Questo articolo è disponibile anche in:
Italiano
The Twenties Generation and the Beginning of a New History
Elisa Carollo
In the young Italian art scene, there is a tenacity that comes close to resistance, but also has a profound uncertainty about it. A tenacity, in its determination to assert its own specific artistic identity, but also a profound uncertainty as to what the best languages and strategies may be, in the increasingly populated and competitive arena of the art world.
The scenario of under-30s Italian art is extremely varied, much as Italy’s territorial, cultural and social contexts have always been. The common feature though is a retreat of artistic practice towards a more personal, intimate, at times poetic territory, often bordering on the self-referential.
With grand narratives long having expired, there emerges an artistic quest that seeks itself, that struggles to affirm a recognisable existential morphology, though more often than not it resorts to an obsessive focus on “niche” themes, which are often deliberately detached from the great socio-political issues of our time.
In his Minima Moralia, Adorno commented: “What philosophy once called life, has turned into the sphere of the private” – and so has the related cultural/artistic narrative.
Unlike the previous generation, today’s research rarely extends to the context in which it is produced. But, at the same time, this focus on the self also takes its distance from the approaches to identity issues taken by foreign peers, whose art is an instrument of making claims for communities who have long been marginalised by art through its history.
But let us take things in the right order. The most common tendency is to pursue one’s own practice as an academic researcher would: a series of arguments addressed with more or less successful material and poetic experiments, which are then accompanied by a careful narration in support of the “thesis” that one is indeed an artist.
In this sense, Italian art still seems to start out from the conviction that theoretical reflection and visual expression must, necessarily, go hand in hand in a total space of creation in which reasoning and traces of existence come together to justify the artistic work. Most of the time, however, the final result takes the form of formulations still in the process of accomplishment, experiments that are still seeking the form of a completed work. Many thus opt for the safe territory of individual narration, choosing to tell their stories through fragments of the context that moulded them or through personal archives: a terrain more easily controlled than the vast surrounding systems, which thus allows the work to be substantiated with a dose of sentimentality capable of empathising with the observer. This is the case in much figurative painting, where the contingency of everyday elements is sublimated in the uniqueness of the emotions accompanying them. We see this, for instance, in the large formats of Andrea Fontanari (Trento 1996) and Adelisa Selimbašić (Karlsruhe 1996), or in the works of Alice Visentin (Turin 1993), which however lead to an expressive visionariness fomented by the artist’s own hypersensitivity. A comparison with the history of the image also remains present in painting, as in the case of Barbara De Vivi (Venice 1992), who re-appropriates the topoi of tradition and mixes them with scenes from the constant iconological flow of today’s mediascape; or the interpretation of painting as “mimesis of nature” conducted by Marta Spagnoli (Verona 1994), who lets animal and vegetable textures flow, in a way of painting distinguished by its lacunas. Then there is Ludovico Orombelli (Como 1996), who, starting from the tradition of fresco painting, applies its techniques to contemporary objects, moving in a hybrid dimension between painting and sculpture, as does Marco Scarpi (Cavallino-Treporti 1998) in his dense pictorial mixtures also capable of conquering an American audience.
The process of making art is the protagonist of much young Italian sculpture. Setting itself up in total rejection of the figurative tradition of the “great masters”, it rather more recovers the lesson of arte povera, in which the artist is a mere activator of processes, and the final form of the work is left to physical, chemical or dialectical forces and energies that are activated amidst various factors.
Here, I am thinking of the work by Nicola Ghirardelli (Como 1994) inspired by a “fascination for the apparent organic disorder and the creation process” and in which iconic elements, such as the eye of Michelangelo’s David, are consumed in the process itself; or of the works by Antonio Fiorentino (Barletta 1987) in which the precariousness and ambiguity of the form take sculpture back to its natural evolution over time. Taking a different approach, albeit one along the same lines, are the mysterious assemblages by Giulia Cenci (Cortona 1988), Benni Bosetto (Milan 1987) and Clarissa Falco (Genoa 1995). By interacting and combining in space, they create narrations in which the human presence is already only a trace: this is a present art that is both the ruin of a recent past and a dystopian prelude to the uncertain future of every entity. The poetics of Giuseppe Di Liberto (Palermo 1996) are a case apart but are nevertheless linked to the use of a material that reveals its existential fragility, recovering art’s archaic function as catharsis from the trauma of loss.
These practices are part of a broader trend that sees the search for an ambiguity of the image, forms that are not real but plausible, which thus remain malleable by the vision and the imagination of the observer.
This most often results in an escape into the fantastical, into the parallel worlds offered by the digital, by contemporary media culture or by dreams and hallucinations. Here I am thinking of the painting by Diego Gualandris (Alzano Lombardo 1993), Giuliana Rosso (Chivasso 1992), Ludovica Anversa (Milan 1996), Giorgia Garzilli (Naples 1992), Leonardo Pellicanò (Rome 1994) and Valerio Nicolai (Gorizia 1988) or, in the medium of sculpture, to the exporting of alien forms and the relations between reality and fiction, imagination and experience, that we find in Ambra Castagnetti (Genoa 1993), Valentina Furian (Dolo 1989), Marco Ceroni (Forlì 1987), Francesco Pacelli (Perugia 1988), Viola Morini (Milan 1997) or Nicolò Masiero Sgrinzatto (Arre 1992).
Less frequent but also present is a subtler analysis of the psychological and psychophysical relations underlying the relationship between body and space, conducted in a more spiritual dimension, as in the meta-sensorial installations of Clarissa Baldassarri (Civitanova Marche 1994), in the performative approach of Ruth Beraha (Milan 1986) and Reverie (Vinci 1994), in the capacity for a universal empathy of forms and colours we see in Alice Ronchi (Ponte dell’Olio 1989) or in the study of the phenomena of optics and perception by Emanuele Caprioli (Milan 1993).
Also, in reaction to all-pervasive media, there prevails a gentle aesthetics of possible domestic “control”. In fact, if for the previous generation the Internet was above all an information-resource, the great revolution brought about by social media, and by Instagram in particular, means a different use of the web, where everyone can be a content creator and everyone is called upon to forge a digital identity of their own, this having become ever more important.
This has led to an infodemic, an information overload, which is at the root of a general disorientation of existence and identity, and a retreat into the personal.
500 hours of videos on YouTube and 347,000 Instagram stories happen every minute: in this unstoppable flow, how can we take up a position? How can artists defend their works, among billions of pieces of content?
This virtual fragility translates into real fragility, in the difficulty of finding one’s bearings in a whirlwind of information, in the relationship between person and persona, and thus also between artist and work.
Some have decided to investigate these very phenomena, such as Giulio Alvigini (Tortona, 1995) who, playing on the mocking humour of memes, offers an irreverent critique of the art system and its rituals. The critique of the contemporary mediascape is also advanced by The Cool Couple (Niccolò Benetton, Arzignano 1986 and Simone Santilli, Portogruaro 1987), Giulio Scalisi (Salemi 1992), Irene Fenara (Bologna 1990) and Rebecca Moccia (Naples 1992).
Looking beyond an inherent fragility, in recent years various institutional projects have shown how artists under-30 have greater stimuli to confront specific contexts and themes, which can react to and broaden their field of investigation. On the other hand, there has been a lack of major exhibitions identifying the latest Italian artistic production, and the curatorial approach in projects of this kind raises complex questions about the notion of the “young Italian artist” and whether it still makes sense: where do we place this geographical/cultural and generational boundary?
In this regard, an analysis of the ethnic/cultural composition of the new generation reveals that, while in other countries artists belonging to the second/third generation of immigrants are emerging, this is still very limited in Italy, despite the sizeable foreign communities that have been present in our country for some time. This is symptomic of a lack of integration, and of the fact that “being an artist” remains a privilege of the few, also because of the precariousness of this figure itself, which is still at pains to find real professional recognition.
One of the names that has emerged is the Italo-Ethiopian painter Jem Perucchini (Tekeze 1995), who works on a visual heritage on the borders of several cultures but lacks any real socio-political thrust. Such a drive is found in Binta Diaw (Milan 1995), of Senegalese origin, who openly addresses themes such as immigration and integration, albeit starting from his experience of perceptions of Italianness/Africanity.
Also personal is the account of the diasporic identity by Francis Offman (Butare 1987), whose canvases with irregular contours and salvaged materials provide the platform for evoking intimate memories of Rwanda, where the artist spent part of his childhood. Equally sentimental is the reworking of the iconographic heritage of the socialist era and Albanian folk traditions by Iva Lulashi (Tirana 1988) and Greta Plana (Durrës 1992).
However, in this challenge to achieve affirmation, a fundamental role seems to be played by the increasingly widespread collectives and shared spaces, which try to compensate for the absence of other platforms of dialogue in the limbo created between the Academy and entering the system.
From Venice to Naples, spaces such as Kadabra, Omuamua, Spazio Armenia, Castro, Spazio In Situ, Spaziomensa, Exit Strategy and Osservatorio Futura (among many others), have created autonomous artist communities who thus secure recognition of their professionalism under a common name, which often also alleviates the absence of a strong individual statement. Among these we should also mention Confino, founded by Ruben Montini (Oristano 1986), one of the few artistic spaces in Italy dedicated to the LGBTQI+ world, thus filling a gap which exists at the institutional level but also on the independent scene.
To conclude, in this context of widespread contingency and of content-overload, which impairs the quality of our judgement itself, the key point is to continue asking questions.
As Descartes said, it is doubt that generates knowledge. And art should do just that, as should criticism.
Rather than offering an exhaustive overview, this text therefore hopes to raise questions about the development of contemporary Italian art, starting with an analysis of the latest generation, of the variegated landscape of mostly individual poetics which it comprises, and of the challenges it faces.
So, we should speak less of a defined identity for under-30 art than of its potential identity: this is a living material and a narration in progress that we are still struggling to bring into focus, but investigation into it must continue so that it can be properly historicised.
We must begin to address this type of reflection, which is not only critical and curatorial, but also political and institutional.
What can help this generation is a Socratic maieutic: asking it the right questions so that it can generate a new awareness of itself, its identity, and its own future destinies.
