Remo Bianco Foundation

The Nuclears. The Spatials

Beginning in 1950-52, yet without giving up his research on the 3Ds, Bianco added one that was literally informal.

Despite the title Nuclear given to a cycle of works of that period, Bianco's research only had marginally to do with Baj's and Dangelo's (the Manifest of Nuclear Painting came out in Brussels in 1952). His reference instead was closer to Fontana, but to other aspects of Italian informal art as well.

Those were the years when Fontana's Spatialism was very widespread in Milan, around the Galleria del Naviglio, and Remo Bianco, although he did not directly take part in it nor sign any of the manifests, absorbed its mood.

The reference to Lucio Fontana, anyway, was obvious in his introducing extra-pictorial materials on the surface of the canvas. But, by the persistence of certain undulating rhythms, we should mention the works of Burri (and less the orthogonality of the Sacchi than the works that have a more mixed linearity and more rounded forms. It is true that Bianco claimed he only met Burri in New York, but works, for instance, like Informale-Spaziale from 1952, placed on a tangle of red lines on a green background, recall Burri's inventions, probably picked up in magazines). However, from spatialism, rather than the sidereal, cosmic dimension, Bianco took the more subversive, dadaist one. In his works we perceive less the foresight of a universal space than an alchemical, domestic enquiry on matter.

Virgilio Guidi remarked, presenting Bianco's exhibition at the Galleria del Cavallino in 1952: "Bianco is closer to the conceptions inherent to the Milan spatial artists. But compared to them he is more bejeweled and more precious; more inspired, more capricious, more immediate. Heavenly phenomena, in the imagination inspired by new science, here seem to be in nearly familiar situations. This may be Bianco's special quality."

So, a familiar dimension, and precious as well, capable of playing with the seduction of adornment. Pebbles, small stones, glass, fragments of pottery scattered over the canvas actually expressed a slow, curious investigation of the texture, a will to enquire beyond the skin of things, and, at the same time, to adorn that skin with tiny bits of light.

It is as though Bianco sought a response to his existential tensions in the materials, as well as pursuing that "let me have fun" recalling Palazzeschi, which remains the most authentic statement of his artistic theory.

It is true that the title of one of his works of 1952, where the ghost of a woman appears in the background, is Sesso e angoscia (plate, p. 41). It is a 3D, and the title echoes also in the nuclears and the spatials, that seem like journeys into the unconscious. But the hilarious irony of the artist never attained a definitive, irreparable tragedy. Anguish, in Bianco, lasted but a second, before being dissolved in the dimension of surprise, of vital curiosity.

Let us listen to him again: "Those were the years [the early fifties] when the first works I might define as spatial rather than nuclear were born, with accumulations of contrasting colors like nitro-enamel and the blending of different materials such as plastics, fused metals, fused glass."

In Bianco's work there was always a magical dimension, the investigation of an apprentice magician who wanted to question nature, capture its secrets, play at being the "little chemist" and discover the philosopher's stone as well.

The textural dimension to be found in his works of these years did not have the same meaning it had in most contemporary informal works: it did not spring from a reflection that believed above all in immanence, that observed the metaphysical supremacy of chaos instead of order, that denounced the fact of "being cast" into existence instead of the existence of a project.

For Bianco matter did not represent the final meaning of the story. It was more like the place of alchemical practices, along with the dream of a magic formula capable of retaining youth, finding the chemical composition of love, and reinventing life.

His material is pleasing. It does not express a nihilist position, but a principle of hope. It is not a coincidence if Bianco's colors, around the mid-fifties, took on particularly bright tones. A far cry from that "academy of anguish" stigmatized by Longhi, Bianco expressed in his informal period a feverish and positive vitality, a singular "joy of living" (to quote the title of a cycle of later works).

The Trip to America

In 1955 Remo Bianco, thanks to a scholarship Virgilio Gianni, his friend and patron, offered him, took a trip to America.

This trip was decisive for his training, because in New York he was able to see Jackson Pollock's painting and to confront a different way of conceiving the spatiality of the picture.

The "spatial" works featuring a tangled linearity taking up the entire surface of the canvas might seem to have been a consequence of this meeting.

But here we have once again a problem of dates. As we have seen, in Bianco's labyrinthian expressive career, the "spatial" works had already begun long before. But I believe that the ones in which Pollock's inspiration is the most obvious belong to the mid-fifties, after the trip to New York.

Works like Informale (plate, p. 72) dated 1950 by the artist himself and elaborated with spots, drippings, meshed juxtaposed lines, seem inconceivable without a direct vision of Pollock, which for Bianco took place far earlier than so many of his companions.

In the same fashion, Informale 1952 (plate, p. 71) in my opinion ought to be moved to a date after the American trip, and we would not be too mistaken in ascribing it to 1955.

It is true though that the Galleria del Naviglio had already had a Pollock exhibition in 1950. The show had drawn little attention, but not so little that an artist like Bianco, who was an assiduous and intelligent visitor to the gallery, would not have noticed it. And he himself recalls, speaking of Pollock: "I was enthusiastic about his work... I don't believe it influenced mine, for the simple reason that I didn't know his works. But I encountered a great affinity of temperament."

And again: "I was doing experiments that instead I called suggestive: they were in the air, they were ripening at the time. They were drippings, drippings on the canvas. In fact I called this painting suggestive because it suggested images to me: this proceeded from, went back to a concept no less than Leonardo's, who had discovered in spots the suggestions of forms; in fact, this dripping color on the canvas provoked odd forms that suggested visions."

So, if we listen to Bianco's evidence, his acquaintance with Pollock took place in New York and not before. There is no reason to doubt the artist's sincerity. But we should not forget that Bianco, and all the painters of his generation, not only had nothing to do with notarial and professional concerns (at that time there was no such thing as philology of painting, nor was it even conceived of), but had a receptivity that was far more prehensile than they themselves even realized. An image, a sign, a detail could lead them to intuit a whole expressive world, without the artist worrying about giving a Christian name to that world.

After all, Bianco practiced informal art since the early fifties, following vast, multiform inspirations that could be found in Italy during those years. The trip to America was expressed in results closer to a Pollock orthodoxy, but also remote from that model, since Bianco was soon to leave aside gesture and action painting.

As Adriano Altamira, a friend of the artist and one of his most attentive and attendable exegetes, wrote: "His visit to New York, when among other things he had the opportunity to meet Pollock, was in that sense a fundamental experience, perhaps insofar as it showed him the futility and the impossibility of advantageously following such a worn path ."

The real problem about this expressive period is actually less a matter of establishing a chronological order than of understanding just how Bianco interpreted Pollock. There is no need to think that the Milanese artist was a mere imitator of the American master. Quite the opposite.

If it is true that, as regards the information grasped in Europe and the trip to New York, he had a most receptive mind, able, without preconceptions, to make the most of the new expressive experiences on the other side of the Atlantic, it is true also that Bianco interpreted Pollock in his own way, relating him in an original way to his own sensibility.

Let me explain. Bianco always expressed a sense of the finite in his work. Infinity, the unmeasurable, the unlimited of sublime, romantic origin have no place in his investigation. That is why, as we already said, Bianco had interpreted spatialism not as a voyage in the universe, nor as a mental exploration of the galaxies, but as a going beyond oneself into the limits and the magic of matter.

In the same manner, when he was faced with dripping and all over painting, he did not care for the sense of illimited, nomadic, undefined spatiality in those experiments. If you look at his tangles, you can see that in Bianco there was always a corporality the line, and also, you might say, a sense of the Cartesian coordinates of the canvas. No matter how tangled the skein of lines he painted, his skein was one that spread over the surface, that tended to become a network. That is, his lines tended to have a rhythm and, ultimately, a bearing structure.

Bianco never came, as Pollock did, to a "grappling with the canvas"; he was not interested in entering the canvas "like in an arena," in Pollock's famous terms. Instead he kept a lucid detachment in guiding his sign patterns: a detachment displayed in the imperceptible order that paradoxically underlay the disorder of the composition.

It is not a coincidence if, soon, on the background of the tangles, a mosaic of square tesserae appeared, a spatial articulation, an implacable scansion. We are talking about the collages, which would be followed by the Tableaux dorés.

But at this point we must pause. In Remo Bianco's multiform production we have to analyze an important part, nearly contemporary to the collages: the "imprints," which we must examine without further delay.


	Remo Bianco. The Singularity of an Artist Elena Pontiggia A Question of Method The Early Works The Three-Dimensional Works. The 3Ds The Nuclears. The Spatials The Trip to America Imprint Art. Testmonies Collages The Tableaux dorés The Sixties. Investigation in Space The Seventies. Elementary Art The Nuclears. The Spatials Beginning in 1950-52, yet without giving up his research on the 3Ds, Bianco added one that was literally informal. Despite the title Nuclear given to a cycle of works of that period, Bianco's research only had marginally to do with Baj's and Dangelo's (the Manifest of Nuclear Painting came out in Brussels in 1952). His reference instead was closer to Fontana, but to other aspects of Italian informal art as well. Those were the years when Fontana's Spatialism was very widespread in Milan, around the Galleria del Naviglio, and Remo Bianco, although he did not directly take part in it nor sign any of the manifests, absorbed its mood. The reference to Lucio Fontana, anyway, was obvious in his introducing extra-pictorial materials on the surface of the canvas. But, by the persistence of certain undulating rhythms, we should mention the works of Burri (and less the orthogonality of the Sacchi than the works that have a more mixed linearity and more rounded forms. It is true that Bianco claimed he only met Burri in New York, but works, for instance, like Informale-Spaziale from 1952, placed on a tangle of red lines on a green background, recall Burri's inventions, probably picked up in magazines). However, from spatialism, rather than the sidereal, cosmic dimension, Bianco took the more subversive, dadaist one. In his works we perceive less the foresight of a universal space than an alchemical, domestic enquiry on matter. Virgilio Guidi remarked, presenting Bianco's exhibition at the Galleria del Cavallino in 1952: "Bianco is closer to the conceptions inherent to the Milan spatial artists. But compared to them he is more bejeweled and more precious; more inspired, more capricious, more immediate. Heavenly phenomena, in the imagination inspired by new science, here seem to be in nearly familiar situations. This may be Bianco's special quality." So, a familiar dimension, and precious as well, capable of playing with the seduction of adornment. Pebbles, small stones, glass, fragments of pottery scattered over the canvas actually expressed a slow, curious investigation of the texture, a will to enquire beyond the skin of things, and, at the same time, to adorn that skin with tiny bits of light. It is as though Bianco sought a response to his existential tensions in the materials, as well as pursuing that "let me have fun" recalling Palazzeschi, which remains the most authentic statement of his artistic theory. It is true that the title of one of his works of 1952, where the ghost of a woman appears in the background, is Sesso e angoscia (plate, p. 41). It is a 3D, and the title echoes also in the nuclears and the spatials, that seem like journeys into the unconscious. But the hilarious irony of the artist never attained a definitive, irreparable tragedy. Anguish, in Bianco, lasted but a second, before being dissolved in the dimension of surprise, of vital curiosity. Let us listen to him again: "Those were the years [the early fifties] when the first works I might define as spatial rather than nuclear were born, with accumulations of contrasting colors like nitro-enamel and the blending of different materials such as plastics, fused metals, fused glass." In Bianco's work there was always a magical dimension, the investigation of an apprentice magician who wanted to question nature, capture its secrets, play at being the "little chemist" and discover the philosopher's stone as well. The textural dimension to be found in his works of these years did not have the same meaning it had in most contemporary informal works: it did not spring from a reflection that believed above all in immanence, that observed the metaphysical supremacy of chaos instead of order, that denounced the fact of "being cast" into existence instead of the existence of a project. For Bianco matter did not represent the final meaning of the story. It was more like the place of alchemical practices, along with the dream of a magic formula capable of retaining youth, finding the chemical composition of love, and reinventing life. His material is pleasing. It does not express a nihilist position, but a principle of hope. It is not a coincidence if Bianco's colors, around the mid-fifties, took on particularly bright tones. A far cry from that "academy of anguish" stigmatized by Longhi, Bianco expressed in his informal period a feverish and positive vitality, a singular "joy of living" (to quote the title of a cycle of later works). The Trip to America In 1955 Remo Bianco, thanks to a scholarship Virgilio Gianni, his friend and patron, offered him, took a trip to America. This trip was decisive for his training, because in New York he was able to see Jackson Pollock's painting and to confront a different way of conceiving the spatiality of the picture. The "spatial" works featuring a tangled linearity taking up the entire surface of the canvas might seem to have been a consequence of this meeting. But here we have once again a problem of dates. As we have seen, in Bianco's labyrinthian expressive career, the "spatial" works had already begun long before. But I believe that the ones in which Pollock's inspiration is the most obvious belong to the mid-fifties, after the trip to New York. Works like Informale (plate, p. 72) dated 1950 by the artist himself and elaborated with spots, drippings, meshed juxtaposed lines, seem inconceivable without a direct vision of Pollock, which for Bianco took place far earlier than so many of his companions. In the same fashion, Informale 1952 (plate, p. 71) in my opinion ought to be moved to a date after the American trip, and we would not be too mistaken in ascribing it to 1955. It is true though that the Galleria del Naviglio had already had a Pollock exhibition in 1950. The show had drawn little attention, but not so little that an artist like Bianco, who was an assiduous and intelligent visitor to the gallery, would not have noticed it. And he himself recalls, speaking of Pollock: "I was enthusiastic about his work... I don't believe it influenced mine, for the simple reason that I didn't know his works. But I encountered a great affinity of temperament." And again: "I was doing experiments that instead I called suggestive: they were in the air, they were ripening at the time. They were drippings, drippings on the canvas. In fact I called this painting suggestive because it suggested images to me: this proceeded from, went back to a concept no less than Leonardo's, who had discovered in spots the suggestions of forms; in fact, this dripping color on the canvas provoked odd forms that suggested visions." So, if we listen to Bianco's evidence, his acquaintance with Pollock took place in New York and not before. There is no reason to doubt the artist's sincerity. But we should not forget that Bianco, and all the painters of his generation, not only had nothing to do with notarial and professional concerns (at that time there was no such thing as philology of painting, nor was it even conceived of), but had a receptivity that was far more prehensile than they themselves even realized. An image, a sign, a detail could lead them to intuit a whole expressive world, without the artist worrying about giving a Christian name to that world. After all, Bianco practiced informal art since the early fifties, following vast, multiform inspirations that could be found in Italy during those years. The trip to America was expressed in results closer to a Pollock orthodoxy, but also remote from that model, since Bianco was soon to leave aside gesture and action painting. As Adriano Altamira, a friend of the artist and one of his most attentive and attendable exegetes, wrote: "His visit to New York, when among other things he had the opportunity to meet Pollock, was in that sense a fundamental experience, perhaps insofar as it showed him the futility and the impossibility of advantageously following such a worn path ." The real problem about this expressive period is actually less a matter of establishing a chronological order than of understanding just how Bianco interpreted Pollock. There is no need to think that the Milanese artist was a mere imitator of the American master. Quite the opposite. If it is true that, as regards the information grasped in Europe and the trip to New York, he had a most receptive mind, able, without preconceptions, to make the most of the new expressive experiences on the other side of the Atlantic, it is true also that Bianco interpreted Pollock in his own way, relating him in an original way to his own sensibility. Let me explain. Bianco always expressed a sense of the finite in his work. Infinity, the unmeasurable, the unlimited of sublime, romantic origin have no place in his investigation. That is why, as we already said, Bianco had interpreted spatialism not as a voyage in the universe, nor as a mental exploration of the galaxies, but as a going beyond oneself into the limits and the magic of matter. In the same manner, when he was faced with dripping and all over painting, he did not care for the sense of illimited, nomadic, undefined spatiality in those experiments. If you look at his tangles, you can see that in Bianco there was always a corporality the line, and also, you might say, a sense of the Cartesian coordinates of the canvas. No matter how tangled the skein of lines he painted, his skein was one that spread over the surface, that tended to become a network. That is, his lines tended to have a rhythm and, ultimately, a bearing structure. Bianco never came, as Pollock did, to a "grappling with the canvas"; he was not interested in entering the canvas "like in an arena," in Pollock's famous terms. Instead he kept a lucid detachment in guiding his sign patterns: a detachment displayed in the imperceptible order that paradoxically underlay the disorder of the composition. It is not a coincidence if, soon, on the background of the tangles, a mosaic of square tesserae appeared, a spatial articulation, an implacable scansion. We are talking about the collages, which would be followed by the Tableaux dorés. But at this point we must pause. In Remo Bianco's multiform production we have to analyze an important part, nearly contemporary to the collages: the "imprints," which we must examine without further delay.
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