Genetics of form is the title of the group show inaugurated the last 9^th April at the historical Gallery of Modern Art “Giovanni Carandente” in the Palazzo Collicola, which, by the signature of the young curator Davide Silvioli, has carried out the seasonal exhibition program following the two inaugural solo shows (Private Constellation by Matteo Montani and Re-Echoby Mark Francis).

The ontology of form, theme that easily finds a concrete definition in the fertile soil of science, if applied to contemporary art it hides the impossibility of a codification, even despite its presumed simplicity. Silvioli consistently chooses to give total freedom to the seven gathered artists (Antonio Barbieri, Giulio Bensasson, Roberto Ghezzi, Giulia Manfredi, Miriam Montani, Bernardo Tirabosco and Medina Zabo) to reinterpret the idea of the form, through continuous hybridizations and contrasting elements.

Certainly, contemporary thought has inevitably embarked on its path overcoming, and at times reworking, the numerous arguments, both those who wanted matter and form split between them, derived from the Platonism, and those derived from the Aristotelian synol which supported its union instead. Relating this argument to the substance (ousia) of the art work and then linking it to the concepts of being and becoming, of act and power, matter and form, the greatest risk is to fall into a metalinguistic debate that modern and contemporary critic have repeatedly undertaken to distract the viewer’s attention from his total dependence on aesthetic judgment.

Reasoning on form, during an era poised between post-humanism and trans-humanism, where language, not only the “visual” but also the semantic one, has come to extremize the idea of experimentation to the point of an excessive use of the prefixes “meta” and “trans” in order to acquire a value of qualitative judgment, it appears as a conservative choice.

Faced with the sudden technological progress, artistic poetics are developed simultaneously, and they often define the form through inner impulses, often linked to a desire for symbiosis with the organic and natural world. The Blaue Reiter (1912), for example, has been seen by critics as an movement of escape from functionalism.The most common mistake that has been made was to adopt a comparative approach between the opposing tendencies, in order to mask the political-economic interests of an upper-middle class. It was certainly no coincidence, in fact, that the first pole had a short life compared to the second.

Despite contemporary trends have moved in the direction of dematerialization, Genetics of the form is part of the debate by offering the testimony of how the desire of the artists to understand the essence of a work will always be really strong.

Non so dove non so quando (I don’t know where I don’t know when), 2016, by Giulio Bensasson, is an attempt at rebellion by organic matter towards artificial matter: slides of natural and forgotten landscapes are contaminated by molds that react to the chemical agent of the film, they settle on the surface and they are changing continuously their shape. In Bensasson’s works, these concepts seem to appear unrelated, the mold, in fact, will continue to expand, renouncing the salvific certainty of a definitive form.

The Naturografie (Naturographies) by Roberto Ghezzi, artist and painter from Florence, are the example of how an artwork can take shape “through” nature instead. The artist lays his canvases on the ground to make them be “painted” by the soil and deteriorated by the organic material. Ghezzi works in symbiosis with the natural context and, as a painter, he provides for the final design of the canvas through the analysis of the latter. The search for a pure form does not disregard so much the plasticity of the material but the nature of the thought, that determines the particular forms. The Naturographies are the daughters of a careful design phase: before placing the canvas on organic soil, and only after waiting months and examining them scrupulously, the artist extracts the fabric of the canvas and fixes in it the substances and organic elements deposited.

The relationship between natural and artificial forms is analyzed by the other Tuscan artist, Antonio Barbieri. Thanks to sophisticated scanners and the use of 3D printers, the artist creates his sculptural works and then he paints them with oil. Barbieri’s artistic process seems to allude to the presence of a structure inherent in the natural form; his research starts from the will, quoting Klee, to make visible what is hidden from the view. The sculpture Chrysolina/Colonna (2022), although it is structurally the result of an alternation of mathematical codes that are repeated following the rhythm of the natural and organic form, evokes, like a totem, a symbolic and spiritual function.

The origin of the formand its continuous becoming – its genetics precisely – is the main fulcrum of the collective curated by Silvioli. Central is therefore the poietic character of the works on show, an aspect understood as the transition from the not being to the being in presence, a shot determined by the proximity to their arches, or formal principle, which the artists deliberately leave unfinished and indefinite.

If for Hegel the art’s death will be resolved in the inability of a work, as an object and thought, of self-annihilation, Genetics of the form, instead, claims the will of the work itself which, free from formal constraints, proceeds in a continuous becoming and it reaffirms the original spiritual value denied by modern “conceptual” critic. “The less you have to see, the more you have to say”: when the message of the work is immediate, every further word is superfluous.

Giulia Pontoriero

Info:

Various Artists, Genetica della Forma
curated by Davide Silvioli
9/04/2022 – 22/052022
Galleria D’Arte Moderna “Giovanni Carandente”
Palazzo Collicola
piazza Collicola, 06049 Spoleto