The thought that guides the ideas and the hand of Gianfranco Baruchello (Livorno 1924) - an artist and an extremely cultured, profound and complex intellectual - draws a rapid and very slow, humble and universal, simple and vertiginous spiral. There are artists who, throughout their life, focus on a few themes, a few techniques, some motifs. On the contrary, Baruchello's mental spiral has spanned and sweeps over all the possible points and themes that his restless conscience felt the need to explore and investigate. Friend and disciple of Marcel Duchamp - the most important intellectual-artist of the twentieth century - Baruchello soon understood that art is and can be many things. Beyond a technique, a craftsmanship, beyond a skilful artifact, art is intuition, vision, revelation, awareness, gesture, play. Among the infinite forms of the world - this beautiful chaos-harmony where God or no one has given shape to everything it contains - the artist's mind has the intelligence and the taste to be able to choose, to be able to indicate. Thus, after Duchamp, art is no longer necessarily linked to an aesthetic, an ideology, an ethics, a manual skill: it is above all a mental, conceptual operation that plays with the infinite forms of the universe.  

Why limit yourself to traditional painting or sculpture? Why limit the hand gestures to a sheet, a canvas, a single material? Since the 1964s, Baruchello has used the fragment, or rather many fragments: of objects, things, presences - from paper to wood, from iron to plastic - combining them together in various shapes and sizes: gluing them on white canvases, enclosing them in plexiglass cases. , harmonizing them in small theaters of dreams and memory, assembling them in totems, or composing objects made with newspaper clippings glued to the table, which Ileana Sonnabend liked so much in New York. But, as soon as this point was touched, Baruchello's restless mental spiral felt the need for other experiments, other forms, other goals. Extremely distant from a repeated formula of success - where today the art market rewards above all repetitiveness, seriality, being easily recognizable - Baruchello has expanded his thinking going far beyond the traditional object. First using the camera and making some videos, soon realizing that masterpiece of new dada art - based on play and provocation - in the film "Uncertainty" of XNUMX, in collaboration with Alberto Grifi, where, above all, pasting many scenes from different films at random Americans, in an ironic and tragic vision, testified to this new world, based on the extreme speed of the image: our world dominated by telecrazia, which in favor of extreme ease and superficiality, has destroyed the times of the liturgy, and the ceremony of attention. 

A unity that breaks down into fragments, fragments that wish to rediscover unity. Because, as our beloved Ceronetti writes: «Unity is not a place; the fragment is a place, it is all places, and the only possible unity ». Since the periphery is the center and the center is the dispersion. Since this is that, and the sense of immensity, of infinity, we can perceive it only in the limit, and in the smallest of details. Since his parents separated at the age of four - giving life to two totally different and opposite worlds - Baruchello, faced with the enigma and pain of contrast and separation, has always felt the need to rebuild harmony. original. Even as a poet, as a writer, he has always known that the heart of invention is in the dream of metamorphosis. Metamorphosis as a game, transformation, infinite desire for life, participation, escape, investigation and transfiguration of reality - a reality that is sometimes intolerable. On the one hand, his great love for dreams: these mysterious, mental, free, irrational presences; dreams often transcribed in signs, images, words: like threads that hold the most variegated kites, like clouds of infinite shapes on the sky of life. On the other, the immense presence of the world: the questions of conscience, the enigma of evil, the presence of the Other, of others. Thus his artistic conception soon opened up to a social, community and political reality. In 1973, by founding the Cornelia agricultural community in the hills around Rome, Baruchello wanted to go beyond an individual, solipsistic art: embracing the deepest ideals of Land Art, and conceiving a community of people where dialogue and interpersonal exchange are fundamental, where ethics and aesthetics can be found, intertwining their meaning and their deepest reasons. Above all a place, a social space, where art no longer implodes into a simple and limited object - the history of art is very different from the history of painting - but opens up to an unlimited dialogue and confrontation with the Other, between the object, nature and matter. "The earth as the root of a place, the being, and then the matter". The earth with its fruits. The hard, good work of man in the garden. The food of the body - agriculture, animals - and the food of the spirit. «For seven years I have carried on the Agricola imagining that art should not dignify reality but grasp its harshness, hardships. The earth does not justify anything ». «The truth is that in the earth there is not only poetry but also poisons; there is not only beauty but also hardness and sacrifice. One day I dug a hole four meters deep and as deep. I told my friends. We go down inside. As if it were a normal place ». “Sometimes I think that the only possible utopia is to discover the tragic in the real. As beautiful as the sea is, you cannot drink its water ». A nature that is also malignant; a nature that moves us to solidarity and communion. I would not like to propose inappropriate comparisons but, like Tolstoy, who reached the heights of a very high intellectuality, Baruchello also felt the need for a return to the land: «Only with agricultural work can you have a rational, moral life. Agriculture indicates what is more and what is less necessary. It rationally guides life. We must touch the earth ”(Lev Tolstoy, Diari, April 17, 1906). And, moreover, even the extensive pedagogical project of Yasnaya Polyana anticipates the reality and utopia of many communities. Later, even with his house/Foundation, Baruchello wanted to develop his broad artistic conception into this broad humanitarian and social vision, helping many young artists and collaborating on many ideas.

Considering this restless, mobile spiral - a vast artistic vision at the same time experimental, multifaceted, social, political, which ranges from the "open work" of Marcel Duchamp and John Cage to video art, from the conceptual universe to the latest perspectives of Land Art - by Gianfranco Baruchello we cannot consider these oils on canvas, and his enamels on aluminum or on cardboard, his mixed techniques, his collages, as isolated, self-referential works, but as the tesserae of a very vast artistic mosaic. On always white surfaces, we see signs, traces, drawings, hieroglyphs, "cosmogonic points" flow and dialogue, in a vision that once again reveals the fragment as unity and unity as fragment: centrality as dispersion and periphery as center . Nothing is known, everything is imagined. In his still unpublished book, “The Walrus’s Advice,” Baruchello takes up a phrase from this curious character by Lewis Carroll: “The time has come to talk about many things, about ships and shoes, about sealing wax, about cabbages and kings.”  Thus a rational, cultured, encyclopedic mind merges with the fairytale: the fairy tale as a story, a possibility, a vision of a free, open, magical, irresponsible poetic universe. Because the sense that escapes must intertwine with nonsense: here where between reality and dream, the possible and the impossible, a third way is grafted. Like his beloved Klee, possessed by a profound metaphysical anxiety, Baruchello knows that rationality is only a relative and limited instrument; and the world is much more than its apparent surface: “In the past, things that were visible on earth were represented, things that one would gladly see or would have liked to see. Today the relativity of visible things is made manifest, and with this expression is given to the conviction that, with respect to the universe, the visible constitutes only an isolated example and that there are latent, far more numerous truths "(Klee). To the static concept of form, even Baruchello has always preferred that of formation: form as movement, mutation, metamorphosis. «The form is fine, death. Formation is Life ». Because "the nature of cosmic totality is a dynamism without beginning and without end."  In this prodigious expansion of the perception of the world, in this felicitous expansion of receptive potential, in this extreme broadening of the meaning of making art, space is no longer a logical succession of planes, but is simultaneously above and below, in front and behind, right and left; and time is no longer a regular and uniform progression, but is simultaneously before and after, past and future, this and that, "because it is the constellation, and not the succession, that gives the idea." "Because everything is so tied up with everything that wanting to exclude anything means excluding everything" (Adorno). Baruchello man of thinking and man of doing. Baruchello multifaceted artist of drawing, assembly, video, concept, performance, Land Art. Baruchello who thinks and smiles. An ancient Chinese proverb says: “If you want to be happy for an hour, drink a bottle of wine. If you want to be happy for a year, marry a beautiful woman. If you want to be happy all your life, grow a beautiful garden."

 

Next show: 

Gianluca Bonetti 

Intimate Wilderness 

From the 10 / 02 to the 10 / 03 

Opening Thursday 9/02 at 18.00