BEYOND THE THINGS OF REALITY. A DISCOURSE ON RAFFAELE CIOFFI’S PAINTINGS
Analytical painting and post-analytical painting: a necessary transition.
In 1990, Raffaele Cioffi enters the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. After his first year attending the course, he understands that, for him, there is an urgency to apprehend and carry out a “real” pictorial research; it was stronger than just following the conceptual line of his teacher Luciano Fabro, one of the founders of Arte Povera. At that time this was a subject which still had great cultural impact on the Italian art world and, together with Transavanguardia, it was probably the main art wave of greatest relevance in the most important commercial and exhibition channels. Therefore he decided to abandon the lure of a route that perhaps would have been easier to follow but that did not convince the young artist from Desio to leave the path of painting.
The writer is first to believe that classifying an artist, especially in the case of authors of the last twenty to thirty years, is certainly no longer necessary as it was in the past, due to the widespread free heterogeneity of stylistic and thematic references chosen by the authors of the last contemporary, yet, reading the origins of a formal choice, even if not exhaustive in a universal sense, is still useful to fully understand the weltanschauung of the artist. This critical attitude allows us to delve more deeply into Cioffi’s pictorial orientation, which can be placed within a climate of formal and theoretical experiences of contemporary painting, recognizable in the aniconic experience, even though he articulated, from the outset, a personal structure that then, in later years, increasingly brought out a narrative accent of a metaphysical and spiritual order.
In Cioffi’s early years, the suggestion for Morris Louis’s Color Field and abstract expressionist interventions as that of Gerhard Richter interposed chromatic assonances with the analytical painting of Claudio Olivieri and Claudio Verna, his masters and references. Yet, even in those early works it emerges the emotional dimension that the aniconic school of New Painting had instead always denie. Cioffi’s closeness, from the earliest times, to another master of painting, very different from his predecessors and with a strong expressionist lyrical afflatus, such as Mario Raciti, an artist filled with ethical and symbolic references, this is evidence of a choice of field that is anything but relativist, we would say instead romantic.
The case of his particular closeness with another master, Valentino Vago, analytical “tangent,” is emblematic and perhaps the closest to the spirit of Cioffi’s research. Vago, a catholic, follows a research to reach the Absolute, at a spiritual dimension that especially determines his clear split from materialist and technicist analytical principles since the 1990s.
Thus, outlining the road that led to the ‘minimal objectification of aniconic-analytic painting, starting from the late 1940s, represents a useful comparison for the reading of Cioffi’s particular post-analytic aniconic research.
The italian aniconic painting – which rewind does not use forms traceable to images that might suggest a connection with real space and therefore with the image – is a commonly accepted synonym for “Pittura Analitica” (a term coined by Klaus Honnef in 1974 and theorized by Filiberto Menna in the same year), in some cases called “Astrattismo Analitico” or even “Pittura-Pittura” (a term used by many militant critics such as Claudio Cerritelli) or “Astrazione Oggettiva”. However you call it is a flexible phenomenon (as it is not really a movement) that had intense years, from the exhibition curated by Honnef at the Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster in 1974 (later repeated in part in Milan) until 1977, and later returned to the Italian art debate with two important monographic exhibitions in 2003 by Marco Meneguzzo and in 2004 by Giorgio Bonomi.
Analytical painting had leading artists such as, Claudio Olivieri, Claudio Verna, Gianfranco Zappettini, Paolo Cotani, Carmengloria Morales, Marco Gastini, Riccardo Guarneri, Pino Pinelli, Giorgio Griffa, Enzo Cacciola and “tangent” artists such as, for example, Gottardo Ortelli, Paolo Masi, Antonio Calderara, Vittorio Matino, Elio Marchegiani, Valentino Vago, and voices in partial counter-melody if rightly analytical, such as Carlo Battaglia who always expressed the allusive sense of his painting. The movement developed in just a few years, through the action of militant Italian painters and critics actively immersed in an era of social tensions and demolishing impulses toward cultural customs, which corresponded to the ideological tension of a general violent resetting of art in its common terms. This process, however, had already been triggered in all fields of culture in the early post-World War II period with a particular emphasis on the problem of “language” in writing, film and art; this brings to mind Roland Barthes with his essays on the “zero degree” of writing (1953) or Alain Robbe-Grillet (1953) who solves, through object phenomenology, the psychological solution of his characters, in a collage of intuitions and free associations, inaugurating the Nouveau Roman.
Therefore, the florilegium of all these very different lines of research drew its driving force from the deliberate, sought-after, planned elimination of traditional techniques and materials in all fields of artistic artifact.
The “analytic” season in Italy, had as its cornerstones impersonality, minimalist synthesis of surface and color, skepticism toward narrative allusions, minimal manual intervention, technicism, and anti- individualism, and had origins farther back than 1973. Analytical painting in fact found its genesis, as we have mentioned, in the stream of deflagrating novelties in the Second Postwar period, in that unstoppable process that drew suggestions no longer only from the observation of nature and the human mind but in the art object itself (self-referentiality).
At that time, the sources from which to draw interpretation and insight are no longer the psychoanalytic sciences of the early twentieth century but are, on the one hand, scientific empiricism, especially in the field of materials research, and the tools of industrial technology (chemistry, optics and electronics); on the other hand, there continues to exist a cultural attitude, undoubtedly post-surrealist and post-dada, which induces extreme research oriented toward the disruption between image and vision, completely altering the sense of language that describes reality. The breaking of the chains of universal rules and values results in a multidisciplinarity that tends to disrupt the traditional paradigms of art in favor of a liberation of the boundaries between typologies and artistic modes.
In Italy, Lucio Fontana’s Spatialism (1947/1951-1958), the Nuclearists (1951), Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani’s Azimut (1959) trigger a process of progressive dissolution of all previous art; an action that plays with the expressive possibilities of images, materials and beyond.
In the following 1960s the minimalist/relativist process in art takes on ever sharper forms, not only in form but in content. In that period, U.S. America is engaged with the second phase of Abstract Expressionism, with New Dada, Fluxus, Optical and Pop Art; in Europe the phenomenon of Nouveau Realisme explodes, which though brief (1963-66) instructs a new kind of surrealism, elusive and ambivalent, which makes heterogeneity of style and references the fundamental assumption of its actions. The lack of purity becomes a real system that will enter like a virus into all forms of artistic expression up to our own years in which the disciplinary and cultural elements of art are used with the greatest freedom without caring about the coherence coefficient of the elements that constitute it.
Still in Italy, Arte Povera and Conceptual Art in their various declinations, Land Art, Programmed Art and Kinetic Art, with the Italian offshoots of Fluxus and New Dada, lead to a progressive distancing from painting. “Painting is dead,” was said in those years. In the mid-1960s, the growth of analytic philosophy, epistemology, Bridgman’s operationalism, Levi-Strauss’s French structuralism, McLuhan’s theories of communication, push the idea that painting is “the operations one performs to make it,” and that it is, as a medium, the message itself.
Conversely, in the 1970s, artistic action increasingly oriented toward the object-in-itself, the artifact, the experimental product, and the move away from humanistic, “narrative” and individual values, often lead to involuted theoretics and didactic research through excessive rigidity, which remain imprisoned in the “here and now” of a rapidly aging actuality imprisoned by the political ideologies governing a new moralism.
Analytical painting, then, expresses in its fundamental assumptions the discipline of a praxis, the annulment of a metaphysical research within the composition, and “separating” it from its human author who remains an imperfect element because he is an individual victim of personal drives and therefore weak compared to the monolith of the idea; in fact, in those years, determining impersonal action as a function of social and cultural re-education was a theme that traced the commitment of art especially in Italy.
I believe that the majority of these assumptions are not in fact possible and that much of the theory devoted to this type of painting takes on the proportions of intellectual virtuosity of an ideological matrix, suggestive certainly, fascinating at times, but with propositions that the new neuroscience and neuroimagering disavow completely: it is not possible for an author, as for anyone, to avoid hinging on in a manual action the feelings and sensations that the artistic action (drawing for example) invariably produces at that moment in the mind of the person doing it. In fact, this physical action results in a creative and emotional visualization of images latent in memory. The action of a gesture, especially if projective as in art, is sphere where the latent figures in the mind of the doer invariably enter into the process of making and direct it on a subliminal level. And what is made is the product of a metaphysical imagination, which has transformed object into subject, action into creation. For that matter, Olivieri and Verna themselves, in their later years, were taking a clear distance from the analytic fundamentalist positions, and as early as 1979 Zappettini, spoke of the primacy of the subjective incidence in the mere action of painting, that same perceptual subjectification of which Flaubert already mentions in Madame Bovary in 1856.
Therefore, since the work is an inevitable projection of the author’s mind, made up of images and feelings (Einfühlung, subtle responsiveness) that appear at the very moment of the gesture, the finished work itself by involving the viewer becomes the author’s own evident allusive/narrative expression; an expression that has that form and not others because it is produced by those images and not others that were formed at the moment of its creation. And the work, by becoming the psychic stimulus of the viewer, created by the automatic thought forms of the author, takes on the role of a “text” and thus a narrative, that is, a story open to the outside world. So, in this whole affair of analytical painting we also recognize a strategic aspect, beyond scientistic motivations and theoretical justifications: in reality, perhaps, theorists have reacted to save painting, “changing everything to change nothing,” as the Prince said in Tomasi di Lampedusa’s “The Leopard.” They tried to curb its heralded extinction with the idea of assimilating the art of the brush, which they deeply and culturally felt-and which they could not accept disappearing-to the objectifying, relativizing conceptuality proper to those new experiences that tended to erase it.
Raffaele Cioffi understood this not through complex theoretical operations but through the intuition suggested by his talent, through his personal path dedicated to physically creating a painting (without any mechanical aids such as the airbrush), grasping precisely from the analytical school the useful elements to compose his language but abandoning theoretical extremes. So, Cioffi in thirty years of activity builds a painting that we can define as post-analytic; a research free from ideological or group ties whose authority he has never recognized. Instead, he drew from his masters a sense of the rigor of painting making, of the sacred importance of this activity and of the continuous and necessary daily commitment. Of all that rational pictorial matrix he grasped only a few values such as acquiring a well-delineated technique (of which he perfectly mastered the measure and possibilities) and the sense of the chromatic structure, articulated through a wise compositional discipline that makes the structure effective because it is stretched to the limit of the synthesis of the stroke of a paintbrush.
This, then, is why we say that Cioffi is a post-analytic painter; because he takes on the kind of painting, the sense of the image, but leads his creative choices deliberately toward sharing with the viewer the events that happen beyond the painting itself, clearly overcoming the cadaverous rigidity of a painting that would like to remain a self-concluded, immobile, detached object and instead opening objective abstractionism to an evocative and engaging dimension. Cioffi marks the transition from analytical painting to post-analytical painting that digests the past but does not before disavow its expressive role as an intermediary between the image of the real and the vision of the imagination.
Light, shadow, painting.
Cioffi’s work in recent years is increasingly oriented toward a pictorial narrative that moves through the original articulation of color and strokes, which we define as “pivoting,” that is, a drafting by brush strokes oriented according to ever-changing orbits, omnidirectional vectors aimed at creating a reticular, iridescent and porous fabric of overlapping colors, appearing in the form of subtle vaporizations from tonal chromatics; expressions of a painting that seeks not only dynamic expansion within the composition but also desires to engage the space outside the “picture object” by altering the perception of the real space around it. With this totally manual, nervous, complex pigment-laying technique of his, Cioffi succeeds in narrating the experience of transcendent movement between our reality and that of mystery, involving the viewer in a participation of surprising intensity. With typically contemporary ductility he activates a personal declination of formal elements of past masters, such as Turner’s luminous vapors and Monet’s and Seurat’s chromatic fragmentation, Rotchko’s Color Field, but also by recalling, with the axial and rigorous sense of pictorial setting, similar to the painting of medieval primitives.
With the exhibition “Luce Ombra Pittura” at the Galleria di Palazzo Ducale in Mantua, the Lombard painter offers visitors his latest works; large unpublished canvases that express a new line of Raffaele Cioffi’s immersive and romantic painting; a phase of greater reflection and depth than the previous exhibition, curated by the writer, on two floors of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Milan-Lissone, “Soglie. 2018-2020”, dominated by bright colors and intense luminosity.
The exhibition at the State Museum of Palazzo Ducale, which is spread over three large rooms of the medioeval Palazzo del Capitano, declares a progressive path that runs through the first room with the last executed compositions of the “Soglie” (Thresholds) cycle, in which the play of deep contrasts (e.g. “Blue Door”) is evident as a prelude to the next phase. Reaching the second room we have an intermediate phase of experiments from the years 2018-20, which we wanted to be shown together with the new compositions precisely because they are reflections of what four years later the painter would articulate with final choices. So, these works from 2018-20 are compositions that decline color but in a tarnished dimension, obscured by a kind of fog that reduces all vibrancy (“Alone Rosa”), and that introduce the latest research.
In the final large room, in fact, we find the works of the last period, the “Passaggi” (Passages) in which the marked chiaroscuro imprint and the sharp difference of the fields highlight a dense, categorical making, undoubtedly with more serious tones, yet always illuminated by an energy that pulses in sub-track that is color, vibrant and pulsing, “pivoting,” ready to emerge. In these works, the use of light and shadow appears more decisive; the same linguistic set-up of the compositions declares itself more synthetic and introspective than in previous works, declined by constructive field cuts from the sharp edge and with rigorous color choices.
Cioffi with these latest works wishes even more clearly to coincide two worlds that would seem to be unapproachable: that of art that only wants to express the aesthetics of itself at the moment of fruition (pure painting without intended meaning) and that of art of an automatic-psychic matrix that deliberately triggers in the observer the elaboration of unconscious images and imaginative suggestions, thus a provoked narration. The lyrical afflatus of this author who intentionally uses a language of synthesis to narrate the complexity of the relationship between art and reality, between the truth of the object and the truth of perception, between description and narration, appears evident.
In the “Aloni” (Halos) Cioffi suggests to us a kind of enlargement of fragments of the works of the previous cycle, the “Thresholds”; visions from the inside, we would say “beyond the mirror,” of the ultra-dimensional portals, and this choice expresses the sense of Cioffi’s self-analysis towards the constitutive structure of his painting; painted canvas as a space of a necessary reflection for the artist towards his linguistic reasons after thirty years of painting practice.
Claudio Olivieri himself writes about Cioffi that his painting, going beyond analytical settings, takes on emotional directions articulating itself “in an ever-changing way, (…) opening new chromatic areas or changing speed or abruptly stopping, but always maintaining an energy that makes the color vibrate. It is from the stroke that all the possible potentialities of the image arise, from transparencies to densities up to the wrinkling of matter in a chromatic tumult or distending in a luminous fulfillment. But looking at the paintings one after another I sense a question: what moves all this? From where does this journey in color begin, traversed and sometimes perturbed, sometimes shaken or resonant as if the trace of the sign provoked its hidden meaning?” In this writing, dedicated to the 2013 “Sipario” (Curtain) exhibition, Olivieri himself in the last lines posits in subtrack that the whole complex structure of this painting has a lyrical origin, that is narrative and not rational, (the hidden sense) and being him an analytical author, with the rhetorical tool of the question, he wittily suggests that the origin cannot be found in the work itself but beyond, in a mystery that such sign, that such painting made of light, shadow and color wants to suggest beyond itself.
After all, light and shadow are constituent elements of a painter’s expressive mechanics.
And painting is the only action the painter knows to realize his testament of truth, beyond the things of reality.
(Trad. dall’italiano di Laura Belle Mugnaini)
