print November 1982

VENICE BIENNALE 1982: NO FORM, LITTLE CONTENTMENT

THE VENICE BIENNALE, AS CURRENTLY known, is the product of reorganization by the Italian Fascist state; though it was founded in 1895 by the City of Venice, its status was not fixed by law until December 1928, when King Vittorio Emmanuele III and Benito Mussolini declared it an autonomous agency. The law empowered a five-man commission to administer the agency; transferred the exhibition buildings in the Giardini out of city hands; and determined the Biennale’s financial structure—a fusion of funds from national and city governments, admissions, sales commissions, and catalogue receipts. With

print September 1982

Marco Bagnoli

The Villa Medicea, situated in Artimino in the countryside outside Florence, is where Rebecca Horn shot her film La Ferdinanda, and it is now the site of an installation by Marco Bagnoli. Inside, a long passage—through dark corridors and deserted rooms, up steep flights of steps—gives one a sensation of aimless movement, of climbing and descending the same stairs over again, of being caught in a labyrinth. There is minimal lighting, from small lamps on the floor that project unsettling shadows on the walls. The approach to (the idea of) the work of art is a tiring and uneasy one.

In an introductory

print Summer 1982

“Italian Art Now:An American Perspective”

This exhibition consisted of the work of seven artists: Sandro Chia, Enzo Cucchi, Nino Longobardi, Luigi Ontani, Giuseppe Penone, Vettor Pisani, and Gilberto Zorio. It provoked numerous questions, but furnished no answers or conclusions about the current Italian art scene. The choice of only seven artists seems to me excessively limited; the changes that took place in Italian art during the ’70s, seen in the transition from Arte Povera to New Image painting (the two poles represented in this show), assumed numerous forms through a process both more subtle and more polemical than this show

print February 1982

Anne and Patrick Poirier

The representation of ruins has ancient roots and illustrious precedents; in various epochs, a sense of searching through sites from the past has been communicated through the evocation of the remnants of the classical age. Fragmentary suggestions of antiquity elicit feelings of transience, ephemeralness, catastrophe, almost as if to indicate that nothing is impervious to the forces of time, that everything is subject to decay. The attempt to reveal traces of a sumptuous but long-vanished past has thus taken on the aspect of an illustration of the vanity of every artistic gesture, be it sculpture,

print February 1982

Luciano Bartolini

The recent exhibition of Luciano Bartolini’s work consisted of two installations—Septen triones (Seven oxen), also the title of the exhibition, and La scrittura degli dei (The writing of the gods), accompanied by a series of additional minor pieces on other walls of the gallery.

In the first installation 14 circular pieces of paper occupied two walls, outlining a shining path that seemed to move toward the corner of the room. The sheets of paper were arranged so as to evoke the constellation Ursa Major (the stars of which are also referred to as “The Seven Oxen”), the guide for navigators and

print September 1981

Luigi Ontani

Luigi Ontani’s most recent work abandons the body as a direct language in favor of a more “pictorial” dimension. In past self-portraits, he has employed the body as a linguistic means, photographing it in poses inspired by mass-media personalities, comic strips (“Superman”), literary works (Don Juan), or figures from classical painting. His interest in the past was conveyed through a filter of historical and literary references; the classical figures he invoked furnished the interpretive key to his stagings of life as art, and, conversely, of art as the acme of life. His staging has always been

print September 1981

Remo Salvadori

This show of Remo Salvadori’s work consisted of three pieces—a sculpture, a map drawing, and a book. The Pieroni Gallery had been structurally modified by the artist for this show, and the book contains a project showing the original, preexisting plan of the gallery and the successive changes introduced; the evolution of the idea is visualized in a series of drawings that develop gradually, with slight variations, until they coincide with a form that has already appeared in many of Salvadori’s previous shows.

The works were placed in the rooms of the gallery in a manner which created alternating

print February 1981

Vettor Pisani

“I work with a T square and compass” is the title Vettor Pisani has given to the rooms in his show. He brings into play elements found in his other work, such as archetypal figures and an austere use of the rational, the measured.

The central characters in this show-ceremony are two of the builder saints from the Roman basilica of the Santi Quattro Coronati (Four Crowned Saints), who hold up as emblems the very T square and compass cited in the title. They are patrons, then, of the dialectic between the straight line and the curve, of the existential tension between the logical order of reason

print February 1981

Gino de Dominicis

Gino de Dominicis’ work takes the space itself as its subject, examining it along three different lines—physical, projected, symbolic—that interact simultaneously.

On the level of immediate observation, one is struck by the unusual division of space in the gallery, which is cut from floor to ceiling by a section of a steel cage that isolates a portion of the room. The space created inside and outside the barriers is the physical level on which one relates to this enigmatic and disquieting work. It is presented as a void, but set apart. The immediate question, then, is who and what is behind or

Ida Panicelli