we've been friends for many years now and this show of yours in Verona, a city that has offered me many professional opportunities and in which I have passed some very happy moments, reminds me of another city we have in common. At the beginning of the eighties Turin was, for me, the second home of art. I had many artist friends there and I am happy to admit that I was also influenced by what the city had represented in the past. I had held my public debut, my first presentation, in Turin, at the very beginning of the decade, and the place seemed as lively as ever and, above all, I felt at home. A few years later, when there was the question of going back to meet you and to visit your studio, I was doubly pleased to do so both in order to see your work with my own eyes and to return to the capital of Savoy with a professional outlook.
At that point in time my idea of an artist coincided, of course, with that of my generation and was dictated by a common interest in painting, in that so-called return to painting that, compared to the Conceptualist flood of the seventies, represented something more organically and viscerally experienced. And I say so-called return because, in fact, it was not a question of going back over well-worn paths, but rather of regaining an experience, an expressive dimension corresponding to the condition of existence.
You might remember the title of the article I wrote for Flash Art in which I spoke of a group of artists I was passionately interested in, you included, and who showed at the Attico gallery. It was in 1985 and the title was La pittura mutata, (Mutated Painting). By that I meant to indicate the mutations resulting from a different attitude, rather than from a different painterly form, with which young painters were then confronting painting. This condition referred not just to you but to a whole generation working at the time with great efficiency in Rome, rather than in Turin.
When I entered your tiny dark studio in Via Chiomonte, where you had invited me to come in without bothering myself over treading on the dark canvases lying one on top of the other on the floor like rugs in a nomad's tent, I understood immediately I was in the presence of an artist with a temperament. A madman, my mother would probably have said benignly. She couldn't understand either the problems we then had, suffocated as we were by the heavy atmosphere of the years of terrorism, or the hopes and worries that bound me to my artist friends. I also understood that there wasn't all that much separating you from them: we all belonged to the same generation, born as we were in the early fifties and, then at least, we all had the same ideals and problems.
I had already made up my mind about your temperament: it had been enough to see some reproductions of your work. But I needed a further confirmation, I wanted to see your works with my own eyes, touch them with my hands. I was greatly surprised when, rather than touching them with my hands, I found myself in the dark little room walking on works I could hardly see. For me this was the breaking of a taboo and it desecrated that sense of reverence I had for the work of art, the same feeling I had for history as I had been taught it at university. I don't think I've ever told you but that experience for me was a lesson in art history. Your behaviour made me understand your whole ideology.
We began to pick up the works one by one, throwing up dust and spreading that characteristic smell of oil and paint, the very smell, I imagine, that Duchamp referred to in his well known tirades against all those poisoned by turpentine so he could defend the most conceptual part of being an artist and attack the most vile and practical part of making art.
The reverential fear I had when I began to walk over those canvas carpets disappeared when I saw how any eventual damage caused by my actions - tears, abrasions, prints, rips - actually contributed to the making of the work; they were an essential, if tangential, part of your language, of your way of painting.
This way of behaving and of presenting yourself corresponded to an idea you had already matured and which could be seen quite clearly in your first two solo shows, at the Segantini gallery in 1984 and at Paludetto's in 1986.These were two galleries I worked very closely together with in that period and which for me represented a link between Turin and Rome. Even though I didn't present either show - the first was introduced by Emilio Villa and the second by Rudi Fuchs - for me they represented a sentimental victory.
Just the titles of those two shows would be enough to reveal your poetics: Relitti sessuali (Sexual Relics), and Ombre atomiche, (Atomic Shadows). These alluded to the degenerative actions perpetuated in time by a society that considered humanity neither as a value nor as the common denominator of a social group but, rather, as a mass. That was it: mass-man in the age of advanced consumerism.
Ombre atomiche, your behaviour, your studio, your consistently black works, all reminded me of the existential pessimism of the fifties. And I must say that formally you had also created some amazingly beautiful canvases that, as we said at the time of the show, Burri would have been proud of. It wasn't by chance that we referred to him, and for two very good reasons: the first was the energy expressed by your worn canvases as well as a certain formal assonance. The second was rather malicious: Burri could not bear rivals and we enjoyed the thought of you being in competition with him.
My memories of the early years stop there, in 1987. We lost touch. I lost myself in revaluation and began to busy myself with historical shows, here in Verona, with Giorgio Cortenova. These were an excuse to rethink the background to the artistic experiences destined to close the twentieth century.
Then, years later in 1995, I was asked to curate a show for the sculpture park in Ozieri, Sardinia: this was an excuse to take up our friendship where it had left off. Once again in your studio I soon realised that things had changed for you too. You no longer lived in Turin and you had left your old studio. Now you lived in one of the houses typical of the Caneva area and, I have to say, there you breathed another atmosphere. At the time you weren't even painting, if by painting we mean the activity you had previously dedicated yourself to and which you were to take up again later. Now you were creating huge structures in metal, enormous black insects that crawled into galleries and the houses of collectors.
We managed to get the wind to propel a huge insect, three metres by two, over the Tyrrhenian sea to Sardinia where it grabbed hold of a wall banking a road climbing up to the highest part of the town. In the land of Nuraghes, of giants' tombs and of the Domus de Jana, a place where contemporary art would have difficulty in justifying itself, that overgrown black insect symbolised the endemically ill state of our daily life and might have represented a warning.
Now that I think about it I begin to suspect that, in the eighties with its atmosphere of enthusiasm for painting (by which I mean brushes, canvas, and paint), we might well have misinterpreted your nature, your real plans and intentions. I now see quite clearly that it was a mistake to confine you within the limits of painting. I ought to have understood at once your particular way of working, I should have understood as soon as I put my feet on your works.
I remember the vague sense of disillusionment in all those who expected from you a painting in the strictest sense. Instead they would find themselves in front of your first painted metallic forms leant against the wall. This was how you transgressed against painting itself and demonstrated your, violent though not pigheaded, way of being. I think of your obstinate constancy in the same way I think of that of the old-time anarchic peasants of the Padanian plane, indifferent and obstinately against everything and everyone. I liked you because you have always seemed to me to be an anarchic individualist, dressed in black with your white shirt buttoned at the throat. More than your paintings, your early curved iron pieces can now be seen as a protest against the world, your will to object - in a low voice, certainly, but always being heard by everybody. And even then we could hear the first stirrings of a refusal to accept your condemnation of the illness of being. As I am sure you will remember, I am referring to the plan for a solo show in New York which was cancelled because the themes it dealt with were too crude, the forms you used too powerful.
With the passing of time you have gone from the cosmic vision of the Ombre atomiche to the distinctive ideas of the Teste di iena, (Hyena Heads), to the Virus series. You have entered the human organism to arrive at the genetic series only to return, quite recently, ab ovo, to the embryo. And here you are again in Verona after rather more than ten years. Anybody who saw the show at Girondini's Fuxia Art gallery in 1989 and the Farfalle notturne, (Moths), you then presented, will not miss how, in these recent works, your continuing poetic and expressive intentions correspond to both a more variegated formal investigation and to a highly differentiated use of materials. On an overall view this same visitor will be obliged to notice how you go beyond painting. This might seem a banal statement when looking at such a highly sculptural work as Gemelli, (Twins), were it not for the fact that neither your painting is painting nor is your sculpture sculpture. The way you treat your surfaces has always been fairly uniform, so we can only say that if the surface you are dealing with is almost two-dimensional, then it is painting; if it is more three-dimensional, then it is sculpture. That's all. The way you treat the support has always been fairly homogeneous, whether you use varnish, foam, antifreeze, graphite or, more generally, industrial paint. It is as though the poetic dimension - closely tied to crude human existence between life and death, between being an embryo or a corpse - develops through materials that, like some industrial metonymy, represent our particular historical condition of living in the society we find ourselves in.
And so the distinctive characteristics of your work and of your existence as an artist can be found in a dialectic that moves from the general to the particular, from the cosmic to the micro-organic, and to understand them there is no need to have your whole working career in view: it is enough to visit any show of yours, this one in Verona for example, to see them all there, united, and to find in synthesis what I interpret as a contemporary artist's memento mori, a reminder to man and, possibly, to the whole of humanity of his genetic limits: both material and spiritual.
Yours affectionately, Roberto Lambarelli.