It may seem paradoxical, but many professional artists now want to be amateurs, dilettantes. There are numerous reasons for this, many of which can apply simultaneously to the same artist. For example, a certain kind of reverse snobbery may be involved, but also a genuine awareness of the dangers of hyperprofessionalism to which artists often fall prey and a consequent desire to sidestep the “obligations” of the profession. And the very etymology of the word “dilettante” bespeaks artists’ desire to “take delight” in what they are doing—experiencing neither agony nor ecstasy but something more bourgeois, more intimate, like the feeling conveyed by a small, old canvas painted by an aunt during a lakeside vacation.
Mario Dellavedova, a forty-four-year old artist who divides his time between Milan and Taxco, Mexico, understands all this. His recent exhibition seemed to be trying to spell it out—literally, in the clear letters applied to all forty of the little paintings, sculptures, and installations that made up the show. At the entrance, two little paintings contained the words that were also their titles, Si prega gentilmente di non toccare le opere esposte (Please Do Not Touch the Works on Display), 2003, and Arrivederci e grazie (Good-bye and Thank You), 2003. These banal phrases are usually placed alongside works and at the exits of fourth-rate galleries, but this time they “are” the work. In these and other pieces, the show evoked the banality of painting and its subjects, yet at the same time one could catch acute paradoxes and subtle images—masked with the same amateurish “ingenuity”—illustrating the artist’s detached and ironic spirit. For example, two beeswax honeycombs were spread out to form a surface on which the artist had worked with tremendous patience, filling some of the hexagonal cells with red egg tempera, to form the words Prova d’ozio (Proof of Laziness), 1996: an ironically self-referential work, considering the time and precision required to tackle something of this nature, like a piece of lacework created by one’s grandmother over a period of years.
My allusions to kinship relationships—the painting by an aunt, a grandmother’s lacework—are meant to register the homely impression that Dellavedova’s work conveys, in spite of its conceptual sophistication. A small canvas with a horizon painted yellow and blue is titled Deserto rosso (Red Desert), 2003, where the reference to Michelangelo Antonioni is as obvious as the fact that the title describes the work only in the sense that the color red has completely deserted the painting. Another piece, La vera nascita di Venere bis tra il Monte Sinai e il Mar Rosso (The Real Birth of Venus Again Between Mount Sinai and the Red Sea), 2001, is an improbable landscape that seems painted by a child, with the written title sliding over the edge and onto the back, as if the size of the canvas had been measured incorrectly.
The exhibition concludes with an installation made of brand-new, unused palettes wedged into cubbies made from white canvas and stretcher frames. Small and manageable like everything else in the show, the installation is titled Il riposo del poeta (The Poet’s Repose), 2003. Everything seems futile, save the dandylike celebration of idleness, the wordplay that slithers between the deliberately uncertain brushstrokes. Dellavedova seems to be telling us that it’s all nothing more than what the show’s title says: “fART.”
—Marco Meneguzzo
Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.
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