MECHANICAL COSMOGONIES

Andrea Bellini

The photograph you see on the left page was taken in June 1968 by Paolo Bressano,¹  at 3 Via San Fermo, Turin—a former car dealership. It is one of the rare picture of the first “exhibition” to be put on in the Deposito D'Arte Presente²  by a collection of young Turin-based artists³  who, soon after, were to enter history as the Arte Povera group.⁴ The Deposito was neither a museum nor a gallery, but rather a space run by artists, which was set up by Marcello Levi⁵ and several local collectors.⁶  Almost all the artists who showed their work on this occasion revolved around the gallery of Gian Enzo Sperone, another of the Deposito's guardian spirits. At the time, Sperone had a little gallery on the corner of Piazza Carlo Alberto, which was not suitable for large-format pieces, so the Deposito allowed him to exhibit the more ambitious works created by his stable of artists. Piero Gilardi, a very active member of the group, spent some time as the organizer of the venue, before leaving the world of art for that of political activism. Even so, there were neither chiefs nor curators at the Deposito: decisions were made collectively, and the artists were free to choose which pieces they wanted to show. This policy soon led to ill feeling and disagreement. And indeed the Deposito did not last long: it closed down in April 1969 amid much conflict and recrimination between the Deposito artists and exponents of the Laboratorio del Teatro Stabile.⁷

We see in Bressano's black-and-white photograph some iconic works from the very dawn of the Arte Povera movement, a term coined by Italian critic Germano Celant. Some now-famous works by Alighiero Boetti are clearly visible in the foreground, and at the top left there are others by Gilberto Zorio. At the back of the room we can just make out Mario Merz's first famous “Igloos” and, just to the right, a sculpture by Giovanni Anselmo. Between the works by Boetti and Merz, there is what looks like a table, with clean, geometric lines. This work has an English title, which describes its material and states its colour: Mat Metal Brown-Purple Big Table Sculpture. This sculpture is quite different from the others in the picture, for it is not made of lowly materials, it is not an installation and it makes no reference to an idea of primary energy. The artist who made it, Gianni Piacentino,⁸ was 23 years old, and one of the youngest artists in the group. Two years previously, in June 1966, at the age of just 21, he exhibited with Michelangelo Pistoletto and Gilardi in the exhibition Arte Abitabile at Gian Enzo Sperone's gallery, in Turin. Like the other artists in the Arte Povera group, Piacentino met his fellow group members Giulio Paolini, Pistoletto, Mario and Marisa Merz, Gilardi, Boetti and Zorio every day between 1965 and 68. As a group, they were very diverse in terms of character, interests and type of work, and these differences emerged ever more clearly as time went by. Piacentino and Gilardi were the first to abandon this little community. They did so for different reasons, but in both cases it was after the experience of the Deposito D'Arte Presente. Gilardi left the art system and devoted himself to creative activities in the social sphere. Piacentino, on the other hand, spent the summer alone, intent on restoring a 1930s motorbike by the US-company Indian. The two completely different paths they chose tell us a lot about their work and about the way this generation of artists viewed the relationship between art and life.

Piacentino did indeed race alone, in both life and art. His meticulous and historically accurate restoration of the Indian was but the logical outcome of his great passions: model-making, mechanics, technology, paint and speed. He had no artistic training and had taught himself to make things through his love of postage stamps and model racing cars. After high school and a couple of years studying philosophy, he earned a living as a disc jockey and, in 1967 and 1968, as a part-time worker at the Plastocoat paint factory in Turin. In close contact with the company chemist, the artist learnt to produce the first water-based enamels being sold to the Italian navy for below-deck coating. He also worked with fluorescent colours for scuba-diving cylinders—to make them more visible in deep waters. And he made the first ‘ceramic’ coatings in epoxy resin for containers used for wine, oil and foodstuffs. It was here that he learnt the basics of the chemistry of paint and important notions about the durability and stability of colours.⁹  At Plastocoat, he also learnt to make synthetic mother-of-pearl colours, some of which were iridescent, with chromatic effects that were to play a key role in his later work.

We now need to step back three years. How did Piacentino's sculpture, as we see it in Bressano's photo, originally come about? Why do Arte Povera artworks appear to come from a common source of inspiration, while Piacentino's are unparalleled in all Italy? Where does this entirely Italian episode of Minimalism come from? As regards this third question, I should like to point out straight away that it was a cultural phenomenon that appeared at the same time as Minimalism in America. When Piacentino made his first works, in 1966, he still had not seen what the Minimalists across the ocean were creating.¹⁰ The encounter that proved decisive for the creation of his first pieces was with Paolini, in 1964, at Luciano Pistoi's gallery in Turin.¹¹ The two¹² started talking about the question of painting, the problem of vision and the issues associated with the object-based dimension of painting. In 1966, having made a number of monochrome canvases,¹³ which already give an idea of his interest in large expanses of colour and in artificial paints, Piacentino started looking at the structure of paintings, at their backs and at their frames. Like Paolini, he too wanted to surpass painting by de-structuring it, but he went beyond purely conceptual meditations and moved towards sculpture. His first pieces of 1966, such as Blue-Purple Big L and Dark Dull Pink Large X, are three-dimensional projections of the constituent elements of the frame. If we look closely, we can see how these sculptures come from considerations that are very different from those that led to early American Minimalism. Unlike his American counterparts, Piacentino was not interested in exploring primary form organized in open structures and serial sequences. Nor did he use industrial processes to make his works, which instead are the result of his extraordinary manual skill and craftsmanship. In contrast to the case with East-Coast Minimalism, it is impossible to say what materials Piacentino used to make his pieces. His sophisticated coatings conceal the underlying material, thus transforming his sculptures into pictorial elements arranged in space, measuring and including the space as part of the work itself. Additionally, his use of colour, the manual element, and his obsessive attention to finish and surface treatment all suggest a link between Piacentino and West-Coast Minimalism. And yet this proximity—to John McCracken, for example—is only apparent, for the American artist sees his works as a means to unlocking an invisible world. They express an absolute otherness with regard to reality—more like objects abandoned by UFOs on earth. Piacentino's approach, on the other hand, is more empirical and skeptical. Using his amazing technical skill, he transfigure elements of the inhabited environment (windows, doors, bookcases, posts and desks) into elements of colour in space. This minimalism, which encounters the everyday world, this crystallisation of practical objects into sculptures, is more akin to pieces made just a few years previously by Richard Artschwager. Piacentino's works are, however, less literal and descriptive, for rather than playing with the object, if anything they transcend it. In a recent interview the artist said: “I like it when the art object competes with the real object as an emotional presence and force (brought about mainly by size and colour), and when it is considered as a real object that does not simply refer to something else (no literariness in art).”¹⁴ The doors, tables and bookcases do not acquire meaning as set forms, but rather act as pretexts to give structure and definition to elements of colour in the environment. As such, Piacentino's posts suspended in the corners of rooms are closer in their intent to the coloured neon lights which Dan Flavin¹⁵ had started making just two years previously, in 1963. However pertinent they may be, these references should not allow us to neglect an important fact: the works of the young artist from Turin were fundamentally autonomous and original—not just with regard to American Minimalism but also, and especially, to the world of Italian art. The importance he gave to colour, to the technical and manual aspects, and to the issue of industrial design made him one of the most singular and innovative artists in post-war Italy.

This uniqueness is possibly why—with the exception of some critics, gallery owners and collectors—the public and experts have always found it difficult to understand the significance of his work. Even his very early pieces, which were included in Germano Celant’s first official exhibitions of Arte Povera, aroused much perplexity among professionals. The precious surfaces of his sculptures appear far removed from those “humble” materials, such as earth, wood, stone, iron and rags, that were being used by the other artists in the group. In a famous essay of 1967, entitled “Appunti per una guerriglia” [Notes for guerrilla warfare], Celant states that Arte Povera mainly appears “in reducing to the minimum and in impoverishing the signs, in order to reduce them to their archetypes.” Piacentino does not reduce things to their minimum, but rather transfigures and idealises them and, on the contrary, tends to make his works sumptuously colourful. The dark dull-pinks, the warm violet-greys, the purple-blues,¹⁶ which appear in the titles of his work between 1966 and 68, bring to mind the lavish chromatic palette of Bronzino and the Mannerists. These are the colours that art turns to when it wants to be precious, aristocratic and lofty. “Colour is everything for me,” said the artist in an interview¹⁷ in 1985. Piacentino and McCracken were the only artists who, in the 1960s and 70s, went so far as to make marbled works, imitating the veins and nuances of marble.

In this context, or rather under the label of Arte Povera,¹⁸ Piacentino felt ill at ease, and the split was not long in coming. As we have seen, he left the Deposito D'Arte Presente in a climate of misunderstanding during the summer of 1968.¹⁹ Just one month later, in October, the Arte Povera + Azioni Povere show opened in Amalfi, and it turned out to be the last time he took part in a group exhibition.²⁰ In a debate held during the event, the critic Gillo Dorfles²¹ took the floor and declared that the works of three artists had nothing to do with the exhibition.²² The three were Fabro, Paolini and Piacentino. On a number of occasions, Paolini has said that Dorfles's view was fundamentally correct and that there was indeed a problem of cohabitation between his pieces and those of the others. What is more, in the summer of 1968 problems linked to the Deposito led to a definitive deterioration of relations between Piacentino and Sperone.²³ 

The artist thus left the group and focused on restoring his Indian-brand motorbike.²⁴ Following a stunning beginning to his career, he spent a year without taking part in any exhibitions. We can say that exhibiting at the Deposito proved to be a watershed in his career. When he had restored the motorbike, Piacentino decided to focus his efforts as an artist on his real passions: competition, speed, modelling and collecting. He started creating a new world—a mechanical and heroic cosmogony in which he found the true meaning of his work and of his existence. His creative output became an extension of his own personality and obsessions. His sculptures turned into objects of affection and into tangible projections of an attitude that bordered on mania. As he has said on a number of occasions, this is why he cannot stand his work being touched, as fingerprints disturb a tranquillity that is made complex by the fact that it is subject to the laws of time.²⁵ We can also see this relationship to his work in their titles, which provide precise technical information about the materials and colours used.²⁶ He appears to be inviting us to look at his sculptures from the point of view of their physical complexity and construction rather than from that of their literary or iconographic value.²⁷ Indeed, in a 1985 interview Piacentino said: “art has taught me to become a craftsman.”²⁸ If we do not bear in mind the pleasure he finds in creating the work with his own hands and in the importance of making, we cannot understand the meaning of his work. Colour, detail and the way technical and decorative problems are solved all play a key role in his artistic practice. “I'm truly fascinated by the aesthetics of technique,” in “everything that functions,” adds Piacentino. This also explains his interest in scientist-artists such as Piero della Francesca, Paolo Uccello and Leonardo da Vinci, whom he appreciates more as scientists than as artists.

In 1969 Piacentino started to work on dozens of kick-scooter prototypes and on a vast range of curious two- and three-wheeled vehicles. With aerodynamic shapes and elegant colours and decorations, these are idealised means of transport with no practical purpose. Even the metals he uses have a pictorial and decorative quality: one need only see how gold, silver, copper, chrome and nickel come together in little details. In their formal variations, the vehicles borrow from aesthetics that range from the first racing cars of the twentieth century to the most modern, from the fuselages of early aeroplanes to kick scooters, and from motorbike fuel tanks of the 1920s and 30s through to the most recent. In form and structure they tend to maintain the minimal character of the sculptures he had been making in the previous four years. Like his first minimal objects, his vehicles tend to appear as trajectories of colour through space too, but they also acquire curves, lines and ornamental elements that bring the elegance of the Liberty style and Art Deco to mind. With an approach that still today is viewed with suspicion in the art world, Piacentino often makes reference in interviews²⁹ to the “beautiful” and the “decorative.” The minimal bars of his early years are now adorned, like friezes, with wings, propellers and wheels as static symbols of movement.

In the 1970s, Piacentino’s mechanical cosmogony started to bear a sort of factory logo, with his initials GP always appearing on all his vehicles.³⁰ Like an automobile marque, the artist signs his work as part of a mythopoetic process. The GP logo is also repeated, always in reinvented ways, in a new series of paintings that the artist began to work on in about 1973. The large abstract expanses of the early monochromes of 1965 still remain on these canvases, but now they are embellished with the silhouettes of twin-engines, old aeroplanes and propellers. These works, entitled Memorial, are monuments to things of the past, to the first flights of the Wright brothers and to legendary crossings. The painting technique is extremely meticulous, with emotion reduced to the minimum, if not to zero, and it is dominated by the precision of action. The style is funereal and solemn, and the images are directly inspired by his collections. Ever since he was an adolescent, the methodical, resolute Piacentino collected postage stamps linked to the history of aviation, and later also models of Formula One racing cars. His work of the 1970s take inspiration from a number of 20s postage stamps illustrating early American aeroplanes. Towards the end of the decade, these canvases were combined with sculptures and bars in his first Symmetrical and Asymmetrical Combines works. From 1983, sculptural elements were added to the canvas in his Abstract Combines. These works exist in two- and three-dimensions, and extend only horizontally or vertically. Piacentino has never made square works. In fact, the constant, linear extension of all his objects gives them the dynamism of a trajectory in space. Even his oval shapes, which he often uses for his “combines,” tend to move in a single dimension along a horizontal line.

Over the following decades, the artist's work revolved around constant variations on the same theme, in an almost timeless, circular dimension. Like other artists who have literally “constructed” their work, based on a “logic of action”—and here again I am thinking of John McCracken—Piacentino has always remained fundamentally faithful to himself. His work continues to be proudly removed from the context of the avant-gardes, staying linked to manual creation, in which the process of invention ultimately appears to be connected to advances in the techniques and materials he uses.

And indeed, Piacentino does not comprehend the problem faced by the avant-gardes of the 1960s, who felt the need to make a break with the past and to abandon aesthetics. In his opinion art must be beautiful, possibly precious and certainly the outcome of the mind together with the hand. In this sense, the artist's work is quite literally schismatic with regard to the various artistic currents at work at the turn of the 1970s. The return to early industrial design, the cold, detached approach to the work and the elevation of impersonal, rational aesthetic values make him a pioneer of the return to object-based art of the 1980s. This is the fundamental difference between Piacentino and an artist such as Panamarenko,³¹ with whose work aspects of his own practice can, to some extent, be compared. Both are attracted by the phenomena of flight and speed, and both turn these modern myths into the subject of their work. The Belgian artist, however, creates his machines within the pseudo-scientific world of the bricoleur and of the inventor-scientist, whereas Piacentino transfigures this world of the mind and draws it into the “sacred” fold of art, for his is a secular neo-metaphysics of the object and of speed.

The exhibition of Gianni Piacentino's work at the Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève is his first ever retrospective abroad. It spans the artist's entire career, from 1965 through to the present day, with a complete reconstruction of his first solo show at the Galleria Sperone, in 1966. Arranged in chronological order, and in close cooperation with the artist himself, the show also examines copious documentary material which comes directly from his archive.

This catalogue, the first extensive monographic publication devoted to the artist, includes a number of original essays written for the occasion by international critics and curators. In her contribution, Laura Cherubini places Piacentino's work in the artistic and cultural context of his early years; Marc-Olivier Wahler relates early Minimalism to the myth of motorbikes and speed; Christophe Kihm also tackles the notion of speed and aerodynamics, emphasising the idealised nature of Piacentino's work; Dan Cameron, on the other hand, considers the relationship between the Italian artist and American art, revealing both the originality and the current relevance of his work; while Hans Ulrich Obrist offers an important interview given recently in Turin; lastly, Marianna Vecellio has worked on a timeline of illustrations, which ends the catalogue.

Here I should like to thank Gianni Piacentino, with whom I have been working for four years to bring about this project, and all the authors, for their assistance and for the enthusiasm with which they accepted the invitation to write about the artist.

Our hope is that this exhibition may act as an initial contribution to a new level of understanding and to a rediscovery of the work of this great artist, as well as lead to a revision of an important part of the history of Italian art in the second half of the twentieth century. The Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève, of which I am the director, intends to become a driving force behind this constant need to rethink the history of art as a complex and concerted phenomenon.

 

 

1 Paolo Bressano was one of the first photographers to follow the work of the Arte Povera artists, even before the movement itself was formed. For example, it was he who took the photographs used by Michelangelo Pistoletto, in 1962, to create his first, renowned “Mirror Paintings.”

2 See on this subject Robert Lumley, “Arte Povera a Torino: l’intrigante caso del Deposito D’Arte Presente,” in Marcello Levi: ritratto di un collezionista. Dal futurismo all’arte povera, Hopefulmonster Editore, Turin, 2005.

3 In actual fact, some of the artists whose works were shown at the Deposito did not take part in the first exhibitions of Arte Povera. These included Ugo Nespolo and Paolo Icaro.

4 The first “Arte Povera” exhibition was held in Genoa, in September 1967, at Francesco Masnata's Galleria Bertesca, where works by Alighiero Boetti, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Pino Pascali and Emilio Prini went on show. In the next exhibition of the same name, at the Galleria De Foscherari in Bologna, in February 1968, Germano Celant added a number of Turin-based artists, including Giovanni Anselmo, Gianni Piacentino, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Gilberto Zorio, as well as Mario Ceroli from Rome. Piero Gilardi, on the other hand, took part in Arte Povera + Azioni Povere in Amalfi, in 1968.

5 Marcello Levi (b.1922) over the last sixty years has been one of the leading collectors of contemporary art in Italy. See, on this subject, Robert Lumley, op. cit.

6 At its height, the Deposito had 60 members who each paid a fee of 10,000 lire a month for two years. Members included journalists and critics such as Luigi Carluccio—who at the time wrote for the Italian newspaper La Gazzetta del Popolo—and young members of the upper middle classes of Turin. These included industrialists such as Ferruccio Bonetti and Alessandro Dorna Metzger, great notaries public such as Remo Morone—one of the first Italian collectors of Pop Art—gallery owners such as Christian Stein, a number of aristocratic families, and several leading professionals.

7 The Deposito was originally set up as an interdisciplinary space for concerts, plays and screenings of experimental films. The first signs of discontent arose when the Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini came to Turin, and the Deposito was placed at his disposal (as he refused to put on any of his works in institutional theatres) for a theatre production of Orgia. The artists complained that their pieces had been removed from the space without prior notice. Pasolini was taken to a room and fiercely attacked by the artists. The situation degenerated in 1969 when a series of experimental films put on by the Laboratorio del Teatro Stabile was violently interrupted by approximately 30 demonstrators, including some artists who had been expelled from the Deposito, who left spray-paint graffiti attacking the film-makers. See, on this subject, Robert Lumley, op. cit.

8 Piacentino showed four works in the first exhibition at the Deposito: Black-Violet Marbled Object with Handrails (1967-68), Beige-Silver Bars on Trestles (1967), Metalloid Blue-Gray Without Oval Sculpture (1967-68), and Mat Metal Brown-Purple Big Table Sculpture (1967-68).

9 As an “expert,” Piacentino gave technical advice to Anselmo, Boetti and Paolini on ways of making special paints.

10 In the interview with Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, op. cit., Piacentino says: “We first came across the work of the Minimalists in about 67, in photographs in magazines at Sperone's gallery.”

11 Luciano Pistoi (b. 1927, Rome; d. 1995, Siena, Italy), of Tuscan origin, moved to Turin in the 1930s. In 1957 he opened Galleria Notizie, with an exhibition of works by three young painters: Mario Merz, Piero Ruggeri and Sergio Saroni. The gallery later proved to be fundamental for the development of the art scene in Turin, showing pieces by Alberto Burri, Francis Bacon, Luciano Fabro, Jean Fautrier, Tano Festa, Lucio Fontana, Franz Kline, Pietro Manzoni, Giulio Paolini, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, Salvatore Scarpitta and Mario Schifano, among others.

12 In those years, Piacentino was using what had previously been Paolini's first studio—an attic in 15 Via San Francesco da Paola, in Turin.

13 Cf. D.S.O. and Amarillis, shown in this retrospective in Geneva, both from 1965, and later Autodefinizione G (1965), Bivest + 1 (1965), Four Colours Cross (1965), MA F.F. (1965), etc.

14 Interview with Arianna Rosica and Marco Tagliafierro, Flash Art Italia, no. 295, July-September 2011.

15 Piacentino and Flavin did indeed meet at the latter's solo exhibition at Gian Enzo Sperone's gallery in Milan, in 1967. Piacentino mentions how surprised the two artists were to find that they both drew their work on squared paper, and that they were always based on rods and lines in space.

16 In the interview with Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, op. cit., Piacentino says: “I've always had this passion for colour; I remember when I was a boy, when I was studying Klee, I wrote down all the names and characteristics of the colours and their variations.”

17 Interview with Isabella Puliafito, catalogue for the exhibition Abstract Combines 1983-1985 at Christian Stein's gallery, Turin, 1985.

18 Do the Arte Povera artists have any themes and methods in common? In one way or another, the artists themselves have always said no, even though of course they did benefit, at least to begin with, from being part of a group.

19 According to Piacentino, his works were constantly being moved by the other artists towards the back of the exhibition space, with the excuse that they needed to take photos.

20 In the interview with Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, op. cit., Piacentino states: “I must say that the most ingenious was Germano Celant, who clutched at straws to justify my presence in Arte Povera.”

21 Gillo Dorfles (b. 1910, Trieste, Italy) is an Italian critic, painter and philosopher. A professor of Aesthetics at the universities of Trieste and Milan, in 1948 he was one of the founders of the Concrete Art Movement.

22 Piacentino has often recalled this episode, both with me and during other interviews. Cf. Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, op. cit.

23 In the interview with Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, op. cit., Piacentino says: “Then I quarrelled with Sperone about the exhibition at the Deposito D'Arte Presente, where my table was put into a corner so as to put the spotlight on the more Arte Povera works. At that point I took to restoring an old motorbike and started making models of vehicles.”

24 The restoration of a 1930s motorbike allowed him to apply his manual skills to a very special object, for during that decade, technology and engineering were still very much a matter of craftsmanship and invention.

25 Piacentino hates the passing of time over his work. The restoration jobs were radical and reconstructive. Right from the outset, he archived detailed technical specifications of the colours he used for each work and kept original bottles in his studio.

26 From the 1950s, he radicalised this approach and gave his pieces titles in the form of initials and a number, no longer making reference to the materials and date of production. Today the titles appear to be addressed to a small number of experts who are able to understand the difficulties involved in making a screw thread or a particular type of paint.

27 This is an attitude that he shares with early American Minimalism.

28 Interview with Isabella Puliafito, op. cit.

29 See, for example, the interview with Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, op. cit.

30 In the interview with Isabella Puliafitto, op. cit., Piacentino states: “My initials came as a result of the annoyance I've always felt when I see a signature on a painting, which I think it's got nothing to do with. Since it had to be there, I tried to make it fit in with the work and make it decorative. I see it as an industrial aspect, and indeed I used ‘Cadillac’ characters. This started in the 70s on the first vehicles and then on the bars. It has now been reduced to the point where it is a sign one cannot even see, or it is broken, but it is always a decorative, even though increasingly abstract, element. My initials are a sort of trademark—an idea of decoration. Basically, it's one of the few literary references I've allowed myself in my work, together with the words Wright Brothers and Flight.”

31 On the subject of the phenomenon of cultural simultaneity, it was indeed right at the end of the 1960s that Panamarenko started making his curious machines.