Franco Guerzoni. Sipari
Franco Guerzoni: of his past roots and recent works
by Fabrizio D'Amico
"I am greatly fascinated by what happens between the picture as I first imagined it and the end result, i.e. all the adventure of tiny victories, betrayals, and defeats that the picture obliges you to undertake: I think that everything resides in the active course imposed by movement, eye, hand and action on the picture surface." These words tell us a lot about Franco Guerzoni's mind and way of thinking about painting. Painting for him is neither a plan nor point of arrival but a journey of discovery. The only hope for the image lies in the concrete time passed in making it. "The final painting is a defeat [...], a question of giving in rather than making a definitive choice": how much history and knowledge there is in this brief phrase. In another time and another world, De Kooning never stopped searching for truths in his greatest masterpiece (Woman 1, which sums up all the sense of a life given over to painting). These truths would continually be hidden and reappear on the tortured canvas day, after day, week after week as the artist tried to add and take away marks, gestures, and colours. In fact the painting was never 'finished' and the dealer had to snatch it away from him in order to give it another life, an entry into the world. Guerzoni knows the fate of that picture: he loves it and - a long time after, when everything had changed and that totality of by now old-fashioned gestures was divested of any kind of rhetoric - has chosen it for himself as the cornerstone of his own painting.
He has also said, "My works are the outcome of a long courtship initiated on the surface by my thoughts and hands, the result of a subtle equilibrium between tiny victories and frequent defeats". Once again we find the concepts of conquest and defeat, of a lengthy time in which the image becomes form in the hands of someone who proceeds by trial and error. He also says, "It is painting that absorbs the eye": one that, before making assertions, looks for participation, for meeting someone with whom to share the experience that produced it. "A painting that does not reflect", one that has no teleology or certainties to give, apart from the time spent in making it. And, finally, it is due to this that, when feasting your eye on a picture by Guerzoni, you discover your own need to check through its existence before submitting to its splendour.
"The starting point is the surface to be animated - the canvas or piece of paper - and the first mark of pigment or ink that is thrown onto it: the effect produced, the adventure that ensues. [...] You don't make a painting in the same way as a building, starting from a ground-plan, but by turning your back on the result - make experiments! Go back!" These words were written by Jean Dubuffet sixty years ago in 1945 at the beginning of his Notes pour les fins lettres, which appeared in Prospectus published by Gallimard in 1946: one of the most amazing texts on aesthetics of the twentieth century. In it Dubuffet throws by the board the useless neo-plastic certainties current in post-war Paris. On his own he found the seeds of a different kind of painting (that he would call Informe, a term that would be taken over by Michel Tapié), and, like a seer, he predicted everything that was to follow, right up to art autre. It was when re-reading this text (as well as others by Dubuffet) that there came to my mind the singularity of Guerzoni's contradiction of those (Quintavalle first of all) who have linked him to Informal trends ("I think the frequently used term neo-Informal is wrongly applied to my work").
Of course Guerzoni has other roots: they grew from 60s Conceptualism which was quite the opposite of Italian Informale painting, with its heavy impasto and stratified material on the canvas, often limited by a more or less latently referential image. But the original Informel was something quite different (and, before Tapié multiplied and spread it about the world, far more cohesive, limited to just e few genuine founder members, amongst whom Wols and Dubuffet). And it is to this original Informalism that, I believe, Guerzoni's 'new' painting is linked more than he knows, a painting that has grown and developed amazingly from the 80s until today.
"To begin a picture is to start out on an adventure with an unknown destination" (Dubuffet). "I am obliged to start another journey, one leading from the needs of the work to the work's completion, and quite separate from my will" (Guerzoni). "I believe that the birth of a new image [...] is continuously sustained above all by unusual and fortuitous ideas" (Guerzoni). "The artist teams up with chance [...]; chance is part of the game" (Dubuffet). "The fragile origin of a work [...] is a note scratched on a small leaf of paper" (Guerzoni). "I feel inclined to leave in my pictures [...] unintended blotches, for example, and rough imperfections..." (Dubuffet). I could continue with this game of juxtapositions. So what we are dealing with is: the time needed by the work itself and a rejection of its completion; the lengthy "courtship of the image" necessary for making it; adventure and chance. And there is another notion basic to Guerzoni's work: archaeology which, for him, means memory. In this sense the source of this formal impulse is to be found in his nearness in time to Conceptualism and to its use of photography, paper and books as its favourite, and interactive, tools of research. But wherever his painting came from - in about, as I said, the beginning of the 80s - these roots gave backbone to his new work. Archaeology became, more than the evocation of a past, an obstinately empirical search for the traces and remains of a remote past in the stratified papers that are the exclusive reign of painting. Marks (never gestures: Guerzoni has from the beginning avoided the violence and immediacy of gesture, "Mine has never been a gash, a violent laceration") reveal themselves as excavations, ulcers, and wounds of the surface. And on top of them other marks are placed to heal the wounds in the hope of recomposing the lost unity: "Between ruin and restoration" he has said.
Other hints are added to archaeology: those indicated by memory which from the very start has accompanied it.