Cinquesensi
Jul 2019
Sublime / Non sublime
Maimeri is the name of Italy’s best-known brand of artists’ paints. Its creator Giovanni Maimeri, known as Gianni, is instead far less-known.
Born in 1884, this Milanese painter and his younger brother Carlo, a chemical engineer, experimented with new ways of mixing wax with pure pigments and developed innovative formulas to improve the quality of paints, varnishes and solvents, obtaining surprising results as regards brightness and durability.
Born in 1884, this Milanese painter and his younger brother Carlo, a chemical engineer, experimented with new ways of mixing wax with pure pigments and developed innovative formulas to improve the quality of paints, varnishes and solvents, obtaining surprising results as regards brightness and durability.
Born out of Gianni’s experience as a painter between 1923 and 1925, these discoveries prompted the brothers to set up a factory that revolutionized the use and circulation of paints among artists. Well-acquainted with the cultured middle-class circles in Milan, Maimeri painted above all portraits, landscapes, interiors and scenes of music halls and musicians. He was himself also a musician. There is, however, a part of his richly documented life that had previously been overlooked, a parenthesis that reveals a dream-like, visionary sensibility resembling the values of the Sturm und Drang movement but characterized by powerful expressionism of a modern nature differing radically from what is to be found in the painting of his maturity.
A photograph of 1905 shows the young Gianni sitting on a huge boulder in the middle of a large, rocky pool beneath a majestic waterfall. This perfect and rigorous shot, verging on photomontage, shows him naked with a proud, contemplative expression like a Sappho à la Von Gloeden or one of the decadent figures painted on Capri by Diefenbach. Aged 25 at the time, Gianni had a slim, svelte body and the future of a romantic hero. At the dawn of the new century, while the to capture on canvas the dynamic movement of a waterfall erupting from a dark cavern. Painting en plein air, or rather inside the cave, he endeavoured to reproduce the luminescent hues of the soaked vegetation at the water’s edge in a natural chasm. He thus undertook his own personal and solitary Futurist revolution in the wilderness, using the same colours as Boccioni (I refer in particular to the master’s Rissa in Galleria in the Brera) for these early paintings. In Europe, parallel to the early avant-garde movements of the 20th century, a new romantic spirit was thus formed that took nature as its point
of reference not only as a source of inspiration but also as a way of life in a relationship of empathy
and symbiosis. Midway between Symbolism and theosophy, epitomized by figures like Max Klinger, Hans von Stuck, Alexej von Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin, this spirit spread from Monte Verità in the Swiss canton of Ascona all the way to the rocks of Capri, firing the imaginations of revolutionary young artists with extreme views determined to find truth in a more authentic kind of existence.
The young Maimeri may have intended to follow this path on his own, far away from the naturist communities, seeking refuge in the wilds of Lombardy, probably at Cunardo (Grotta di Cunardo, 1910), where he often went with his brother, or at Bellano, as his grandson Gianni recalls hearing about in the family. In any case, these early paintings - the first of which was sketched on panel at the age of 15 (Cascata, 1899) - are endowed with this European spirit in dialogue with the highest achievements of romantic expressionist painting. The awesome sublime was thus the focal point for this artist with a spirit like a raging torrent, overflowing with creativity and conscious cultural drives, capable of bringing colour to light out of darkness like crashing cascades of water. He may have calmed down later, but his youthful impetus was in a state of free fall, just like the movement of tumbling waters.
of reference not only as a source of inspiration but also as a way of life in a relationship of empathy
and symbiosis. Midway between Symbolism and theosophy, epitomized by figures like Max Klinger, Hans von Stuck, Alexej von Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin, this spirit spread from Monte Verità in the Swiss canton of Ascona all the way to the rocks of Capri, firing the imaginations of revolutionary young artists with extreme views determined to find truth in a more authentic kind of existence.
The young Maimeri may have intended to follow this path on his own, far away from the naturist communities, seeking refuge in the wilds of Lombardy, probably at Cunardo (Grotta di Cunardo, 1910), where he often went with his brother, or at Bellano, as his grandson Gianni recalls hearing about in the family. In any case, these early paintings - the first of which was sketched on panel at the age of 15 (Cascata, 1899) - are endowed with this European spirit in dialogue with the highest achievements of romantic expressionist painting. The awesome sublime was thus the focal point for this artist with a spirit like a raging torrent, overflowing with creativity and conscious cultural drives, capable of bringing colour to light out of darkness like crashing cascades of water. He may have calmed down later, but his youthful impetus was in a state of free fall, just like the movement of tumbling waters.
This energy is captured in the spirit of the exhibition, which moves freely between the symbolic mystery of subterranean erosion and stone being constantly worn away by water. A movement of secrets and discoveries in caves, caverns and chasms that represent the sublime results of this action.
Out of darkness, frightening, inaccessible places in the world revealed only by the daring of speleologists, something unexpected is brought to light: stratified and sedimented biological memory, nature reshaped beneath the earth unbeknown to us.
Sometimes, however, the level rises and the torrent overflows its banks, sweeping away the upper layers of sediment and unearthing objects, items stripped of any frills, reworked and abraded into new forms of matter like witnesses of darkness, ghosts unexpectedly turned into sculpture, arousing our wonder. Following Degas, who found the idea of landscape as a state of mind pretentious, we can speak in this connection of the wild as a “state of eye”. This state of eye is to be understood not as itself wild but as the ability to see things and bring them out of the darkness of indifference. After the meeting with Maimeri, this happened again on descending into the dusty cellars of the Fonderia Artistica Battaglia, where abandoned pieces of sculpture lay on the shelves and in baskets full of broken items. Perhaps forgotten by their creators or just carelessly heaped together, these indeterminate monuments came to present a fortuitous beauty of the unfinished, stimulating a curiosity previously drowsing in the daydreams of a lethargic visual capacity, vitiated by often overly predictable frameworks. The sight of this improbable, haphazard scene seemed to connect once again with the sublime vision of a dark and decadent landscape. The “sediments” of sculpture robbed of their destiny thus suddenly brought back to light with violent clarity the involuntarily carved traces of a reworked aesthetic that transformed bronze into an opaque, primitive material in new forms as though extracted from furnaces full of ash.
Sometimes, however, the level rises and the torrent overflows its banks, sweeping away the upper layers of sediment and unearthing objects, items stripped of any frills, reworked and abraded into new forms of matter like witnesses of darkness, ghosts unexpectedly turned into sculpture, arousing our wonder. Following Degas, who found the idea of landscape as a state of mind pretentious, we can speak in this connection of the wild as a “state of eye”. This state of eye is to be understood not as itself wild but as the ability to see things and bring them out of the darkness of indifference. After the meeting with Maimeri, this happened again on descending into the dusty cellars of the Fonderia Artistica Battaglia, where abandoned pieces of sculpture lay on the shelves and in baskets full of broken items. Perhaps forgotten by their creators or just carelessly heaped together, these indeterminate monuments came to present a fortuitous beauty of the unfinished, stimulating a curiosity previously drowsing in the daydreams of a lethargic visual capacity, vitiated by often overly predictable frameworks. The sight of this improbable, haphazard scene seemed to connect once again with the sublime vision of a dark and decadent landscape. The “sediments” of sculpture robbed of their destiny thus suddenly brought back to light with violent clarity the involuntarily carved traces of a reworked aesthetic that transformed bronze into an opaque, primitive material in new forms as though extracted from furnaces full of ash.
If branches project from a woman’s face, if a fawn loses a limb, if a horse lacks a support, if a ballerina dances with no arms, if a series of legs walk by themselves and collide with one another, if a gigantic chicken’s foot rest on the head of a peasant woman, if the rose window of a church becomes a flower,
if a pair of legs does the splits regardless of its lack of a body, if a water-seller bears angel’s wings, does this mean that a creator has lost his wits? Or that Surrealism is reorganizing itself for rebirth through spontaneous automatism just as its theorists maintained? This scene in the cellar is nothing other than the apotheosis of improvisation. It is the works that rebel against us and decide “to stand on their own feet” regardless of their presumed, presumptuous authors. Displayed in an exhibition with no authoriality, lost in a state of free fall into a swirling abyss, they no longer have any possibility of recognition. Nothing whatsoever in art had ever fallen so far down and returned from the depths to regain life and beauty in accordance with a canon that was not their own. The gap between the hand that shaped them and what they now represent cannot be bridged. These are archaeological tunnels of the present to be addressed only by the daring of Agostino Iacurci, one who could answer these sly questions about the sense or non-sense of art, capable as he is of causing the genealogical tree of things to disappear, amputating names and surnames, branches and roots. A nonchalant observer tripping lightly through the abyss of the contemporary era.
His is no longer a landscape of the soul but a “state of eye” of the present, understood as the simple normality of life encountered on street corners every day. For confirmation of this, suffice it to observe the gigantic “Greek vases” that transform the blind wall of a condominium in Ragusa into an extravagant image from a suburban, Disneyland, archaeological museum, where a faint memory of Magna Grecia runs up against an architectural present as fragile as an earthenware vessel and crumbles. The mural is inserted into a space of urban disorder as a first step towards cleansing and redevelopment that seeks to unite and connect the individual buildings of the new settlement with decorative discretion.
And the sublime horror of the contemporary era is thus not all that far away if we go along with the mocking vision of Iacurci, who steals the classical canon from Winkelmann to hybridize it with pillars of cement designed for public parks and private gardens where, with “likeable” arrogance, yellow, red, green and blue dwarves have now appropriated an aesthetic that has transcended everything to reassert them as the key to any interpretation of an era as equivocal as ours.
An era of which Iacurci becomes the glorious interpreter, above all when a hand as pink as a doll’s waves a mocking farewell from the top of an extraordinarily stupid Ionic column repainted with acrylic gloss. Bye-bye, sublime! It is far better therefore to wander through the streets of the world in the knowledge that judgement on art belongs to everyone.
This is what the artist from Lecce permits himself, for example, by delegating the task of understanding the meaning of things to a huge ear (Ear, 2017) laid on the ground to hear the echoes of the vast flow of news that falls like rain from the abyss of the media and pick up a hint of the selfish beauty of art.
“I feel colourful,” says a coloured woman observing the large-scale work on the walls of a school in Atlanta that Agostino painted in 2016, authentic testimony that involves no distancing from what is for each of us the meaning of the unknown sublime, something to be uprooted from a chasm of sense and entrusted to the vision of a world that exists no longer but is not finished and instead continues to evolve even when we think we can no longer interpret it. “Just vision. More than meaning.” This is all Iacurci tells us, because he knows that vision can be both things at once: sublime and not sublime.
An era of which Iacurci becomes the glorious interpreter, above all when a hand as pink as a doll’s waves a mocking farewell from the top of an extraordinarily stupid Ionic column repainted with acrylic gloss. Bye-bye, sublime! It is far better therefore to wander through the streets of the world in the knowledge that judgement on art belongs to everyone.
This is what the artist from Lecce permits himself, for example, by delegating the task of understanding the meaning of things to a huge ear (Ear, 2017) laid on the ground to hear the echoes of the vast flow of news that falls like rain from the abyss of the media and pick up a hint of the selfish beauty of art.
“I feel colourful,” says a coloured woman observing the large-scale work on the walls of a school in Atlanta that Agostino painted in 2016, authentic testimony that involves no distancing from what is for each of us the meaning of the unknown sublime, something to be uprooted from a chasm of sense and entrusted to the vision of a world that exists no longer but is not finished and instead continues to evolve even when we think we can no longer interpret it. “Just vision. More than meaning.” This is all Iacurci tells us, because he knows that vision can be both things at once: sublime and not sublime.