52

CESARE VIVALDI, 1991

         Gubinelli has been working on paper since the Seventies, since his first public appearances and therefore, practically always, with a sharpness of proposals and continuity of results which, of his discrete presence, make a rather unique and precious case in the panorama of art today. A discrete presence, I repeat, not at all arrogant or presumptuous, and yet enlivened by the implicitly polemic pride of the artist who goes against the tide and neither wants nor knows how to find support in factors external to his own art, whether they be politics, fashion, society life or the simple acquiescence to the person who feels he can dictate the rules and arrogates himself the right to do so. Silently, Gubinelli has always safely travelled the road which suits only him, well aware that a modest means like paper in itself contains infinite potentials of expression, and well aware that what he does and how he does it, in brief his direction, is one of the first and primary which have been offered to artists, of the Orient long before of the West. If the relation exists which almost all critics attribute between our painter and Fontana, Castellani, Dorazio or, going even further back, Balla, Newman and even Malevich (and we are speaking of such critics as Lara Vinca Masini, Enrico Crispolti, Vanni Bramanti, etc.), even more illuminating is the relation which in 1985 Bruno Munari proposed between the painting of Gubinelli and oriental imagination. In my opinion, especially Zen art in its claim to reach any objective-target without even aiming at it, has in the art of Gubinelli, compatibly with the changing situations of thought and action, an almost perfect confirmation. Concentration is essential, expression a consequence: the outcome of the artistic fact is therefore, in a certain sense, taken for granted, contained in all its infinite possibilities in its premises.

         Gubinelli, in the Seventies, worked without using colour, cutting fine signs on white cardboard and folding it so as to animate the surfaces with subtle luminous vibrations. Then he began with increased decision to set his attention on the architect's transparent paper, cutting and modelling it with folds and colouring it, with sharpness but also with great intensity; even posing himself the problem of occupying space on a rather vast scale, arranging this paper in cylinders to roll up and unroll, into cones to collect or spread out. The problem, though always faced in a different manner, was and is, in reality, unique: the declension of light in space with the consequent creation of always new spaces, creation every time obtained with the simple alteration of the background white, in a "minimum" and most elegant modulation, and later on with the introduction on that background of coloured clouds, with the total erasure of white and its alterations as means of expression and inquiry of the surface. Something of the sort had tempted Carla Accardi who kept close to pure signed values, projecting her signs onto transparent plastic screens. Gubinelli, however, in his own way carries out a different operation which only he succeeds in seeing through to the end, even though many had intuited it in more or less the right way: the introduction of the practically absolute freedom of the informal in a very strict "pedalier," almost supremacist, made up of elementary inquiries and minimum alterations. We recall the way in which Rothko breaks his favourite rectangular module with strong flares of colour-light; in Gubinelli's case, "rupture" occurs outside of any module, it advances along a route that can run parallel to the furrows traced by the incisions or by the modulations on the sheet of paper, but it can be totally divergent, not to say contradictory.

         All this presupposes on Gubinelli's part, as Lara Vinca Masini wrote in distant 1977, a "level of cultural acquisition which takes for granted almost all the contemporary artistic-cultural platform in the area of an increasingly more reductive exploration, on light, space and structure."

Nor could it be otherwise considering how our painter wants to reach his own full originality operating in the most conscious way possible in the area of one of the most live "modern traditions," that of space light, among the most critically motivated and yet still rich in "works in progress," susceptible to closer examination and variations.

         Crispolti in 1989 rightly observes that Gubinelli in this tradition "has made interior probing his field of operation," and thus "there derives an evident condition of rarefied anxious lyricism, one vaguely shadowy, where the painter's emotivity is diffused and, in a certain manner, hidden, in an evocative flowing which escapes all measure of confession."

April 1991

Ed. Essegi, Pinacoteca Comunale, Loggetta Lombardesca, City of Ravenna, 1991.

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