Earth-Heart-Light Sergio Risaliti
“I make myself perfect with light.
I am graced with a fair
Revelation: the Globe of the world
Inexhaustible longings surround me …” 1
–Jorge Guillén y Álvarez (1893–1984)
The twentieth century witnessed the full affirmation of abstract painting, which from the beginning has been contrasted, for its variety and its richness, to the figurative art that preceded it. Still, this new style had already surfaced in the nineteenth century with Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), the first artist who was able to dismantle the mimetic description of reality with an absolutely groundbreaking level of insight and audacity. It was indeed to his work that other artists such as Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), André Derain (1880–1954), Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) and even Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) looked; artists who would become the protagonists of a formal and conceptual revolution that proved to be lasting and fertile. Abstract painting then proliferated and branched out, asserting itself as an equal peer to the ready-made—one of the other great inventions of the artistic avant-gardes of the previous century—through glorious affirmations and moments of crisis over the course of the last hundred years. In this manner, basic geometric forms, detached from the task of depicting anthropomorphic figures, everyday objects, or elements of nature, became the words both essential to and sufficient for the creation of a new artistic language, capable all on its own of describing, representing, and presenting new worlds. The line, the final bastion of the old understanding of the academy of fine arts, was set free from the bonds of illusionistic representation, eventually reaching absolute autonomy with Piero Manzoni (1933 –1963). In addition to all of this, a much freer use of painting materials and colors–in comparison to Claude Monet (1840 –1926) and Henry Matisse (1869–1954) was realized during the 1940s and 1950s. Indeed, abstract expressionists and color-field expressionists sustained that color is freed from objective context and becomes the subject in itself. Painting had become autonomous and in some sense absolute, linguistic experience while color corresponded less to the representational medium than, if anything, to a form of expression or communication comparable to that of biology or industry. One additional transformation, even more radical, is owed to Art is Art by Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967), who was nicknamed the black monk. With Reinhardt, painting reached the point of a language separate from real life, without function or meaning, an object conscious of itself (not at all unconscious), ideal, transcendental, unaware of everything that is not art (absolutely not anti-art).2
There is one other decisive conquest that launched the twentieth-century avant-gardes light years away from the tradition of the academy. Starting with Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), the first to rest his canvas on the floor, many artists decided to abandon easel painting and not to think about the wall while working. In 1946 Pollock began to paint on the horizontal plane; that is, laying out his canvas directly on the floor of his studio. It was in this manner that he painted works like 1947 Alchemy (Guggenheim Foundation Collection, Venice) and 1947 Composition with Black Pouring (Olnick Spanu Collection, New York). With this method, stemming from Pollock’s interest in the sculpture of Michelangelo,3 in jazz, and in Native American dances; construction came to be favored over representation, and action over contemplation. From then on, wall paintings, commonly presented in frames, were replaced by three-dimensional elements or protruding structures, painted and colored supports of different shapes and sizes, as in the case of the works of Ellsworth Kelly (b. 1923), who intensified the color form and realized monochrome structures that were completely smooth and yet stood out drastically thanks to the sharp edges that distinguished them from the space around them and from the rest of the world.
After the Second World War, most of the focus was on sculpture and on architecture, which rendered painting a language evermore adherent to architectural principles and to the rules of linguistics. At that point, painting was concerned with, in a self-referential way, the very practice of painting, its grammar, its devices and its means, the rules of its game, the logics in its presentation, and even the typologies of brushstroke. Such was the case with Giulio Paolini (b. 1940) and Robert Ryman (b. 1930) whose work since the early 1970s, its form as well as its content, has concerned itself with the very nature of painting. According to Giulio Paolini, the work exists even before the intervention of the artist, who is the first one capable of contemplating it. The study is extended out toward absolute images, inherent to the very nature of the canvas and to the use of a very basic process: tempera colors, ink, etc., the geometric subdivision of the pictorial surface, the monochromatic color field, the tracing of a checkered sheet, the drawing of a letter, a chromatic scale.” 3 Members of the Supports/Surfaces group reached similar conclusions, even if they tended to politicize the artistic practice. For Claude Viallat (b. 1936), the question is much more radical: The subject of painting is painting itself, and the paintings exhibited relate only to each other. They do not make the slightest appeal to an elsewhere, because the surface, by means of the formal ruptures carried out upon it, prevents mental projections or dreamlike parentheticals by the viewer. Painting is a fact in itself, and it is on these grounds upon which the problems that concern it must be established.5
In Italy, unlike in other European countries and in the United States where already in 1936 the American Abstract Artists organization had been founded, this new abstract language struggled to assert itself, even if the lessons of Cézanne, just like those of the Fauvists and of the Cubists, had strongly influenced and changed national artistic practices as early as the first years of the century. Political conservatism and the burden of more traditional schools of thought within the fine arts served as impediments to the innovations transmitted via the various Italian artists living in Paris and those arising from Futurism and from Metaphysical Painting, whose most important protagonists were in dialogue with other European avant-gardes beginning in 1908–1910. The Fascist dictatorship imposed a return to order, the exaltation of classical values, and the rhetoric of the academy, which confined to silence the voices of the most audacious and experimental Italian artists. We owe to Lucio Fontana (1899–1968), Fausto Melotti (1901–1986) and other exponents of the abstract movement in Milan the establishment of an artistic language independent of figurative illusionism. A center for the circulation of these ideas, in both the painterly and sculptural or architectonic fields, was, from 1930-37, the Galleria Il Milione in Milan, the one small piece of Italy that took part at that moment in Europe. New ideas arrived there and departed from there, and within its walls networks of contacts and acquaintances grew broader. In just a few short years the gallery hosted exhibitions of the work of Lucio Fontana, Osvaldo Licini, and Fausto Melotti, and also showed works by Wassily Kandinsky and Friederich Vordemberge-Gildwart (1899–1962). Il Milione also exhibited xylography works by Joseph Albers (1888–1976). In Turin, meanwhile, the first collective exhibition for Italian abstract art (Prima collettiva di arte astratta italiana) took shape, and soon after the First Manifesto of Abstract Art (Primo Manifesto per l’Arte astratta) was published. The abstractist movement was even celebrated with a room at the Rome Quadriennale. Years later the Abstraction-Création group dedicated the fourth issue of its own prestigious journal to the Milanese abstraction, affirming the international scope of the movement’s influence. These international connections were reestablished right after the war, and out of Italy emerged the artistic practices of Alberto Burri (1915–1995) and of Lucio Fontana, Giuseppe Capogrossi and of Libio Basaldella known as Afro (1912–1976) to be followed the decade after by the inventions of artists like Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani (b. 1930), co-founders of the magazine Azimuth and from 1958 in close contact with the group Zero in Düsseldorf.
The work of Domenico Bianchi is without a doubt a part of this history. His work must be considered, for all intents and purposes, abstract. Comparable to certain radicalizations of the avant-gardes and to artists such as Lucio Fontana and Mario Merz, Luciano Fabro and Jannis Kounellis, Domenico Bianchi maintains a different position with regard to the art of the past. Bianchi has a profound appreciation for the conceptual value of the symbolic form—be it a circle, a square, or a spiral—understood in its mysterious but real relationship to life and to the laws of the cosmos, with the infinite in time and in space, of which light and line are mediators—in analogical and not figurative terms—in its innumerable geometrical configurations and in its limitless pictorial apparitions. The use of wax, guardian of life and transmitter of precious biological and cosmological information, reveals from Bianchi’s early works an inclination toward liberating the work-painting from the frame and almost removing it from the wall to let it be the material completely, evoking what was proposed by Arte Povera and in particular by Mario Merz. And it is exactly Merz’s work that connects Bianchi’s path to Lucio Fontana’s, because in this case the dialectic of organic-terrestrial and inorganic-cosmic is always resolved in favor of a form that is a real and true expansion of reality. A new reality generated by the artistic process that brings the painterly work into the world, but a reality that in its form contrasts itself to the world, a reality with which one interacts through analogies and not with narrative and illusionistic intentions. Fontana, indeed, is and remains an artist of humanism who feeds on, cultivates, and delights in formal beauty, in the fascination of a line as creator of space, in the vitality of color, in the evocative power of the image-form, which can make us feel everything that pertains to the phenomenon of life, of the cell, of the embryo, of the energetic exchange that transports life from the soil to the plant (De Sanna, 1996). The idea of the seed, too, of the germinal nucleus, of the galaxy, and thus the breast, the uterus of the expectant mother, the embryo in its placenta in her womb, navels, female orifices; beginning with the Buchi, to the Quanta, to the Nature, to the Tagli, all the way to the Elissi. It is not coincidental that Domenico Bianchi’s first paintings were by analogy images of pregnant bodies, of luminous galaxies and transparent as placentas. Looking at the works in the Olnick Spanu collection, paintings made of wax or on wooden tables cut into and then decorated with palladium, the spiral-
shaped movement, which one also finds in the works of Lucio Fontana and Mario Merz, pinpoints both the microcosm and the macrocosm, subatomic structures and immense magnitudes, where it is always light that gives life to space and to time.
In this way, the image of Domenico Bianchi works is constituted by a marking that is always circular, that is the subject of the painting, and from a central nucleus, is the procreator of an absolute form that refers to infinite hypotheses of life and of space, of time and of direction. It is a designed and built form that always remains faithful to its principle foundational model; a creator of endless iterations and variations. In this iconic permutability, the artist constantly transforms the image generated by the line, which from the center unfolds and extends itself within the geometric structures that shape the remaining space according to the proportions of the square or the modulations of the curvilinear and fluctuating fields. The design assumes a vaguely symbolic property, and manifests itself like a digit of organic geometry, a purely decorative element, a cosmological fantasy borne of the curvilinear un-windings. More precisely, Bianchi’s design is the indexing of a force, of a procreative action that is born and multiplies in the wax or in the wood or on the paper. The wax is, indeed, a site of gestation, of transmutation, of solidification and of resonance; a site of solid physicality and of inescapable luminosity. From luminous and sensuous matter, the painting is born, both as a structure and as an image—language and form, which generate and transmit emotions and information, are always in analogical and symbolic forms and never in figurative or narrative ones.
An analysis of a few specific works will help better understand the artist’s method of working, his choice of materials, and the correlations between art and music and art and geometry. Every work originates from a complex process that involves gestation, imagination, structuring and production. Bianchi reaches and rejoins the microcosm with the macrocosm, the finite with the infinite, the earth with the universe, individual unity with the archetypal matrix. The dimension that he creates is translucent like amber and gilded like honey, crossed through and permeated by energy: a solid profundity in expansion whose immensity is tethered at its center with concentric designs, or contained within a space of expansion built with grids and sheets, flat planes and thick arches that overlap with curved planes and with fluid fields. The light is as if incarnate within the material, and at the same time functions as the power source and the amplifier for the image created by means of the dynamic self-engendering of the line, which measures and steers time and space.
For Domenico Bianchi, the painting is a nascent cosmos and forever expanding. To the eyes of the viewer, the work appears already finished and yet still becoming, just as the design seems to demonstrate that it continues to evolve within itself. Beginning and end coincide, even though the hypothesis of an ongoing becoming is suggested by the light, by the organic quality of the material, by the development of the line in an unfinished figure or by the progression of the planes and the line. The wax undergoes something of an alchemic process of transformation. From a solid state, the substance becomes a liquid through a process of superheating to approximately 45˚C (113˚F), its melting point. The wax’s main properties are its malleability, its viscosity, and its water-repellency, therefore turpentine is added. Everything then gets mixed with the color: ivory black, ultramarine, cobalt yellow, cinnabar, vermillion and the unique Naples yellow, a color that, according to Cézanne, could never be missing from a painter’s palette. Then while it’s still hot, the wax is poured onto the surface of the painting. Bianchi works on a horizontal plane: his stand rests on a table, or on two sawhorses. With slow but steady movements he knows how to make the wax pour out, following the lines of the shapes painted in beforehand and the borders that guide and separate the fluid, in order to create precise contours and sharp lines of demarcation between fields and levels, between zones differing in color and in luminosity. Once the wax has cooled, and thus returned to its natural solid state, Bianchi works with razors and spatulas to refinish it and flatten it out in levels. This is a very important part of the process, as the quality of the painting also depends upon this slow filing-down that has to be delicate and attentive. It is at this stage that Bianchi perfects the calligraphic beauty of the design. The wax achieves an extremely high degree of transparency, which along with the fine flakes of palladium evokes forms that are never identical, shades that are never monotonous, and eurhythmic intricacies and articulations.
One must speak the language of musical-geometric constructive principles in order to understand fully the secret generated by these abstract-symbolic compositions, their proliferation and reoccurrence, with flights and variations that suggest a common formal origin. In terms of scratched out or engraved signs, the artworks that Bianchi showed from 1985-87 incorporated the use of chalk to sketch out the compositional structure, as well as noble and precious materials like palladium. He then started placing precious inlays into stone or marble as in Panchina, the first of a series completed in 2009. Since 1989, the year of his exhibition at the Castello di Rivoli, Domenico Bianchi has, with the help of a computer, begun to transform his two-dimensional design into a spherical form. It was not so much the technological results that interest him as much as the infinite number of forms that the sphere is able to assume.
It was at the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea–Castello di Rivoli that Bianchi, for the first time, was confronted with large scale and was asked to make a painting that took on the proportions of a fresco. The artist had to deal with the enormous dimensions of the Museum almost as if he was confronting the architecture of an enormous gothic cathedral with its large windows and interiors decorated with Byzantine mosaic and inlaid facades such as the Florentine basilicas of Santa Maria Novella designed by Leon Battista Alberti, the first great example of classical eurythmia in the Renaissance. The juxtaposition of the white marble from Carrara with the green marble from Prato has a function both spatial and symbolic, geometric and musical—the white designs against the darker sections of stone becomes the musical score which transforms the adornment into pure light. Making things big, working on a monumental scale, requires supervision at the peaks and at the troughs, of repetition and of variation, of the vertical-horizontal sequence, of the profundity of different levels, of rhythm and of cadence. In this difficult trajectory Bianchi maintains a surprisingly architectural air and exhibits a compositional freedom that steers him clear of monotony. The pattern does not set the rules, even if it structures the load-bearing grid and articulates the thematic development: circle after circle, spheroid after spheroid.
At the recent exhibition organized in the great Limonaia of the beautiful Italian-style Boboli gardens that are adjoining to the Pitti Palace in Florence, Bianchi created a painting almost 90 meters large. It is a monumental work that takes several minutes to look at from top to bottom. Spread out on the ground, it would cover an area the size of a football field. The title of this work–Sidereus–evokes a famous scientific treatise, one of the most revolutionary texts of the modern age by Galileo Galilei, Sidereus Nuncius, in which the Tuscan scientist presented his extraordinary discoveries, and in particular his studies on the surface of the moon and of the so-called Medicean planets, which he was able to observe thanks to his telescope. Bianchi’s images spread out across the entire length of the building designed by the architect Zanobi del Rosso 1778 ca. under the commission of Pietro Leopoldo di Lorena. His work produced the effect of a Milky Way, and the composition of the repeated but varied circles created the sensation of music from the celestial spheres. As in music, the constructive principle of the sphere is, at base, a kind of antecedent dogma–thus called dux–from which arises innumerable consequent variations–designated with the term comites.
Musical theory and themes are not new to Bianchi. He comes to his art with considerable training in music and a deep passion for the Rock and Roll of the Sixties and Seventies. For Bianchi, attending concerts is a way of life. Much like the reinvention of his circles, he is constantly reinventing Stone Free, written by Jimi Hendrix in 1966, using his guitar and his own arrangements. We can think of many artist–musicians in the history of art. As a boy Leonardo, as Giorgio Vasari describes …gave some little attention to music, and quickly resolved to learn to play the lyre, as one who had by nature a spirit most lofty and full of refinement: wherefore he sang divinely to that instrument, improvising upon it. Nevertheless, although he occupied himself with such a variety of things, he never ceased drawing and working in relief, pursuits which suited his fancy more than any other.6 The Renaissance is full of cases similar to Leonardo. According to Giorgio Vasari, Giorgione, painter of the famous Tempest, had a gift for music as well: he took unceasing delight in the joys of love; and the sound of the lute gave him marvellous pleasure, so that in his day he played and sang so divinely that he was often employed for that purpose at various musical assemblies and gatherings of noble persons.6 Coming back to the 20th century, we discover that Paul Klee was an outstanding violinist and that he played in public concerts along with the municipal orchestra in Bern. Fausto Melotti, the Italian sculptor studied and played the piano since his childhood. Robert Ryman, he begun as a jazz musician. Indeed, in the early 1950s, his greatest aspiration was to become a professional saxophone player.
In his painterly output of recent years, Bianchi has reworked outdated and weakened principles from the history of art without providing explanation for these citations of stylistic fascination or of the nostalgic revival of the lost virtuosity of figurative arts in the Renaissance. Domenico Bianchi carries out his work, rather, supporting historical and artistic memory against the oblivion of technology and fast communication. He is in favor of the use of manual skills and a slow, loving process instead of depersonalized mass production. He prizes the exemplary instead of homogenization and the symbolic instead of the kitsch. The artist is in favor of the hermetic against the rapid communication of the spectacle. Another important aspect is the attention Bianchi dedicates to his inner life and to the subjective circumstances of his artistic practice. His point of reference is subjectivity understood as a universe of sensibility and imaginative capacity. His perspective on meaning has shifted from the public and from the everyday towards the intimate and towards the continuous time of consummate awareness, the time of the interior gaze repositioned within the vast bounds of collective experience. Abstract configuration tends, ultimately, to position the meaning of this experience beyond the threshold of the visible, near a more metaphysical dimension of being. However every transcendental perspective finds its completion in the immanence of the created thing, which reveals itself to be a form produced with sovereign prowess, with loving care and with tangible slowness. This humanistic presentation takes us back to a time when the artist was an expert skilled specialist and his practice unfolded in harmony with every level of awareness and of perception, from the low to the high, through contemplation of the laws of the cosmos, with respect for the materials, for their qualities and properties, aligning creative practice and organic life, musical principles and geometry.