Remo Bianco Foundation

Imprint Art. Testimonies

It has been written that the "imprints" began in the early fifties, or even in '48. But here a precision is necessary. In one of the artist's diary notes dated May 15, 1948, we can read: "I am painting with a new system: I spread color on the objects and print them on the canvas, I even use my fingers."

As you can see, we are dealing with a procedure that is quite different from that of the plaster casts, which should be placed later on, towards the mid-fifties, at the time of the manifest of "Imprint Art." Later on Bianco himself was to claim: "In 1956... I went back to the imprint investigation, when I could avail of plastic materials, materials that were appropriate for being poured in those plaster shapes and thus for being reproduced. I dreamed of entire walls covered with these imprints. These casts can be of anything, even the most commonplace, humble objects that surround us: it is a kind of `recovery's of these objects.

Before discussing in more detail what these imprints/casts are, we should recall a methodological stance.

We should not confuse poetic ideas and inventions, of which Bianco was a mine (or, if we want to stick to a geological metaphor, a volcano), with their material execution, which often came about later on. Besides, we should say to begin, I am persuaded that part of the reason for the unsatisfactory appreciation of Bianco's work on the present artistic scene, is owing, equally, to the implausible nature of certain dates.They are philologically approximate dates, based on later evidence, that end up by having the opposite effect than was sought, and that is by obliterating the propulsive role Bianco actually had, in later days (days that however are still early, even if they are postdated by several years).

But let us come to the Impronte (imprints). The small, delightful plaster panels, that grip as in a vice trinkets of every form and kind, odds and ends ranging from dollhouses, furnishings for little girls pretending to be grown-up ladies, and little boys dreaming of being knights, are compositions in which the recovery of the object is perfectly achieved. They are caskets of memory, metaphysical attics, where various things seek and find shelter: small horses from the playroom, trees from the cowboys' ranch, balls and marbles, mirrors of the cruel Queen who asks it who is the most Beautiful in the Kingdom, lightbulbs, deck chairs, pipes, coffee pots...

Bianco sought a perpetual condition of childhood and practiced his own personal primitivism: a primitivism sui generis (we might call it an objectal primitivism), full of traits of courtesy, graciousness, expressive delicacy. The kindness of his soul, that fragile, vulnerable psychology, capable perhaps of desperate deeds, but singularly suave and generous, that all those who knew him are unanimous in claiming, was expressed in these cheerful works, midway between play and memory.

But what do these works mean? In 1956 Bianco published the Manifest of Imprint Art, that we should produce here in full. So the artist wrote: "The art of the future is placed under the sign of the IMPRINT. An IMPRINT is everything that remains impressed in our subconscious. IMPRINT of society itself, insofar as it is an image of all those conditionings the essence of life implies. So I claim that man cannot avoid being imprinted by a society that is in constant mutation and is always surrounding us with new things. To escape the things that are not always desirable, man has to master them, creating an imprint that is no longer the object but a something more in comformity with his nature. All this requires a different means of expression that takes all these assumptions into consideration. I claim that my imprints are a universal documentation that will catalogue all the things that have been in touch with me through a reality re-dimensioned of the present truth. I claim that in a near future men will make imprints in order to possess the reality that is around them."

It was necessary to make this long quotation, not just because Remo Bianco's writings are little known, but also because this manifest, despite several involved and cryptic expressions, clearly explains the atmosphere, the expressive horizon which was Bianco's when he created the Impronte.

To catalogue all those things that had been in touch with him: that was the artist's aim. It is an aim, as you can see, that is closer to a Borges dictionary or a Proustian madeleine, than to assumptions of pop art. Bianco had in mind a universal primer, yet where the protagonist was always man, or rather he himself. His research was autobiographical, in which the things that were imprinted on his skin, in his soul, surfaced captured in the surface of the plaster.

And again we listen to the artist: "I made imprints/casts in plaster (I was interested in gathering imprints made by cars, for instance), and this research thus became a kind of cataloguing of events, facts and things. I remember the people who were intrigued when they saw me appear with a bag of plaster, I looked exactly like a policeman making an investigation and taking imprints on the pavement, on the sidewalk."

We shall come back to the imprints. But we observe that these works came about in a fervid atmosphere of thought of developments for art, not merely Italian. As explained Miklos Varga, who had a long friendship with Bianco and wrote some powerful pages about him: "And along the lines of this existentialist notion there began to make headway, even if with other motivations, the fingerprints of Piero Manzoni in 1960, the 1960-62 body casts of Antonio Recalcati, whereas Yves Klein, still in 1960 came into the limelight with his spectacular naturométries, imprints of female bodies, sprinkled with blue on the white canvas.

At the same time as the Impronte, and nearly specular to them (the first ones executed "by removing," the second "by putting") are the Sacchetti, or, as Bianco called them, the Testimonianze, begun after 1955. The latter are precisely small plastic bags lined up in rows, and which contain small, negligible objects.

Again the artist writes: "The Sacchetti too, the pictures with countless suspended small cellophane bags, belong to the imprint period. These small bags are approximately dated '56, but I kept on doing them, because sometimes I felt the need to continue... These bags are made of a material (it might just as well be ante povera) that has been discarded, thrown away, found in the trash or in drawers of destroyed or not destroyed objects, but old anyway and having a very poetic appearance, and gathered in small bags: they are all those objects we forget about and that have scarce value: seashells, pebbles, medals, coins, stamps, even cigarette butts, broken dolls, a pipe, a toy, especially tin toys and so on... What was I resolved to do when I began making this kind of picture, hanging little bags full of objects, scraps, onto the canvas? You immediately think of Christo's `wrapped' packages, Arman's 'accumulations,' which actually had nothing to do with them, quite the opposite, at the time I didn't even know about them."

As can be seen, in Bianco's attitude there was an emotional, sentimental implication (although not sentimentalist). His conceptual operations were not philosophical syllogisms, they did not conceal a purely theoretic attitude, nor even less cerebral. They were, indeed, affective experiences, precisely of someone who was heedful of the most modest and vanquished reality, and wanted to revaluate it. "I like the loser, but when it wins it's spoiled," the artist said."

Playing with memory, retaining the fleeting past, paying attention to what in life is held to be the least important: there was also that implication, which you might call ethical, in Bianco's work.

The artist goes on: "I wanted to rebuild part of my life, nearly all these objects were mine, had belonged to me, to my childhood. Then I connected this problem to others, rebuilding through these objects the person's life, telling exactly what had happened in the meeting with others in one day: for instance of a little girl, who had given me her doll: we broke the doll and went to find her father. Her father was a turner, and from that meeting we kept a bit of leftovers from the lathe, that was put in another bag. Along the way we found some cigarette butts and they were put in another bag, and then an old newspaper, that we burned, and the ashes were put in another bag. The girl's mother too had given us some things she had found in a drawer. So we rebuilt, the little girl and I, a day we had shared in a particular way."
Gabriella Belli and Annamaria Marchionne accurately remark, speaking of the Testimonianze: "The elements seized by reality are separated, catalogued, enveloped, wrapped in small plastic bags, that `hide' and `conceal' the objects themselves, to be later introduced and assimilated in the formal design of the picture, where they keep their independent structure given by the rhythms of the subdivisions inside their containers. The interest of these works lies essentially in the enveloping and wrapping operation which, unlike dadaism, is something more than a mere provocative presence of objects: it is an `investigation' and an `activity' related to an object. The function of enveloping actually implies the necessity of grouping, isolating, preserving, transferring, by an attraction for what is unknown and secret, that achieves, by its repetition, a sort of obsessive ritual.

Collages

The distance between ego and expression, between gesture and sign, is even easier to discern in the Collages, the works Bianco began on his return from New York.

What are these Collages? They are "directing" works, because they consist in the very informal and "Pollock-style" canvases which Bianco subdivided in geometric tarsias and put back together again.

As we already said, the instinctive violence, the vital energy, the pathos of Pollock's works could not become a part of our Milanese painter's expressive registers. Instead Bianco felt the need to modulate his gesture, to transform Pollock's cosmic scream into a light, amused rhythm. He then started cutting up the canvases painted in the Action Painting manner, reducing them to small squares, and thus composed large collages, breaking up the unity of the picture into a kaleidoscope of details.

Seemingly they were the same pictures as before, rebuilt in another "assemblage." But in reality the operation was exactly the opposite.

By recomposing his pictures of signs according to a regular geometry, Bianco distanced himself from informal art and went back to an art of spatial rhythm and organization.

The uniqueness and the instinctiveness of the gesture were replaced by the countability of the single modules, the repeatability and thus seriality (although filled with different signs) of the mosaic tesserae; the tangle of lines was replaced by the broken segment, which was no longer a skein, but a single line. The work now presupposed a different scrutiny, an analysis and a choice of the single fragments. Whereas informal art was becoming a catch-all language, whose common denominator was immediacy of the gesture, passion of the scream, immersion in matter, Bianco undertook what we can already define as a conceptual attitude.

Adriano Altamira writes: "With these works Remo Bianco, aside from stating that informal art was dead, soon after the mid-fifties, invented his checkerboard system that was to remain the set grid of nearly his entire important pictorial production of the following years: the Tableaux dorés and the Sacchettini. A grid that not by coincidence resumed everything in a conceptual formula that for instance had an echo, although with even more lucidity, in the work of Piero Manzoni."

But let us listen to how the artist himself recalled this moment: "Between '55 and '59, I did this experiment of the collages (and would pursue it a number of times in the future). I would cut up the painted canvas in so many little squares and keep the parts that interested me most and then recompose the canvas, which thus became like a sort of checkerboard, where all those forms were broken up."

And precisely in developing the principle of small squares, Bianco, around '57 came to what was probably to remain his greatest, and undoubtedly his most famous works: the Tableaux dorés.


	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 Imprint Art. Testimonies It has been written that the "imprints" began in the early fifties, or even in '48. But here a precision is necessary. In one of the artist's diary notes dated May 15, 1948, we can read: "I am painting with a new system: I spread color on the objects and print them on the canvas, I even use my fingers." As you can see, we are dealing with a procedure that is quite different from that of the plaster casts, which should be placed later on, towards the mid-fifties, at the time of the manifest of "Imprint Art." Later on Bianco himself was to claim: "In 1956... I went back to the imprint investigation, when I could avail of plastic materials, materials that were appropriate for being poured in those plaster shapes and thus for being reproduced. I dreamed of entire walls covered with these imprints. These casts can be of anything, even the most commonplace, humble objects that surround us: it is a kind of `recovery's of these objects. Before discussing in more detail what these imprints/casts are, we should recall a methodological stance. We should not confuse poetic ideas and inventions, of which Bianco was a mine (or, if we want to stick to a geological metaphor, a volcano), with their material execution, which often came about later on. Besides, we should say to begin, I am persuaded that part of the reason for the unsatisfactory appreciation of Bianco's work on the present artistic scene, is owing, equally, to the implausible nature of certain dates.They are philologically approximate dates, based on later evidence, that end up by having the opposite effect than was sought, and that is by obliterating the propulsive role Bianco actually had, in later days (days that however are still early, even if they are postdated by several years). But let us come to the Impronte (imprints). The small, delightful plaster panels, that grip as in a vice trinkets of every form and kind, odds and ends ranging from dollhouses, furnishings for little girls pretending to be grown-up ladies, and little boys dreaming of being knights, are compositions in which the recovery of the object is perfectly achieved. They are caskets of memory, metaphysical attics, where various things seek and find shelter: small horses from the playroom, trees from the cowboys' ranch, balls and marbles, mirrors of the cruel Queen who asks it who is the most Beautiful in the Kingdom, lightbulbs, deck chairs, pipes, coffee pots... Bianco sought a perpetual condition of childhood and practiced his own personal primitivism: a primitivism sui generis (we might call it an objectal primitivism), full of traits of courtesy, graciousness, expressive delicacy. The kindness of his soul, that fragile, vulnerable psychology, capable perhaps of desperate deeds, but singularly suave and generous, that all those who knew him are unanimous in claiming, was expressed in these cheerful works, midway between play and memory. But what do these works mean? In 1956 Bianco published the Manifest of Imprint Art, that we should produce here in full. So the artist wrote: "The art of the future is placed under the sign of the IMPRINT. An IMPRINT is everything that remains impressed in our subconscious. IMPRINT of society itself, insofar as it is an image of all those conditionings the essence of life implies. So I claim that man cannot avoid being imprinted by a society that is in constant mutation and is always surrounding us with new things. To escape the things that are not always desirable, man has to master them, creating an imprint that is no longer the object but a something more in comformity with his nature. All this requires a different means of expression that takes all these assumptions into consideration. I claim that my imprints are a universal documentation that will catalogue all the things that have been in touch with me through a reality re-dimensioned of the present truth. I claim that in a near future men will make imprints in order to possess the reality that is around them." It was necessary to make this long quotation, not just because Remo Bianco's writings are little known, but also because this manifest, despite several involved and cryptic expressions, clearly explains the atmosphere, the expressive horizon which was Bianco's when he created the Impronte. To catalogue all those things that had been in touch with him: that was the artist's aim. It is an aim, as you can see, that is closer to a Borges dictionary or a Proustian madeleine, than to assumptions of pop art. Bianco had in mind a universal primer, yet where the protagonist was always man, or rather he himself. His research was autobiographical, in which the things that were imprinted on his skin, in his soul, surfaced captured in the surface of the plaster. And again we listen to the artist: "I made imprints/casts in plaster (I was interested in gathering imprints made by cars, for instance), and this research thus became a kind of cataloguing of events, facts and things. I remember the people who were intrigued when they saw me appear with a bag of plaster, I looked exactly like a policeman making an investigation and taking imprints on the pavement, on the sidewalk." We shall come back to the imprints. But we observe that these works came about in a fervid atmosphere of thought of developments for art, not merely Italian. As explained Miklos Varga, who had a long friendship with Bianco and wrote some powerful pages about him: "And along the lines of this existentialist notion there began to make headway, even if with other motivations, the fingerprints of Piero Manzoni in 1960, the 1960-62 body casts of Antonio Recalcati, whereas Yves Klein, still in 1960 came into the limelight with his spectacular naturométries, imprints of female bodies, sprinkled with blue on the white canvas. At the same time as the Impronte, and nearly specular to them (the first ones executed "by removing," the second "by putting") are the Sacchetti, or, as Bianco called them, the Testimonianze, begun after 1955. The latter are precisely small plastic bags lined up in rows, and which contain small, negligible objects. Again the artist writes: "The Sacchetti too, the pictures with countless suspended small cellophane bags, belong to the imprint period. These small bags are approximately dated '56, but I kept on doing them, because sometimes I felt the need to continue... These bags are made of a material (it might just as well be ante povera) that has been discarded, thrown away, found in the trash or in drawers of destroyed or not destroyed objects, but old anyway and having a very poetic appearance, and gathered in small bags: they are all those objects we forget about and that have scarce value: seashells, pebbles, medals, coins, stamps, even cigarette butts, broken dolls, a pipe, a toy, especially tin toys and so on... What was I resolved to do when I began making this kind of picture, hanging little bags full of objects, scraps, onto the canvas? You immediately think of Christo's `wrapped' packages, Arman's 'accumulations,' which actually had nothing to do with them, quite the opposite, at the time I didn't even know about them." As can be seen, in Bianco's attitude there was an emotional, sentimental implication (although not sentimentalist). His conceptual operations were not philosophical syllogisms, they did not conceal a purely theoretic attitude, nor even less cerebral. They were, indeed, affective experiences, precisely of someone who was heedful of the most modest and vanquished reality, and wanted to revaluate it. "I like the loser, but when it wins it's spoiled," the artist said." Playing with memory, retaining the fleeting past, paying attention to what in life is held to be the least important: there was also that implication, which you might call ethical, in Bianco's work. The artist goes on: "I wanted to rebuild part of my life, nearly all these objects were mine, had belonged to me, to my childhood. Then I connected this problem to others, rebuilding through these objects the person's life, telling exactly what had happened in the meeting with others in one day: for instance of a little girl, who had given me her doll: we broke the doll and went to find her father. Her father was a turner, and from that meeting we kept a bit of leftovers from the lathe, that was put in another bag. Along the way we found some cigarette butts and they were put in another bag, and then an old newspaper, that we burned, and the ashes were put in another bag. The girl's mother too had given us some things she had found in a drawer. So we rebuilt, the little girl and I, a day we had shared in a particular way." Gabriella Belli and Annamaria Marchionne accurately remark, speaking of the Testimonianze: "The elements seized by reality are separated, catalogued, enveloped, wrapped in small plastic bags, that `hide' and `conceal' the objects themselves, to be later introduced and assimilated in the formal design of the picture, where they keep their independent structure given by the rhythms of the subdivisions inside their containers. The interest of these works lies essentially in the enveloping and wrapping operation which, unlike dadaism, is something more than a mere provocative presence of objects: it is an `investigation' and an `activity' related to an object. The function of enveloping actually implies the necessity of grouping, isolating, preserving, transferring, by an attraction for what is unknown and secret, that achieves, by its repetition, a sort of obsessive ritual. Collages The distance between ego and expression, between gesture and sign, is even easier to discern in the Collages, the works Bianco began on his return from New York. What are these Collages? They are "directing" works, because they consist in the very informal and "Pollock-style" canvases which Bianco subdivided in geometric tarsias and put back together again. As we already said, the instinctive violence, the vital energy, the pathos of Pollock's works could not become a part of our Milanese painter's expressive registers. Instead Bianco felt the need to modulate his gesture, to transform Pollock's cosmic scream into a light, amused rhythm. He then started cutting up the canvases painted in the Action Painting manner, reducing them to small squares, and thus composed large collages, breaking up the unity of the picture into a kaleidoscope of details. Seemingly they were the same pictures as before, rebuilt in another "assemblage." But in reality the operation was exactly the opposite. By recomposing his pictures of signs according to a regular geometry, Bianco distanced himself from informal art and went back to an art of spatial rhythm and organization. The uniqueness and the instinctiveness of the gesture were replaced by the countability of the single modules, the repeatability and thus seriality (although filled with different signs) of the mosaic tesserae; the tangle of lines was replaced by the broken segment, which was no longer a skein, but a single line. The work now presupposed a different scrutiny, an analysis and a choice of the single fragments. Whereas informal art was becoming a catch-all language, whose common denominator was immediacy of the gesture, passion of the scream, immersion in matter, Bianco undertook what we can already define as a conceptual attitude. Adriano Altamira writes: "With these works Remo Bianco, aside from stating that informal art was dead, soon after the mid-fifties, invented his checkerboard system that was to remain the set grid of nearly his entire important pictorial production of the following years: the Tableaux dorés and the Sacchettini. A grid that not by coincidence resumed everything in a conceptual formula that for instance had an echo, although with even more lucidity, in the work of Piero Manzoni." But let us listen to how the artist himself recalled this moment: "Between '55 and '59, I did this experiment of the collages (and would pursue it a number of times in the future). I would cut up the painted canvas in so many little squares and keep the parts that interested me most and then recompose the canvas, which thus became like a sort of checkerboard, where all those forms were broken up." And precisely in developing the principle of small squares, Bianco, around '57 came to what was probably to remain his greatest, and undoubtedly his most famous works: the Tableaux dorés.
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