If there wasn’t anything to cry about, there would be something to laugh about. Massimo Bartolini’s Italian Pavilion at the Biennale is not entirely alone unsuitable for representing Italian art in the world: it is perhaps the last bastion of a conception of art that brings milk to the knees, where there is none nothing to seeon which there is no nothing to writeof which there is none nothing to think or comment on. For a simple reason: that there is nothing at allif not the tautological repetition of a non-concept: that art, for Bartolini, surveyor unexpectedly lent to art (just like his predecessor, Gianmaria Tosatti, is nothing more than a theater critic who has confused art with its mere scenographic structure), it’s all in the “project”: “Where there is construction there is form and form is total presence. For this reason, hesitations are not possible. Hesitations have their place, however: the project. If the designer is entitled to the world of imagination and then that of pondering, the creator is entitled to the apparently humble and univocal world of matter. In his hand, talent and sensitivity are archetypal and do not allow lies.”
Under the guise of empty, somewhat pompous words (as often happens when it is necessary to cover the void of content and imagination), precisely, cosmic nothingness. AND there is nothing to see even to the immense, and again excessively expensive – 800 thousand euros of ministerial funds and 400 thousand from sponsorships: to achieve what, then? –, Italian Pavilion of this, in other ways rich and complexBiennale Arte 2024: nothing other than a complex of innocent tubes, as can be found in any sad, melancholy, unfinished construction site. As in those thousands, or rather tens of thousands, of open and never closed construction sites in Italy, following the shower of bonuses offered by a government incapable of doing anything other than liberally spreading security policy and money wherever it happens (but in the pockets of workers never, ça va san dire).
It is sad, sometimes, to say “we said so”: but unfortunately, sometimes, it is necessary. “In Bartolini’s work there is always a strong presence of technical language, and of specialized technicians: carpenters, electricians, surveyors, engineers”, we wrote in our article of 31 October last, when Bartolini’s name was announced as the sole representative of the ‘Italy for the 2024 Biennale. “The attention not only to the philosophy of building, but to the practice of construction itself (technique, materials, etc.), has in fact remained fundamental in his work”. And we continued by saying that his work is “a hymn, rather than to the philosophy and magic underlying living, to its structural and technical system. If so much gives us so much, al Italian Pavilionafter the immense abandoned factory of Tosatti, let’s prepare for a immense construction site, ‘icon of building’. Let’s hope, at the very least, that perception, amazement and magic will for once prevail over mere technique.”
We must confess that we had deluded ourselves about this (vain) hope, and perhaps, for once, we really hoped we could delude ourselves. We don’t say paintings, we don’t say sculptures, which Bartolini, poor him, knows how to make neither one nor the other, despite being an artist, but at least: at least, I don’t know, a glimmer of that extraordinary liveliness, of that wealth of materials, of imagination, of contents, of ideas, of planning (this time, yes, really), which can be breathed here and there among the other pavilions and in the international exhibition of this edition of the Biennale. And instead.
Massimiliano Tonellidominus of “Artribune” (who as a journalist, it must be said, we respect and to whom we recognize the merit of having been able to modernize art journalism in Italy, removing it, in unsuspecting times, from the shackles of a diarchy between national-popular journalism style Mondadori art and the hyper-partisan and friendly one like Politi, inventor of Flash Art, who has been in good and bad weather for about thirty years in national art and beyond); Tonelli, therefore, who has never, I won’t say, written anything memorable about art criticism, but, as far as we know, absolutely nothing, yesterday praised this year’s Italian Pavilion in advance of everyone else, defining it “a seal on his career in the years of his full artistic maturity” by Bartolini.
We don’t doubt that it’s a seal. But of what? If it is of maturity, perhaps someone – either him or us – has the wrong discipline: from surveyor, maybe yes. A beautiful “Italian garden”, but with innocent pipes, can be an apt metaphor for the sad and melancholy times in which we live today; but as for art, poetry, imagination, in here we see little or nothing. It’s just a labyrinth: a ugly labyrinth of innocent tubes.
Is this therefore what represents the famous creativity, the imaginative and imaginative capacity of Italian artists in the world? Bad tempora currunt. But, if we don’t want to disappear completely, perhaps it is better to change course, and quickly.
Tags: Bartolini mature artist house bonus Art imagination poetry
