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There is a real caesura moment in contemporary Italian art, coinciding with the year 2000. Indeed, from the turn of the century, research by the most significant artists of these last twenty years began to display a compelling convergence around themes and forms that are strongly linked to a direct relationship with both political and cultural reality.

A certain coherence in research and a particular expressive efficacy have provided the peculiar energy of the first scene, after some half a century, that has a probable chance of letting the shuttle of Italian art reach the escape velocity needed to break out of the orbit of arte povera and to find its own autonomous place in the galaxy of art history.

But on this point, it is worth making some things clear. Indeed, the tail end of the twentieth century in Italy ended up being the terrain of clashes between the legacy of arte povera – which remained very strong because of the longevity of the artists who drove it and their critic of reference – and other more or less critically defined scenes which gradually tried to bring forth their own discourse on the present. Germano Celant proved to be the true dominus of Italian art for the entire second half of the twentieth century, a meticulous and extremely intelligent builder of a monument to his generation which, through the decades, has managed, like Cronus, to devour its offspring. This has had the effect that, still today, on an international level, a movement born over fifty years ago is still the most present, whenever Italy is being discussed in the exhibitions of the great contemporary art galleries and in the foundations around the world that really count. The emergence of other phenomena, sometimes endowed with great artistic coherence – for instance, the transavantgarde – has proven incapable of keeping its own wave rolling beyond the decade that generated them and drove them forward. This is also the case of artists steeped in the language of advertising such as Maurizio Cattelan and Vanessa Beecroft, children of the 1990s in a West in which, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, politics was replaced by marketing, and who were even more the children of a country in which the founder of private television had taken over the prime minister’s job. But the particular emergence of these two artists, across an entire decade mostly alone as Italians in the truly international sphere (they were later joined by Francesco Vezzoli), demonstrates the weakness of an art system that by the end of the century could no longer leave a clear mark at the generational level. Apart from these individual cases, some of them charged with a rebellious spirit at times integrated into the system (rather like Oliviero Toscani’s shock campaigns for Benetton), the downward path of Italian art at the end of the twentieth century seems to follow the same trajectory as the country’s politics, mindful of a golden moment at the end of the 1960s and then heading towards a weakening that culminated in the much-fought-over terrain of the 1990s.

With the turn of the century, something began to change. Indeed, the new millennium decreed the natural death of arte povera, even though its manifestations in a celebratory key would endure. Precisely for this reason, the 2000s were a confusing and fascinating time. From the archipelago of the ironic, delicate – in the double meaning of exquisite and precarious – transgressive, advertising art of the 1990s, whole islands began to detach themselves, determined to slip into other waters before ending up in the regions of a renewed and clearly political art, one that saw Pasolini as a prophet who needed rediscovering. And it was precisely in the year 2000 – dates sometimes have a ritual weight of their own – that a video emblematic in this sense, Timecode by Elisabetta Benassi, who goes with her motorcycle to pick up the Casarsa-born poet that Italy had abandoned only as “a dog (without a master)”, at the Ostia seaplane port, twenty-five years before, distracted as it was by the bright lights of the new televisual conformism made up of cheerleaders and showgirls. It was no coincidence that the countertendency was a female figure, dressed in a red leather jacket, a soccer player, a motorcyclist, capable of wearing and subverting all the male stereotypes of the period, acting as a reverse psychopomp to go and retrieve from hell such a similar figure, another Tiresia. It was this video that marked the beginning of the 2000s, the years in which two distinct lines emerged within so-called political art, one of an archival character and the other of a formal character. The first, whose best results are to be found in the work of Rossella Biscotti, was followed by a whole wave of relatively colourless visitors to libraries, newspaper libraries and street markets, places where one could at least revisit the smell of what Italy was like before the intoxication of the Second Republic (i.e. the scent of the post-war Italy that ended in the early 1990s). The second, which found its most sophisticated artifice in Francesco Arena, was instead a matter of more markedly artistic research, more concerned with the aesthetic outcome than with documentary exactitude. The art of the 2000s was, doubtless, not only this. But in this horizon we can recognise an element of coherence and a certain inclination capable of expanding its spectrum to encompass less openly militant research which nonetheless had a strong political or bio-political value – as in the case, for example, of Monica Bonvicini – or a self-reflective one, as in Flavio Favelli. Nor should we forget the strong impetus coming from the re-emergence, at the end of the decade, of some artists (above all female artists) belonging to paths and movements linked to the thrust of feminist ideals. This bore considerably influence on a scene that began to emerge only a few years later, perhaps finding its true contemporary declension in the late 2010s-early 2020s through the work of the youngest female artists.

But let’s take things in the right order. The multiplicity of the political scene of the 2000s converged, in a selective way, in an important exhibition realised by Marcella Beccaria at the Castello di Rivoli in 2012. It had a highly emblematic title: La storia che non ho vissuto (testimone indiretto), in English The (hi)story I didn’t live (indirect witness). It was already clear from this concise phrase that the great effort of Italian art in the decade that had just passed was a matter of stitching things back together. This was not a pointless chore after a long tearing-apart, but – let’s say it – this wasn’t yet a matter of striving forth making progress. Indeed, many works from these years had the character of reappropriating the history that had escaped us in the risqué 1990s, like a dress left on the floor by the previous generation that had tried to reach its destination naked.

Yet, this gathering-up of the parents’ clothes in order to try to put them on anew, placed the children in a somewhat controversial role, indeed a partly improper and – even if it was concealed – reactionary one. In fact, the art of these years would mainly represent a work on the past that was also destined to remain in the past, a purely archaeological gesture of revisiting its own public body, and still not concerned with the real consequences for the present. The only real relapse (a very important one) would be that of the phenomenon as a whole, whose value was to clean the roots, to make them once again capable of oxygenating the reasoning that would soon return to guide Italian art towards the present.

In fact, the 2010s were the moment in which these preparatory phases came to fruition in a more evident way, developing their own original poetics. The enzyme that comes again to unite a generation and to be the vector of its works becomes the street, the place where – usually, after a trauma – one tries to reconstruct a relationship with reality, unbound from the compromises of the past. This was the case with the cinema in the period of neorealism and the same was true for the artists of the 2010s. For them, the street represented an escape route from a world infected by television, an emergency exit from the advertising language of Cattelan (still very strong even in these years with his Toiletpaper), from the patina of Vezzoli, of Beecroft and of what remained of the twentieth century. This allowed them to regain possession of a country that for years had danced around the pool of Non è la Rai (This is not the RAI, i.e. the public broadcaster), as if in a dream, without realizing that all the euphoria was caused by massive doses of GHB vaporised via the ether. If for the artists of the 2000s the escape from the tele-concentration nightmare had been represented by the flight into the past, the escape into what once had been, for the artists of the 2010s the street was the discovery of a reality that had never been hidden but that had been considered ob-scene (i.e. outside the framework of every accepted narrative) for thirty years. From this standpoint, figures like Eugenio Tibaldi and Alessandro Bulgini were paradigmatic representations of a new figure of the artist. In 2000, Tibaldi moved from his native Alba to live for seventeen years in the province of Naples, between Giugliano, Varcaturo and Licola, one of the fiercest and most violated places on the Campania coastline. He did so in order to attempt an anthropological reading of a society that lives the urban space – concretely taken away from the state’s control – as a work on its own conscience, in which the superfetations, the appropriations, the abuses, are not mere architectural facts but residues of behaviour, traces of an identity that builds up its charge in the factory of TV desires (Reality, Matteo Garrone, 2012) and is explosively discharged in those areas of the country where violence opens up breaches in the collective illusion. And while the whole of Italy was distancing itself from places like this, placing them in an almost mythological elsewhere as in the TV series Gomorra, contouring their borders, losing them in a province without orientation, in a kind of Hungary of the cinema of white telephones, where any kind of evil can happen as long as everything remains contained in that elsewhere, Tibaldi is there in a total identification between life and territory, recording with his pencil all the tremors that made those places vibrate daily, until he realized, after a while, that the seismographic tracing of his tract corresponded with cruel exactitude to the electrocardiogram of the country. Licola and all that was removed around it was not the elsewhere, it was the heart of Italy.

But this is just one example. A similar work was done by Bulgini, an admirable painter over the late 1990s and 2000s, who in 2014 devised a project called B.A.R.L.U.I.G.I., then merged into the broader Opera viva cycle. This path of street art started in the suburban Turin neighbourhood of Barriera di Milano, through daily actions and performances based on the weaving together of a plan of aesthetic and relational connection for this territory’s mixed community. Everything starts with simple actions, from the decoration of the sidewalks with chalks to the definition of a kind of uniform with which to move daily through the streets. From Turin, the project spread to different places, first to the United States, then to the Berber communities of the Atlas mountains, and finally to Taranto, where it reached perhaps its highest result, leading the artist to identify himself as the officiant of a contemporary tragic rite, to be the aoidos of an epic of the present, interweaving the stories of individual citizens, of the maverick figures encountered along the way, in a confessional and cathartic tale about the nature of a humanity that has remained outside the official narrations, but which is more real than any possible representation, as in Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero. The street, in this sense, is much more than a simple context or place. Rather, it is a neural network of the diffuse intelligence of men and women who, leaving behind the individual solitudes of houses facing onto televisions, go down into the streets and alleyways, begin to seek each other out again, to recognise themselves.

But an approach compatible with these first traits of a poetics shared in common among some twenty-first-century artists can also be seen in the work of Gian Maria Tosatti, with his monumental Sette stagioni dello spirito, which for three years saw the entire city of Naples transformed into a great performative installation, a Bildungsroman for the citizens, sewn together with their bodies and their stories. The street, in this case, is still the level where everyone’s lives converge and meet, ending up spun in the looms that the great environmental works of this project become.

And – with the due variations related to different identities – the street enters into the works of almost all the artists who have made the greatest impact. It is no accident that Giorgio Andreotta Calò, in 2011, faced with Bice Curiger’ prestigious invitation to the Venice Biennale, chose to set out from Amsterdam to the lagoon city and to recount his diary of this journey. This was a less political practice, but had a strong charge of testimony that would become his constant poetics. And another street would be evoked by what, perhaps, remains his work of greatest impact, the great fragment of razor-sharp marble placed in the centre of the church of Santa Maria delle lacrime in Carrara, that is, in the middle of the street that marble quarrymen travelled to work every morning for centuries without knowing if they would return.

So, the streets also become, if not necessarily a visible element of the work, its infrastructure. Think of Giuseppe Stampone’s great Global Education project, which travelled around the world, showing the same images to different communities to gather from them definitions that, if sometimes apparently incongruent, on closer inspection had a lot to say about the state of coercion, confusion, compromise, aggression, suffered by people living at street level, where the word “peace” can be pronounced as a definition for the image of a big gun.

But it is worth noting that all these projects do not strictly belong to the relational practices taking place in the international art debate in these same years – and, to tell the truth, since the end of the 1990s. Certainly what we have described has a relational component, but the work itself is not reducible to this. Rather, it sustains the process which, in the end, leads to a purely and highly aesthetic outcome. Tibaldi’s large installations with tube-and-joint scaffolding (at the Museo Ettore Fico in 2016 and at the Quirinale in 2017), Bulgini’s performance that attempts to drag the island of Taranto away from the sea basin polluted by the Ilva chemical works, with a red boat rowing to the point of exhaustion, to the point of bleeding, Tosatti’s white cathedral in which dozens of colourful birds fly, Calò’s much-cited spine and Stampone’s alphabetic primers are some of the most striking images in the history of contemporary art.

But we can still continue this overview that loops almost an entire generation into the poetic thread represented by the street. And it is important to note how this element is able to act as a trait d’union between very different artists. In these years Andrea Mastrovito’s works with communities of kids in the Bronx, with whom he designs the walls of a playground, beating upon metres upon metres of stencils to leave impressed on the walls the traces of graphite as if in an involuntary mural evoked by the explosive force of football. And around the revolution in Istanbul’s Taksim Square, which had the street as its place of elaboration and confrontation, there developed the inspiration of many works by Margherita Moscardini, in perfect balance between aesthetic value and political gesture. Another artist not immediately assimilable to the metropolitan dimension is Arcangelo Sassolino, who in 2012 made perhaps his most harrowing work, Elisa, in the street; here, the agony of an android unravels the asphalt surface of a car park. Domenico Antonio Mancini concluded that decade, in 2019, with Landscapes, an exhibition with a fierce impact, which exposed, in the icy form of a Google Earth URL painted in black on white canvas, a gallery of places of impasse, of suburbs from which there seems to be no exit, the furthest points of streets that come to vanish into nothingness. Such a political-existential synthesis seems to be the mirror of a historical time that would a few months take us off the streets and close us up inside our homes for almost two years, besieged by a pandemic. And, perhaps, among the meshes of this story there is still room for the streetname plaques of Ettore Favini, for the street school (Scuola di Santa Rosa) of Luigi Presicce and Francesco Lauretta, for a neorealism of markedly social stamp, such as that of Elena Bellantoni, for the agreeable hooliganism of Simone Cametti with his brilliant Bolide. So, too, for Andrea Nacciarriti, who smashed the window of his own gallery in Turin in 2010 and almost ten years later finds himself in a market in disarray, building a disturbing countdown, which in the silence seems to lead to a new decade which we did not seem so sure we wanted to enter into (and later, we would understand why that was). But that we have indeed come out of this first twenty years of the twenty-first century is being shown by Roberto Cuoghi with the latest portraits he has authored. We have thus far seen little of them, but those who have had the privilege of observing them in the studio, will notice how they seem to be the cruel exercise of recording the faces of fellow travellers we have met and abandoned in recent years, violated by reality.

Marinella Senatore will also end up in the street, with her parades full of good intentions, of slogans with an aggressive appeal, animated by confectioners with their cakes and majorettes with their twirling batons. A sweetened version of what has been told so far, which nevertheless confirms with its results the deep, clear-cut furrow that this generation has carved in the history of art.