Remo Bianco Foundation

The Tableaux dorés

A series of gilt squares, but also silver or scarlet, were arrayed on the canvas, as though expectantly. The procedure of dripping and the linear tensions were henceforth replaced by the calm, thoughtful spreading of the gold leaf, that the artist combined in many ways: either extending the surface and reducing the picture to a few juxtaposed squares, or lining up the tesserae in uncertain, uneven sequences, or reinforcing the thickness of the texture of the work.

In the Tableaux dorés there is an itemizing, repetitive obsession, a vague and intentionally labored fabulating. It is the same imperfect itemizing that we can see in the other Milanese artists (I am referring to Arturo Vermi's "aste," for instance) and which is expressed with a stammer, that may reflect a crisis in language. But in Remo Bianco this uneven itemizing, this mute encyclopaedia of life and nature was filled with a magic, divinatory value. What are the Tableaux dorés if not tarot games, Sybil's squared pages, solitaires of rows of cards laid out for prophesying the future: cards still covered, seized just before the omen and filled with a haruspex' untouched magic?

Remo Bianco's gold does not have a sacred value, but an alchemical and pre-scientific one. The sense of gold returns here as a fabulous, fantastic element, but also the most genuinely Milanese inclination for gold: just think of Bembo's fifteenth-century Tarocchi (Tarots).

It is significant as well that even these silent Mandalas contain an autobiographical echo: the memory of the artist's mother, who was familiar with cartomancy and the art of tarots, and whom Bianco described as a "fantastic woman full of divinatory magic."

How were the Tableaux dorés born? A note by the artist helps us understand their genesis. Bianco writes: "In 1957, in Milan, after having coated with a single color the surface of a `collage,' I would apply pure gold leaves onto it. The painting was then painted in two colors, nearly like in heraldry. "

A simple gesture, nearly natural, or at least rigorously connected with the artist's investigations. And yet, and rightly so, the Tableaux dorés are the works that most inspired the critics' comments, often leading them to pieces of delicate, intense lyricism.

We shall transcribe here only a few of the most beautiful and evocative passages. But the selection could be far vaster, because it can be said that there was not a single critic, of those who followed Bianco's work, who was not aware of the enigmatic charm created by these luminous mosaics of his, by those pages of the "Golden book of life," in which the fate of each of us seems to have been recorded.

Agnoldomenico Pica writes, pointing out in the Tableaux dorés their architectural nature, as of precious stones, bright and shining, lined up in space: "Even Limoges enamels en cloisonnés, that in fact have Oriental roots, could provide a remote interpretive key to these preciously variegated surfaces, nearly an opus alexandrinum made with invented marbles, where instead of the blood and the humors of a passionate, vegetative life it would seem possible to grasp (but we may be fooling ourselves) the secret, ancestral longing, mysteriously ever-alive, of a millenary mineral story. "

In turn Raffaele Carried, who visited Bianco's studio, recalls the suggestiveness springing from those gold leaves that filled the room (a suggestiveness not devoid of anxiety, because those squares reminded him also of the gridded window of a prisoner): "Wherever I looked I could see square or rectangular gold leaves laid out in checkerboard patterns on colored surfaces. An infinite, thronged series of combinations of forms, all cut out in the gold like a Byzantine mosaic in a prisoner's dream."

On the other hand Umbro Apollonio interprets the Tableaux dorés in exclusively formal terms, as mysterious time-space units: "In the repetition of formal units, nearly residual imprints, an organized sequence occurs, that measures a time in which space is no longer a vacuum, but the premise of dynamic, fluctuating relationships. The very dazzling sonorousness of gold and silver imprinted on brightly-colored backgrounds forms a combination of accents and pauses that frames a constant echoing of relationships, thus establishing an expansion directed beyond the limits of its own level. In a like procedure, balanced between imagination and intellect, never merely mechanical, Bianco avoids schematism, thanks to that part of the arcane that is hinted in it, to that joyful lightness with which, on the screen of the picture, the graceful sequence of its forms moves about, forms which, after all, aim at a bewitching, aristocratic enjoyment.

And still more. With an artist's lyrical feeling, Mark Tobey, who had met Bianco in 1968, speaking about the Tableaux dorés mentions "gildings, that glow like an altar, like the lights of a Greek twilight.""

And Pierre Restany, situating the gold paintings in the spirit of the times, remarked: "The tesserae of his countless collages and the gold leaves of his `gold paintings' suggest comparisons with symbolic tarots, for personal use or rather with a single use: the painter Bianco loves his neighbor as himself, and wants only to see good in the fate of humanity. If he takes the gold of Yves Klein's trilogy, it means he sees resplendent light, and not the sign of fire that burns ... The gold pictures are countless opalescent, translucid mirrors, luminous windows open onto the imprints of reality."

And last, Sanesi spoke of forms of pure light having metaphysical reverberations: "A synthesis entirely entrusted to cadenza, to the rhythm of forms of pure light against a space that owing to it comes to life, maintaining the full-empty ambiguity of a vision reduced to a tangible idea, not devoid of metaphysical reverberations... Signs with an interpretive code that recall a broader code, but not uncertain, merely more open to an emotional interpretation, nearly archetypal, as soon as the various panels containing them begin to assemble in pagodas."

The Sixties. Investigation in Space

Although Bianco expressed himself at length with painting, his temperament and talent were not eminently pictorial. For him painting was a means, not an end, and in his works there was not the slightest pictorialism, no research of enjoyment related to the "craft" of painting.

In that sense his attitude was certainly conceptual, or even openly anti-pictorial. Artisanal wisdom did not appeal to him. Gold leaf, cloth, wood, rubber, plaster, paper spotted with color, as worn and consumed as needed, were all instruments used indifferently, readymades that had a value not in view of a formal beauty, but as dice to be cast on the table. What counted was not their appearance, but the feeling of expectancy they provoked and their value for the game. Bianco could even use paint like a readymade, like found material, to be used and re-used. With such assumptions, it is not surprising that the artist felt the need to put alongside his abundant pictorial research, a specific reflection about space, by means of sculpture, performance, installation. Besides, the Impronte and the Testimonianze were already three-dimensional elements. Not to mention the 3Ds: paintings that go beyond painting.

Around the middle of the sixties, therefore, the Sculture-neve appeared.

In this case as well we are dealing with small objects, that were coated with artificial snow and enclosed in plexiglass caskets. They could be toy soldiers, squeezed and curled up tubes of paint, cash registers (naturally miniature), small still lifes with jug and bottle, pitcher and plastic fruit, table centers, flowers, playing cards, tiny Christmas cribs. And they could be as well frogs, roses, toy automobiles and airplanes, birdcages. A whole world, entirely coated with a gentle snowfall, making it all look metaphysical.

Even for these works the dates generally credited differ by over a decade. It has been said, but in the framework of recollected conversations, expressed with some dubiousness, that the Nevi might have begun in the early fifties.

For instance Milena Milani recalls: "How often, with my friend Remo, did we joke about his inventions. His imagination was boundless. Snow, even in those remote years, in 1952, I think, ended up in a show window, on branches that vibrated, wrapped in that mysterious glittering.""

In a complete biography in 1972, Adriano Altamira instead situated the Sculture-neve, as the Traffiture, the Sculture calde and the Appropriazioni at the same period: the mid-sixties. And this last date seems more consistent with the rest of the development of Bianco's work, and with the very expressive direction of the times.

Even in this case the double date arises from the confusion between the first idea and the concrete execution. Again, in the artist's words: "This overlaying obviously was connected with an experiment I had done in 1956. It was precisely at Christmas that I observed artificial snow, spray-can snow, that had been sprayed upon a pine tree; the pine tree, the snow had hardened and the pine's shape had been altered. I bought some spray cans and used it on several forms, toys I think. Ten years later, the idea had grown in me and had become a possibility. Overlaying became inarrestible."

The Sculture-neve are works of delicate suggestiveness and subtle charm, despite the fact that sometimes time has damaged or compromised their freshness, their candor, their very gracefulness. But Bianco's work did not just focus on the Nevi. Still in the early sixties the artist worked on casts and body "imprints," like the "live" imprints (live models presented as Tableaux dorés or wrapped in cellophane) that in 1964 were presented at the Galleria del Cavallino.

In these works surfaces the dialogue with the anthropometries of Klein and the "actions" of Manzoni, even if the inspiration in Bianco is substantially different: an inspiration closer to real life, more attentive to the psychological and emotional dimension of the performance.

The attention and the concentration on the "live imprints" however, relayed to the background other aspects of Bianco's production, which today appear to us particularly interesting.

We are referring, for instance, to the Traffiture (1965), that seen today seem close to certain recent works (I'm thinking of Gober, and Katharina Fritsch), in the spirit of the neo-Pop declination of the sacred.
The Sculture calde and the (rarer) Sculture fredde seem equally intriguing, where Bianco reintroduced (even if in an ironic vein) linguistic material of classical origins: especially marble, that is "heated" by electricity, or cooled with ice.

With the Appropriazioni, finally, (a term which combines the nevi, traffiture, sculture calde and fredde), Bianco tended to take possession of the objects he saw around him, and to leave his own imprint on them, and at the same time to assimilate them in an identical process.

Art as the creation of new forms was replaced by art as a reflection on what already exists; the definition of a language was substituted by a meta-linguistic operation (if we can thus define the appropriation of another's language).

The Seventies. Elementary Art

This brief profile we are sketching certainly does not exhaust all of Bianco's ideas and investigations. In the sixties, marked by a visionary interest for science, we should have at least mentioned the use, as of 1960, of sephadex (a gelatine that separates aniline colors according to their specific weight); the formulation of what Bianco called Chemical Art, meaning art able to use the possibilities offered by technology (the Manifest of Chemical Art was published in 1964); the countless experiments with which Bianco related art and physics, using wind, water, smoke.

Beginning in the seventies, on the other hand, forms of "elementary" art arose (after two periods the artist defined as "sadistic" and "mystical," characterized respectively by the traffiture and the solipsistic distance from reality).

This was a painstakingly achieved tabula rasa, after the troubled sadistic and mystical periods. It was a tabula rasa, a zero degree (or a degree one) in drawing, consisting in coming back to a visual ABC, to intentionally banalized expressions, to sketches made on backgrounds of squared notebooks: lively, captivating images, similar to fragments of primers, or children's transfers.

Again it was the language of nursery rhymes, popular imagery for children that inspired Bianco. But we need not think of some emotional, sentimental tone. With his Banal Art, Bianco made fun of the conditionings and the prejudices that reduce man to an irresponsible child. To the immature man who falls back unaware into childhood, Bianco opposed the artist, the man who consciously chooses to return to a primogenial condition. Life cannot be playful: playful can only be the attitude of he who meditates on life. These stylized figurations were soon followed by the cycle of the Gioia di vivere: a return to a neo-expressionist figuration, often expressed in references, by which Bianco showed he could perceive the stylistic mood of the eighties.

And meanwhile the Tableaux dorés continued, and the collages, that sometimes, now, had sweetly suggestive titles (Cosi tanti fiori dolci sono nati, 1985; Al giardino I bambini accendono 1 colori, 1985).

Thus ended the long expressive parabola of Remo Bianco. And we might conclude this rapid commentary on his art with the words of Gillo Dorfles, who in 1995 thus defined his work: "a work unconnected with the passing of the years, yet still present by its intimate, authentic vitality.


	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 Tableaux dorés A series of gilt squares, but also silver or scarlet, were arrayed on the canvas, as though expectantly. The procedure of dripping and the linear tensions were henceforth replaced by the calm, thoughtful spreading of the gold leaf, that the artist combined in many ways: either extending the surface and reducing the picture to a few juxtaposed squares, or lining up the tesserae in uncertain, uneven sequences, or reinforcing the thickness of the texture of the work. In the Tableaux dorés there is an itemizing, repetitive obsession, a vague and intentionally labored fabulating. It is the same imperfect itemizing that we can see in the other Milanese artists (I am referring to Arturo Vermi's "aste," for instance) and which is expressed with a stammer, that may reflect a crisis in language. But in Remo Bianco this uneven itemizing, this mute encyclopaedia of life and nature was filled with a magic, divinatory value. What are the Tableaux dorés if not tarot games, Sybil's squared pages, solitaires of rows of cards laid out for prophesying the future: cards still covered, seized just before the omen and filled with a haruspex' untouched magic? Remo Bianco's gold does not have a sacred value, but an alchemical and pre-scientific one. The sense of gold returns here as a fabulous, fantastic element, but also the most genuinely Milanese inclination for gold: just think of Bembo's fifteenth-century Tarocchi (Tarots). It is significant as well that even these silent Mandalas contain an autobiographical echo: the memory of the artist's mother, who was familiar with cartomancy and the art of tarots, and whom Bianco described as a "fantastic woman full of divinatory magic." How were the Tableaux dorés born? A note by the artist helps us understand their genesis. Bianco writes: "In 1957, in Milan, after having coated with a single color the surface of a `collage,' I would apply pure gold leaves onto it. The painting was then painted in two colors, nearly like in heraldry. " A simple gesture, nearly natural, or at least rigorously connected with the artist's investigations. And yet, and rightly so, the Tableaux dorés are the works that most inspired the critics' comments, often leading them to pieces of delicate, intense lyricism. We shall transcribe here only a few of the most beautiful and evocative passages. But the selection could be far vaster, because it can be said that there was not a single critic, of those who followed Bianco's work, who was not aware of the enigmatic charm created by these luminous mosaics of his, by those pages of the "Golden book of life," in which the fate of each of us seems to have been recorded. Agnoldomenico Pica writes, pointing out in the Tableaux dorés their architectural nature, as of precious stones, bright and shining, lined up in space: "Even Limoges enamels en cloisonnés, that in fact have Oriental roots, could provide a remote interpretive key to these preciously variegated surfaces, nearly an opus alexandrinum made with invented marbles, where instead of the blood and the humors of a passionate, vegetative life it would seem possible to grasp (but we may be fooling ourselves) the secret, ancestral longing, mysteriously ever-alive, of a millenary mineral story. " In turn Raffaele Carried, who visited Bianco's studio, recalls the suggestiveness springing from those gold leaves that filled the room (a suggestiveness not devoid of anxiety, because those squares reminded him also of the gridded window of a prisoner): "Wherever I looked I could see square or rectangular gold leaves laid out in checkerboard patterns on colored surfaces. An infinite, thronged series of combinations of forms, all cut out in the gold like a Byzantine mosaic in a prisoner's dream." On the other hand Umbro Apollonio interprets the Tableaux dorés in exclusively formal terms, as mysterious time-space units: "In the repetition of formal units, nearly residual imprints, an organized sequence occurs, that measures a time in which space is no longer a vacuum, but the premise of dynamic, fluctuating relationships. The very dazzling sonorousness of gold and silver imprinted on brightly-colored backgrounds forms a combination of accents and pauses that frames a constant echoing of relationships, thus establishing an expansion directed beyond the limits of its own level. In a like procedure, balanced between imagination and intellect, never merely mechanical, Bianco avoids schematism, thanks to that part of the arcane that is hinted in it, to that joyful lightness with which, on the screen of the picture, the graceful sequence of its forms moves about, forms which, after all, aim at a bewitching, aristocratic enjoyment. And still more. With an artist's lyrical feeling, Mark Tobey, who had met Bianco in 1968, speaking about the Tableaux dorés mentions "gildings, that glow like an altar, like the lights of a Greek twilight."" And Pierre Restany, situating the gold paintings in the spirit of the times, remarked: "The tesserae of his countless collages and the gold leaves of his `gold paintings' suggest comparisons with symbolic tarots, for personal use or rather with a single use: the painter Bianco loves his neighbor as himself, and wants only to see good in the fate of humanity. If he takes the gold of Yves Klein's trilogy, it means he sees resplendent light, and not the sign of fire that burns ... The gold pictures are countless opalescent, translucid mirrors, luminous windows open onto the imprints of reality." And last, Sanesi spoke of forms of pure light having metaphysical reverberations: "A synthesis entirely entrusted to cadenza, to the rhythm of forms of pure light against a space that owing to it comes to life, maintaining the full-empty ambiguity of a vision reduced to a tangible idea, not devoid of metaphysical reverberations... Signs with an interpretive code that recall a broader code, but not uncertain, merely more open to an emotional interpretation, nearly archetypal, as soon as the various panels containing them begin to assemble in pagodas." The Sixties. Investigation in Space Although Bianco expressed himself at length with painting, his temperament and talent were not eminently pictorial. For him painting was a means, not an end, and in his works there was not the slightest pictorialism, no research of enjoyment related to the "craft" of painting. In that sense his attitude was certainly conceptual, or even openly anti-pictorial. Artisanal wisdom did not appeal to him. Gold leaf, cloth, wood, rubber, plaster, paper spotted with color, as worn and consumed as needed, were all instruments used indifferently, readymades that had a value not in view of a formal beauty, but as dice to be cast on the table. What counted was not their appearance, but the feeling of expectancy they provoked and their value for the game. Bianco could even use paint like a readymade, like found material, to be used and re-used. With such assumptions, it is not surprising that the artist felt the need to put alongside his abundant pictorial research, a specific reflection about space, by means of sculpture, performance, installation. Besides, the Impronte and the Testimonianze were already three-dimensional elements. Not to mention the 3Ds: paintings that go beyond painting. Around the middle of the sixties, therefore, the Sculture-neve appeared. In this case as well we are dealing with small objects, that were coated with artificial snow and enclosed in plexiglass caskets. They could be toy soldiers, squeezed and curled up tubes of paint, cash registers (naturally miniature), small still lifes with jug and bottle, pitcher and plastic fruit, table centers, flowers, playing cards, tiny Christmas cribs. And they could be as well frogs, roses, toy automobiles and airplanes, birdcages. A whole world, entirely coated with a gentle snowfall, making it all look metaphysical. Even for these works the dates generally credited differ by over a decade. It has been said, but in the framework of recollected conversations, expressed with some dubiousness, that the Nevi might have begun in the early fifties. For instance Milena Milani recalls: "How often, with my friend Remo, did we joke about his inventions. His imagination was boundless. Snow, even in those remote years, in 1952, I think, ended up in a show window, on branches that vibrated, wrapped in that mysterious glittering."" In a complete biography in 1972, Adriano Altamira instead situated the Sculture-neve, as the Traffiture, the Sculture calde and the Appropriazioni at the same period: the mid-sixties. And this last date seems more consistent with the rest of the development of Bianco's work, and with the very expressive direction of the times. Even in this case the double date arises from the confusion between the first idea and the concrete execution. Again, in the artist's words: "This overlaying obviously was connected with an experiment I had done in 1956. It was precisely at Christmas that I observed artificial snow, spray-can snow, that had been sprayed upon a pine tree; the pine tree, the snow had hardened and the pine's shape had been altered. I bought some spray cans and used it on several forms, toys I think. Ten years later, the idea had grown in me and had become a possibility. Overlaying became inarrestible." The Sculture-neve are works of delicate suggestiveness and subtle charm, despite the fact that sometimes time has damaged or compromised their freshness, their candor, their very gracefulness. But Bianco's work did not just focus on the Nevi. Still in the early sixties the artist worked on casts and body "imprints," like the "live" imprints (live models presented as Tableaux dorés or wrapped in cellophane) that in 1964 were presented at the Galleria del Cavallino. In these works surfaces the dialogue with the anthropometries of Klein and the "actions" of Manzoni, even if the inspiration in Bianco is substantially different: an inspiration closer to real life, more attentive to the psychological and emotional dimension of the performance. The attention and the concentration on the "live imprints" however, relayed to the background other aspects of Bianco's production, which today appear to us particularly interesting. We are referring, for instance, to the Traffiture (1965), that seen today seem close to certain recent works (I'm thinking of Gober, and Katharina Fritsch), in the spirit of the neo-Pop declination of the sacred. The Sculture calde and the (rarer) Sculture fredde seem equally intriguing, where Bianco reintroduced (even if in an ironic vein) linguistic material of classical origins: especially marble, that is "heated" by electricity, or cooled with ice. With the Appropriazioni, finally, (a term which combines the nevi, traffiture, sculture calde and fredde), Bianco tended to take possession of the objects he saw around him, and to leave his own imprint on them, and at the same time to assimilate them in an identical process. Art as the creation of new forms was replaced by art as a reflection on what already exists; the definition of a language was substituted by a meta-linguistic operation (if we can thus define the appropriation of another's language). The Seventies. Elementary Art This brief profile we are sketching certainly does not exhaust all of Bianco's ideas and investigations. In the sixties, marked by a visionary interest for science, we should have at least mentioned the use, as of 1960, of sephadex (a gelatine that separates aniline colors according to their specific weight); the formulation of what Bianco called Chemical Art, meaning art able to use the possibilities offered by technology (the Manifest of Chemical Art was published in 1964); the countless experiments with which Bianco related art and physics, using wind, water, smoke. Beginning in the seventies, on the other hand, forms of "elementary" art arose (after two periods the artist defined as "sadistic" and "mystical," characterized respectively by the traffiture and the solipsistic distance from reality). This was a painstakingly achieved tabula rasa, after the troubled sadistic and mystical periods. It was a tabula rasa, a zero degree (or a degree one) in drawing, consisting in coming back to a visual ABC, to intentionally banalized expressions, to sketches made on backgrounds of squared notebooks: lively, captivating images, similar to fragments of primers, or children's transfers. Again it was the language of nursery rhymes, popular imagery for children that inspired Bianco. But we need not think of some emotional, sentimental tone. With his Banal Art, Bianco made fun of the conditionings and the prejudices that reduce man to an irresponsible child. To the immature man who falls back unaware into childhood, Bianco opposed the artist, the man who consciously chooses to return to a primogenial condition. Life cannot be playful: playful can only be the attitude of he who meditates on life. These stylized figurations were soon followed by the cycle of the Gioia di vivere: a return to a neo-expressionist figuration, often expressed in references, by which Bianco showed he could perceive the stylistic mood of the eighties. And meanwhile the Tableaux dorés continued, and the collages, that sometimes, now, had sweetly suggestive titles (Cosi tanti fiori dolci sono nati, 1985; Al giardino I bambini accendono 1 colori, 1985). Thus ended the long expressive parabola of Remo Bianco. And we might conclude this rapid commentary on his art with the words of Gillo Dorfles, who in 1995 thus defined his work: "a work unconnected with the passing of the years, yet still present by its intimate, authentic vitality.
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