Futurist installations with a Dadaist flavour, silkscreen reproductions, mechanical forms, high literary references, fractals and quanta, scientific dynamics, cybernetics, dreamlike and subtly erotic fantasies, assemblages, light and sound impulses, multiples, videos, drawings, plexiglass, oils on canvas, perpetual renewal to remain himself, continuous and unstoppable alchemies. This is an incomplete list of the artistic vocabulary of Luciano Bertoli from Reggio Emilia, to whom a large group of public and private institutional and even entrepreneurial actors, led by the Palazzo Magnani and Pietro Manodori Foundations, dedicate a wide (almost a hundred works on display, the most recent from 2015) retrospective, entrusted to the curatorship of Martina Corgnati and hosted in the Renaissance rooms of Palazzo Da Mosto in Reggio Emilia.
Luciano Bertoli, “Città alcolica”, 1985, methacrylate, colored methacrylic extrusions, optical fibers, 135 x 60 x 80 cm, photo © Carlo Vannini, courtesy Fondazione Palazzo Magnani
In the preview of “Luciano Bertoli. Frattempo. Le curve di Mandelbrot” – a title taken from a creative cycle dating back to the late 1980s and early 1990s – Maurizio Corradini, president of the Palazzo Magnani Foundation, sums up very well one of the most relevant aspects of Bertoli’s creativity: the artist manages to give poetry to science. A concept that is the leitmotif of the official presentation at a time when his son Andrea also defines his father as an eclectic artist, an observer of scientific progress, even that which is difficult for most. Curator Corgnati verbally zooms in on Luciano Bertoli’s anti-pictorial art, imbued with studies and observations that range from late medieval and fifteenth-century painting to twentieth-century scientific currents, which legitimizes the coincidence between art and life. The critical passages mentioned above are essential to better enter the creative world of the artist who, born in 1940 and died in 2021, goes through the artistic decades oscillating between a strong bond with his territory and conceptual maps that explore the essence of the universe.
Luciano Bertoli, “Karriola”, 1976, pencil, pastel and ink on paper, 20 x 28.5 cm, photo © Carlo Vannini, courtesy Fondazione Palazzo Magnani
We can explore Bertoli’s hypereclecticism through some of the key works exhibited in the the exhibition, starting, paradoxically (but not too much) for a man interested in science, with a man. It is Calvino’s Man on the Dead Willow Tree (2003), on which the artist sees himself, a new Cosimo, as a child. The tree and the human figure seem to be at the end of their life cycle and are silhouetted against a background soaked in cosmic rays. «[…] photons of color would reach my eyes, atoms grouped within tangles of spin particles». For Bertoli, reality is made above all of waves and voids, rays and atoms. And in the Self-Portrait from 1970, an already more recognizable style such as the expressionist one blends admirably with splashes of anger that ultimately compose a face that brings us both to a profoundly human reality and to a science fiction iconography, with ears like Spock from Star Trek; with Luciano Bertoli you have the sensation of always being in two worlds, in outer space and on earth.
Luciano Bertoli, “L’ombra di Leonardo”, 1975, ink, watercolour, collage and combustion on paper, approximately 28.5 x 20 cm; “Vale più di mille parole”, 1975, installation, painted wood, iron, ropes, pulleys, suspended objects, 195 x 190 cm excluding installed and suspended elements, photo © Carlo Vannini, courtesy Fondazione Palazzo Magnani
If the late medieval monsters by Hyeronimus Bosch were bizarre fantasies capable of representing the demons of evil, Bertoli’s (in)animated monsters, such as the 1978 Cosmic Project Machine or Worth More Than a Thousand Words from 1975-76, are the protagonists of his mastery in large-scale wall works. This is not a deconstruction as an end in itself, but rather a great creative furrow in which the artist from Reggio Emilia unites in a single glance his technical mastery with a noble Disney-like playfulness, always keeping a permanent sentinel eye towards the infinite distances of the universe. Birth of Hiberna from 1985 is another crucial passage in Bertoli’s creativity. «The constant that unites all the periods of my life is considering my brain as a machine that works and produces. And, by producing, it renews itself». The methacrylate takes the stage and the artist projects us into a dimension of cinematic megalopolis (that of Metropolis or Blade Runner). We are faced with a futuristic scenario, in front of which the primordial monolith in plexiglass reminds us of the source of knowledge as the supreme guiding star of living and acting.
Luciano Bertoli, “Frattempo, Le curve Mandelbrot”, 1997, oil on panel, 100 x 100 cm, property of the author, photo © Carlo Vannini, courtesy Fondazione Palazzo Magnani
One cannot read Luciano Bertoli’s work without also focusing on the technical materialization of kinetic machines and mechanisms. The Virtuosini, dating back to the late 1980s, structured like vintage domestic ‘plates’ for listening to LPs, refer us to the musical experimentalism that came after the frontiers of dodecaphony. And again, large installations such as Il critico fondamentale (1995) truly constitute a great leap forward both for the use of materials, more elaborate and refined, and for the conceptual attitude (the creative process becomes even more sophisticated and shows more forcefully the artist’s technical mastery also in the direction of kinetics). Finally, another great artistic river into which Bertoli’s hyper-eclectic action has flowed. These are the large oil paintings on wood that make visual the great interest the artist has developed in the secrets of quantum nature. A masterful example of this is Sintropia d’amore (1999), also a fusion of the human and scientific nature of Luciano Bertoli’s conception. In the gravitational and infinitely small flow of matter, small and seductive female body elements can be glimpsed, because syntropy indicates the tendency of a system to be at the same time tending towards approach and differentiation, a conceptual synthesis that fully photographs the artist’s world. And again, after the crucial encounter with the October 1985cover of the American magazine Science, which depicts the Mandelbrot set, or what we commonly call “fractals”, Bertoli finally has before his eyes a morphological representation of this world and, as usual, he effectively feeds on it to bring it back into his works. The challenge is fascinating, fractals are among the most complex mathematical objects, but the artist does not back down, because «at most we are an idea, a design desired by that single mind». The retrospective is accompanied by the homonymous catalogue published by Silvana editoriale and the Fondazione Palazzo Magnani.
Info:
Luciano Bertoli. Frattempo. Le curve di Mandelbrot
21/09-24/11/2024
Palazzo da Mosto
Via Giovanni Battista Mari, 7 – Reggio Emilia
www.palazzomagnani.it/mostre/in-corso
I am Giovanni Crotti and I was born in June 1968 in Reggio Calabria to be reborn in June 2014 in Piacenza, the city where I live. My income is guaranteed by digital consultancy, and I then spend it largely on art and letterature: I have been and am a content curator and organizer of cultural events for artists, galleries and institutional spaces, as well as a writer of exhibition reviews, creatives of every era and books.
NO COMMENT