Unrealised Paintings
The desire to create a small virtual exhibition of unrealised pictorial projects stems from the need to analyse the pictorial medium within the contemporary artistic production. Five years ago we started the MoRE Museum project and in this time we have collected about one hundred unfinished works, all designed to be performances, installations, videos and sculptures. After years of work, my research as a curator at MoRE wants to address the art of painting, with the aim of understanding (through various acquisitions structured into several outputs) how the artistic discipline par excellence is "designed" - if I am allowed to use this term - and how, in some cases, it fails to become a reality.
The common thread of this particular virtual exhibition is therefore a series of questions: how and when does an unrealised pictorial project occur? What are the design phases of the contemporary artist? When can he not complete his canvas or his project related to the pictorial practice? How to archive a pictorial design in a digital way?
Art history is rich in examples of pictorial planning. Archives and cabinets of prints and drawings collect and tell a universe of preparatory studies, sketches and drafts for the pictorial elaboration. It is therefore necessary to analyse the value of this material and understand the motivations that lead an artist to leave the project unfinished.
Why the unrealised painting? Often the motivations that lead a project to not be finished are easily understood: think of large environmental installations that require enormous economic and logistical efforts, or dangerous performances or simply works that are not feasible because of their utopian nature.
The research of the exhibition is therefore designed to be able to find an answer to this kind of questions thanks to the donations of the artists invited for this purpose: Riccardo Baruzzi, Thomas Braida, Andrea Kvas and Eugenia Vanni, all artists working on a defined artistic medium declined in different angles and drifts. These artists are part of that line of pictorial research that seems to have found fertile ground in the last ten years, to the detriment of conceptual art that has dominated between the nineties and the 2000s.
It is therefore impossible at this juncture to take on the critical debate related to the pictorial practice, of which it is worth mentioning only some positions. In a 1966 essay, Renato Barilli talks about painting as an action that plunders the "imaginary museum"[1] - referring to our memory and the history of art itself - and this statement seem to work for some of the invited artists.
But what does painting steal from this "imaginary museum" today? Is it possible to update these words?[2] When it comes to painting, is it really necessary to anchor oneself to a previous stylistic model? Regarding the reasons for not carrying out the works that the artists have donated, these are mainly related to time. The lack of time in implementing the pictorial practice is Thomas Braida’s reason of non-realisation. The same can be said for Baruzzi. In our taxonomy, these may perhaps be categorised as "ideological reasons". Eugenia Vanni states that she is waiting for the right moment to approach the work of Paolini, and in this perspective of analysis the reason for the unrealised could also be "ideological". For Andrea Kvas, the projects (even if he defines them as potential works) serve as a starting point, and therefore the material donated by the artist could be included in the category of "theoretical exercise".
This short text certainly does not want to define contemporary canons related to painting, at most it wants to give back a primary role to the brush and pictorial design, starting from the words of Renato Barilli on the "imaginary museum" because MoRE, the platform where these works are stored, is after all a digital museum. Virtual, not imaginary but certainly not tangible.
[1] Renato Barilli, Aspetti del “ritorno alle cose stesse”, RA 1: First national painting exhibition, Amalfi, Stamperia napoletana, Naples, 1966, pag. 1.
[2] Obviously this statement by Renato Barilli should be contextualised in the debate of the seventies and the reflection on the pictorial art of the fifties and sixties, in which he states: "Everyday life can not be redeemed only by locking it inside magically suspended pieces; or by breaking it down and ruffling its lines, putting it back together according to an absurd "assembly". There is also the possibility of redeeming it by adapting its modest demands of a precious, sophisticated, aristocratic ritual. All this perhaps explains how in certain current experiences, suddenly and unexpectedly, it’s possible to find elements of cultic extraction, versed reminiscences. The following examples are part of this context: Bosch by Tadini, Goya by De Vita, "suspended" and reduced to the fixedness of the lexical word, the magical and alchemical Renaissance of Biasi, the mythology of Vacchi, the Gothicism of Fieschi, Pasotto’s “Beardsleyean" linearism. In particular, it’s possible to observe that Liberty style and Art Nouveau are among the most often looted areas of the imaginary museum”. In a sense, Barilli seems to anticipate the appropriation and postmodern climate that will take hold especially in the mid-seventies and at the end of the eighties. Barilli also seems to reiterate this reference to the imaginary museum, or rather the impossibility of finding new forms, in the text written for the event La ripetizione differente at the Studio Marconi in Milan in 1974.