting it as vertebra, but only as an order in inevitable emotive disorder; incisions and colours on transparent paper, water-colours on paper, rolls of tracing paper on the "guides" of which colour advances or rather, runs on the tips of its toes; collages of triangles on transparent paper, diadems of grass, tenderly cheerful decorations with which to adorn oneself for imperishable geometry, but a geometry here too, learned from Licini and not only from Mondrian and Malevich.

         Thus, before the "papers" of Paolo Gubinelli, I experienced an invitation to interpret in the key of an intimateness, a conspiracy of silence, with "little" left in the mental space of the white sheet, the "little" which can become "much," everything, if that continuous oscillation of the artist's working assumes unity between method and chance, between image sought with pre-ordered means and spontaneity, between medium-small measure and evidence. I posed myself the curious question as to whether Paolo were an angel who studies as a man or a man who, with painting, becomes an angel: all of his works when photographed, for example, reflect this second figure, in the sense that they are complete with an intransgressible iconicity. Allow me to take as chance examples different works, also in time, such as "Incisioni, colori su carta trasparente," (tr. note: Incisions, colours on transparent paper), 1980, 59.5 x 42 cm, a silken, pearly space where Licini-like sign creatures, arrows and ellipses with the sign of a golden fingernail, or "Incisioni, acquerello su carta," (tr. note: Incisions, water-colours on paper), 1983, 29.5 x 21 cm, the fable of two solar worlds contrasting in a cosmos as close as the sky (Father Licini appears here too, in the cut, even though the Maestro leaves his admirer free in the signed and chromatic quanta), or also "Incisioni, colori su carta trasparente," 1984, 100 x 70 cm, those eight window-shaped squares which strengthen the whole with reiteration and give a tender, original presence of a spring morning: all of these works, in the mechanical translation of the photograph, take on a greater concreteness, evidence.

         Of course, the difference between photograph and original, in the psychology of the viewer, is well-known and old: who has never been "disappointed" by a Cézanne until that moment seen only in photograph and then presented before his eyes in the original, so... bare of colours, so covered by the invisible dust of time? Then, naturally, he had to admit that the fault was his, that he had grown accustomed to an easy interpretation, perhaps facilitated by a kind of artifice. This mood, this error was, to a great extent, also mine seeing Gubinelli in photograph and then "live," one fine evening of this past October in his home. Naturally, Gubinelli live is more difficult, more risky, because his vision often closes up less and can appear to remain in his hands; but the more he dialogues with the viewer, the more tender and human is his message, amiable even in what he does not express to the very end! I would say that very often he leaves his definiteness open and that in any event, our entering his image with the reserve of the retina and a soul clear of nostalgia about evidence, the message of this painter from the Marches (born in Matelica, near Macerata) totally gratifies us. All the more so the outcome of his works realised or in large measure implied with space-environment (incisions, folds on paper, 1973-1979) or in the chromatic accentuation of water-colours (incisions on paper, 1989) do not seem to me to outdo in results those which have struck me so and which I have illustrated with their open definiteness. Of course, I am not the first to speak of Gubinelli's existential style: with far better-versed and scientific formulation, Enrico Crispolti, to whom no serious artist passes unnoticed, wrote in 1989 that Gubinelli "has made interior probing his field of operation" and that in his art we find "the most refined and unique results, almost private, almost fearful of losing, in a stronger contact, the very sense of their intimacy." Vanni Bramanti, Roberto Daolio, Lara Vinca Masini, Giuliano Serafini and others have seen, perhaps with greater certainty than mine, Gubinelli's present and future, accepting the definiteness of the painter's images susceptible only to a development in the sense of quality.

         I feel that the psycho-sentimental bond of this artist's image is, more than in many other good painters, fierce, exclusive, even though successively sign and colour appear to be mediators and controllers of those effusions, dizziness and depressions, of his perpetual young man's fevers of growth; nor could it be otherwise because papers, materials and geometries left to gestalt or programmed solmisations would not only be boring but today rather obsolete and certainly out of date. The painting of Paolo Gubinelli by cycles and reiterated gestures, such as to constitute, taken as a whole, a "manner," reproposes the great informal abstraction. A manner like that, for example, of 1988 in which an area of vast monochrome spots, orange, violet, ochre is supported and depicted almost by confines of surfaces, by signs for the most part undulated, or the one of 1989 in which the chromatic effusion of a water-colour in an initial and not coagulated stage, is bridled in extremis in the sign, giving the idea of a disorder taken as icon.

         But his is certainly no longer that of the first Strazza, of the first Romiti or of the first San Filippo of the Fifties and Sixties, that manner in which colour informally started in the canvas with no other vertebra than itself and always with an expansive vis. The way colour starts in the papers of this painter from the Marches is always entrusted to the ordered operation of the sign, be it called to support collapses and obnubilations, or to give direction and movement, dynamic itinerary to the effusion of these births of things in the space of the paper.

         While with the admirers without reserve of Paolo Gubinelli it can be said that his future is all similar, as to his present I wish to conclude my testimony with an affirmation that does not contradict the judgement of my colleagues but which does differ: always exalted and always mortified by emotional outbursts and mental restraints, reflected in icons of disorder, delicate product on the threshold of the too beautiful, but well on the track, still and as always, of the anti-pleasant intended as new and unpredictable game of style, his present yearns for another future, even though this future is already in the present. And the utmost suggestion presented by the works of Paolo Gubinelli is that of a genuineness outside of the very latest "isms," of a humanity and sensibility of accents outside the succession of groups between the Eighties and after, as though his diary, in the pages of the soul, could — and can — continue like a natural gift, a very personal message for the few. My certainty for Paolo is that of not having any, of knowing where he comes from, of anxiously, fraternally waiting where he is directed and trustfully accepting not knowing it. Never before as with this artist has criticism not been prophetic.

Ostia, November 1990

Antologica, Ed. Università degli Studi di Camerino, Palazzo Ducale, 1991.

Paolo.Gubinelli@inso.it

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