Remo Bianco.
The Singularity of an Artist.
Elena Pontiggia
A singular, indefinable artist, Remo Bianco created an eclectic work in the noblest sense of the word: a constantly heretic work (heretic even towards itself that lies outside of categories and that, maybe for that very reason, was never thoroughly understood.
Living in a state of perpetual expressive adolescence, repeating his ironic, Palazzeschistyle saying: "And let me have fun!," Bianco always considered art to be a game, with a playful freedom and a linguistic volubility streaked with conceptual dadaism. In other words, Bianco played with art, clearly knowing, as I have already written: that all we can do is either play or be played. But beneath the surface of the game, an authentic, longsuffering existential concern surfaces in his work: an awareness of pain, of aggressivity, of injustice, a heartbreaking feeling of time going by and that we cannot stop.
1 will go on travelling the world over and finding out that man is bad under every sun," he himself wrote.1 And also: 1 gave and was subjected to every violence.`
Bianco's entire poetic work is nothing but a long, unbroken autobiographical page: a page from a diary where the artist describes himself and his relationship with the world.
Bianco worked all his life on what Proust called "the immense edifice of memory": he gathered, indexed, put together the traces and imprints of life. He was heedful of the smallest things, the most neglected, seeking to rescue them, to preserve them, to ennoble them by giving them an aesthetic statute. But he also lined up and mixed up, like a modern Bembo, an interminable bunch of tarots: silent tarots, nameless and faceless, as suits the sensibility of our times, that can no longer provide answers, only questions.
And what are tarots? They are a game that represents the game of life, meaning the game Remo Bianco was the most interested in.
His entire work, actually, projects a sense of effervescent, untiring creativity, that explores every artistic genre: painting, sculpture, installation, collage, performance, readymade. His work is a crucible of ideas, as well as a Chamber of INonders, where objects and images of every shape and kind undergo metamorphoses, deformations, enchantments, experiencing sadisms and reliefs, cruelty and tenderness. So approaching the vast corpus of his work is like entering the magi's den: entering the concentric circles and the short circuits of a language that endlessly reinvented itself. And precisely by its overwheiming richness, for a long time it was eluded and misunderstood.
Perhaps Bianco himself was aware of this when he wrote: 'They never really took me seriously. I bombarded them with too many ideas, too many intuitions, too much disorder.`
A Question of Method
It is not a simple matter to try to try to sort out Remo Bianco's vast, multifaceted work. It is not simple for a number of reasons. The first and most important is intrinsic to the artist's artistic theory: a theory not only little prone to philology, but even to a defined, or definitive, division in periods.
Remo Bianco's works were always in progress, in the course of becoming. Bianco proceeded by cycles of works that were not competed, but were rethought and reworked, sometimes years later. His creative urge, insensitive to the selfindulgence of formalism, yet in its own way never satisfied, expressed itself in results that overlapped and thronged like a river, chaotic, in waves, spurred by an emotional surging that was never disciplined nor could be disciplined.
That gave rise to the artist's constant metamorphism. In a century like ours, that has made the stylistic mark the distinctive feature of art, often leading to a wornout theory of repetition and variation, if not actual brands, Remo Bianco's work stands out from the others by its restless, fleeting physiognomy: a shifting physiognomy, typical of an artist who refused to give up any of the expressive paths he had undertaken, but instead heald them all in hand, like the strings of a puppeteer.
So it would be futile to try to analyze Bianco's corpus in terms of clearly defined expressive periods, even if there were certainly moments that featured more one or the other kind of investigation.
lf we add to this trait of Remo Bianco's work another equally significant one, meaning the artist's utter neglect of any kind of cataloguing, and the carelessness with which he signed or dated the work (the dates, when there are any, always have to be interpreted); if furthermore we realize how scarce the evidence (writings, catalogues, publications) that could provide stable points in the tangled skein of Bianco's production is, we understand that every date attributed to his works contains an element of critical randomness which will be difficult to eliminate.
In this piece we shall therefore take into consideration this "original sin" (but might it not also be a virtue?) of Remo Bianco's research. We shall seek as much as possible to specify circumstances and chronology, also with the help of Lorella Giudici's catalogue: she carefully reconstructed, where information could be found, the exhibition history and the bibliography of the entire Gianni collection. But we shall not strive to entrench arbitrarily what arose like a fluid element, to block with a date that could just as well belong to a twoyear or fiveyear period, or even a decade of work. Such an operation, seemingly philological, would actually be the opposite of philology.
And to wind up these precisions, we should specify that we are referring here essentially to the works of Virgilio Gianni's collection, while situating them in Bianco's entire career.
The Gianni collection, besides, offers a complete vision of the artist's work, as a result of a singular existential fact, connecting the Lombard industrialist with Remo Bianco.
I have had the opportunity to meet, in the rather lengthy period of work related to this book, Virgilio Gianni. And I have rarely seen in a collector such an intense fonciness for an artist (such an intense fondness as to be onesided), as is his towards Remo Bianco. More than being in love with the works, as is usually the case with collectors, Gianni is in love with their author. And his love is a nearly paternal feeling, spurring him to seek the best way to make Bianco known, so as to spread and promote his work; a love that even today, after so many years, leads him to earnestly wonder whether perhaps, at the time of their friendship, he had not left the artist too much by himself, had not been able to spend time with him and talk to him as he would have liked to, absorbed as he was by the many obligations of his own work, that had him travel all over Europe.
They had met at Brugherio, nearly half a century ago, in 1953. Gianni had gone there to visit de Pisis, who was spending the last days of his life at the Villa Fiorita, and there he had met Bianco, who was a friend of de Pisis. Ever since then the industrialist's admiration for the young artist, whom de Pisis had pointed out and even nearly "entrusted" to him, would grow. An admiration, our impression is, less based on the full understanding of what Remo Bianco was doing (as singular, innovative and even eccentric as it was) than on the psychological charm the artist emanated.
In few words, it was something like a blank check: a total trust, renewed day after day, even when the artist's works and undertakings might have seemed remote from their shared sensitivities, even if this sensibility was that of a devotee of art.
This was an exceptional union, that would deserve to be better known, if the typically Lombard reluctance of the only surviving protagonist did not veil that knowledge, his purpose being, as he once said in a solemn, heartfelt statement, only "to bring fame to the artist. Who deserves it."
But now, without further preliminaries, let us get on to Bianco's research.
The Early Works
The first works we know by Remo Bianco go back to the early forties. In particular a selfportrait remains: a face with stronglymarked outlines, recalling Rouault's clowns.
This is no coincidence. In the Milanese circles right after the war, interest in Rouault, as was regard for Picasso, was widespread, and led to the publication of the first Italian monograph on the artist (Rouault, Edizioni Arte e Scienza, Milan 1945). Besides it was just around that time, or a few years before, that the French master had been given important marks of recognition: including the 1937 show at the Petit Palais in Paris and the one at the MoMA of New York in 1938, the publication of the one hundred prints of Passion (Vollard, 1939) and the monograph by Venturi (New York 1940).
So Bianco took his first steps in a pathosfilled mood of expressionism. And the choice of the theme too, midway between cheer and desperation, between game and tragedy, was indicative of the artist's psychology, and of his artistic theory. Ali of Bianco's art, so tinged by a playful dimension, was a game. But a game steeped in melancholy.
During those same years, on the other hand, Bianco also saw a great deal of de Pisis. He had known the Ferrara painter since the late thirties, and for him this meant not only meeting European culture, but also, more specifically, an art in which signs were predominant.
The work of de Pisis, actually, despite its classical structure, had splintered the drawing into myriads of volatile, light segments that, actually, were not so very far from abstraction, nor from a certain Informal art, imposed on the sign. Bianco learned a great deal from his swift, tense graphism, his anxious pointillism. And spending time with de Pisis also allowed him, in the postwar years, to be apart from the monolithic, opposed groups (on one side realism, on the other abstraction) in which Italian art was divided. Instead Bianco's work, after overcoming his first youthful successes, was turned towards an expression dominated by lightness, by levity. This can be seen also in a poem he wrote when he was twentytwo, and which is dated 1944: "Two butterflies / love each other in the sunlight / reminding me / of our human love."
That same year (which to tell the truth was hardily an inspiring one for lyricism, but Bianco lived in his own world, far from historical contingencies) we can read the following reflection in a notebook: "My heart is light, like a swallow's wing. The soul is tired of being locked up and longs to fly.
So we see in the artist the aspiration towards immaterialness, absence of gravity: aspirations, which soon will be transited into signs.
Another work of that period, to mention another example of the youthful period of which but few traces remain, is the Lavatore ammalato of 1947: a figure where the plastic organization is reduced and nearly dissolved in white and whitish tones, reminiscent of certain de Pisis interiors.
The Three-Dimensional Works. The 3Ds
The first turning point in the artist's work occurred around 1948: a turning point that indicates he had reached a stylistic maturity, materialized in the 3Ds, meaning threedimensional works.
Having left behind the feeling, emotional painting of his early days, Bianco turned towards an abstraction based on the different nature of materials.
The first idea of the threedimensionals came in 1948, even though most of the 3Ds can be dated around 1950 and lasted throughout that decade.
What Bianco sought was depth obtained not by volumes, but by surfaces, through a sum of layers. So the artist placed various materials, which as of 1952 included glass, plastics, wood, layered so as to form a play of ambiguities and transparencies.
As a matter of fact these essays (we are thinking especially of the cut and layered wood surfaces) came before Fontana's Teatrini. And, on the whole, with their alteration of the background of the work, they were a prelude to all the research on the manipulation of the canvas, on the pierced, extroverted, elaborated canvases that were undertaken at the end of the fifties by the artists gathered around Azimuth.
Obviously, the meaning and value of Bianco's work are not to be sought in the rights of anteriority in a dogmatic sense. And besides, rights of anteriority are always relative: aside from dates, you would have to observe the meaning (at times utterly different) given by the various artists to certain apparently similar operations. In our case, Bianco's assumptions were far from those of Azimuth, so the comparison has a limited bearing, if any at all.
Having said this, we also ought to say that insufficient light has yet been cast on the role an artist like Bianco played on the Milanese scene, with his whimsical manysidedness, his playfulness, his intense, visionary quality. A personality such as his, his very way of understanding art, surely left a less ephemeral mark than one might think.
But let us listen to the artist himself speak about his inventions: 'The first time I collaborated with others, with other painters, with people that had nothing to do with painting, was for the 3Ds. This had begun in 1948 too. Then it grew in bits and pieces. In 1952 it developed more seriously with transparent material, sheets of glass or else plexiglass. On the other hand, the discovery of plexiglass was precisely the technical factor on which this research was based: there were 3 or 4 surfaces. I liked painting one and giving the other ones the opportunity to do other things and then blend them all, the result being an odd combination."6
The 3Ds were presented in Milan, with the artist's other works, in a oneman show at the Galleria Montenapoleone in 1952, that was accompanied by a text by Lucio Fontana.
"Remo Bianco's recent experimentsFontana wrote among other things, aiming at seeking in a play of layers new aspects of 'spatial painting,' particularly interest me by the value of certain indications. 'Dimensions' acquire 'real' values that go beyond scenographic effects.`
Thus Fontana understood Bianco's striving, his determination to overcome the picture to attain "reality": he grasped its theatrical, narrative aspects ("scenographic effects"), but its exceptional potentials as well, which even went beyond the results he had achieved.
But Jet us look at some of these 3Ds. Let us take for instance no. 5 (plate, p. 75 ). Bianco worked with irregular vertically opposed triangles, with diagonal rows, with cutout shapes. In his composition there is a reminiscence of Licini's geometry (I am thinking of works like Il Bilico), and there is a consonance with the formal research that the MAC (Movimento Arte Concreta), was performing in Milan at the time.
However Bianco's geometry was airways playful and mocking. lf in 1935 Licini had said: "We shall prove that geometry can become sentiment," Bianco, in the early fifties could paraphrase Licini's sentence and claim: "We shall prove that geometry can become irony." And actually, when you think of it, the rational forms of the 3D no. 5 (plate, p. 75) contain weirdly playful echoes and nostalgias of figurativeness: the lines seem to form figures of baseball bats, decorations of a gondola, billiard cues, starter pennants, small flower wreathes.
Or else, Jet us look at 3D no. 2 (plate, p. 47) Here too we are seemingly in terms of a rigorous abstraction. But actually those wavy forms remind us of bow ties, biscuits, gluten pasta for soup (as in certain advertisements of the times), or little butterflies. So Bianco's abstract work is full of echoes of reality: and they are playful, smiling echoes tending to desacralize the Pythagorean sacrality of geometry, and even rationality. In fact, for Bianco, geometry was an irrational, whimsical, heretic discipline.
Anyway, geometry was not the end, but the means of his pictures. Far from believing geometric language to be redeeming in itself (according to a thenwidespread ideology), Bianco was already thinking about the possibility of going beyond the dimension of the picture. Layering, transparency, inserting different materials already threatened, even if still only embryonically, the nature and the identity of the canvas. Threedimensionality therefore was a kind of prelude to his future installations, and the exit of the work from the rectangle of the frame.
As for how Bianco felt about geometry (means and not end, a linguistic instrument and not a stylistic absolute), it is no coincidence if, more or less during those very years in which he carried his threedimensional inventions further, he also approached an instinctive informal art, that would seem to be the opposite of concretism.
The Nuclears. The Spatíals
Beginning in 195052, 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 dei 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 extrapictorial 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 InformaleSpaziale from 1952, placed on a tangie 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 dei 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."1
So, a familiar dimension, and precious as well, capable of playing with the seduction of adomment. 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 colours like nitroenamel and the blending of different materials such as plastics, fused metals, fused giass.
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 1ittie 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 colours, around the midfifties, took on particularly bright tones. A far cry from that "acaderny 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 midfifties. 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.
[t is true though that the Galleria dei 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: 1 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."11 And again: 1 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 1 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 colour 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.
lf 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 immeasurable, 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 a/I over painting, he did not care for the sense of illimited, nomadic, undefined spatiality in those experiments. lf 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 1ike 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 impiacable 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.
Imprint Art. Testímonies
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: 1 am painting with a new system: I spread colour 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 modifies, at the time of the manifest of 1mprint Art." Later on Bianco himself was to claim: 1n 1956... I went back to the imprint investigation, when 1 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. 1114
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 post-dated 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 grownup 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 ís 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 conformity with his nature. Ali 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 redimensioned 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 madeleíne, 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: 1 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 196062 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 arte 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 sy11ogisms, they did not conceal a purely theoretic attitude, nor even less cerebra. They were, indeed, affective experiences, precisely of someone who was heedful of the most modest and vanquished reality, and wanted to revaluate it. 1 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: 1 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 giro, 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."11
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 "Poilockstyle" 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 count ability of the single modules, the repeatability and thus servility (although flied with different signs) of the mosaic deserve; 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 catchall 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 midfifties, 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.`I
But let us listen to how the artist himself recalled this moment: "Between '55 and '59, 1 did this experiment of the collages (and would pursue it a number of times in the future). l 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.1122
And precisely in developing the principle of small squares, Bianco, around '57 came to what was probably to remain his greatest, and undoubtediy his most famous works: the Tableaux dorés.
The Tableaux dorés
A series of gilt squares, but also silver or scariet, were arrayed on the canvas, as though expectantiy. 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 prescientific 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: 1n 1957, in Milan, after having coated with a single colour the surface of a 'collage,' I would apply pure gold leaves onto it. The painting was then painted in two colours, 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 Iyricism.
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 cloísonnés, that in fact have Orientai 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 humours of a passionate, vegetative life it would seem possible to grasp (but we may be fooling ourselves) the secret, ancestral longing, mysteriously everalive, of a millenary mineral story.
In turn Raffaele Carrieri, 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 coloured 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 Apolionio interprets the Tableaux dorés in exclusively formal terms, as mysterious timespace units: 1n the repetition of formal units, nearly residua] 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 dazziing sonorousness of gold and silver imprinted on brightiycolored 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 persona] use or rather with a single use: the painter Bianco loves his neighbour as himself, and wants only to see good in the fate of humanity. lf 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 líght 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 fullempty 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 pictorials, no research of enjoyment related to the "craft" of painting.
In that sense his attitude was certainly conceptual, or even openly antipictorial. Artisan wisdom did not appeal to him. Gold leaf, cloth, wood, rubber, plaster, paper spotted with colour, as worn and consumed as needed, were al] instruments used indifferently, ready-mades 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 reused. 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 threedimensional elements. Not to mention the 3Ds: paintings that go beyond painting.
Around the middle of the sixties, therefore, the Scultureneve 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 centres, 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, 1 think, ended up in a show window, on branches that vibrated, wrapped in that mysterious glittering.
in a complete biography in 1972, Adriano Altamirall instead situated the Scultureneve, as the Traffiture, the Sculture calde and the Appropriazíoni at the same period: the midsixties. 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, spraycan 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 possibilíty. Overlaying became
inarrestible.
The Scultureneve 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 1ive" 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 1ive 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 neoPop 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 Appropriazioní, 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 cloes 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 sepinadex (a gelatine tinat separates aniline colours 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 sadístíc 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 Ari, Bianco made fun of the conditionings and the prejudices that reduce man to an irresponsible child. To the immature man who fails 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 wino meditates on life. These stylized figurations were soon followed by the cycle of the Gioia di vivere: a return to a neoexpressionist 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 1 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.