The Brera Academy of Fine Arts and the Braidense National Library celebrate the Italian painter, sculptor and essayist through the anecdotes of his life, his work and his artistic majesty
If the anecdote can be the measure of something, this Milanese exhibition that the Braidense National Library and the Brera Academy of Fine Arts – working together for the first time: we note – put together on “Baj. Books in freedom” hides many under the display cases. They are children of the memories of Roberta Cerini, wife and artistic companion of Enrico Baj (1924-2003), passionate custodian of the Archive in the villa of Vergiate, in the Varese area (“a large house which over time was emptied of people and filled of things”), of which he granted twenty artist books out of the fifty-six created by Baj from the 1950s until his death, which are joined in the exhibition by five from the Braidense collection and an example from the Academy’s library. Anecdotes, we were saying.
First display case, first story: to create “De Rerum Natura” (thirty-six etchings, with a text by Roberto Sanesi, around fifty copies for Schwarz publisher), Baj thinks of doing it himself. But he takes too much acid and becomes intoxicated. It is 1958, the partnership with Giorgio Upiglio, the printer with whom he will create some of his most valuable works, has not yet blossomed. That acid that burns everything, in Baj – incendiary in founding movements, such as Nuclear Art, good at participating in others, such as Surrealism, and at writing in newspapers, at cultivating deep friendships between Milan and Paris, at animating clubs and clubs , moving between anarchy and pataphysics, between political commitment and caustic detachment – someone like that, in short, really likes the “acid effect” on the page, with those dirty things. A workaholic of obsessive expertise, Enrico Baj has never considered graphics a minor art: he dedicates his time and talents to artists’ books and this exhibition, curated by Angela Sanna, Michele Tavola and Marina Zetti and open until 6 July, bears witness to this. To create “Les Incongruités Monumentales” (another display case, another anecdote) he spends his afternoons experimenting in the Parisian Michel Cassé’s print shop, because the balance between text and image, creativity and technique, is delicate. Upiglio himself reiterated that Baj liked to create “matrices on the spot”. One hundred years after his birth, Milan finally remembers the father of Dames and Generals, Meccans and Body Snatchers who changed the visual alphabet of twentieth-century Italian art: in October there will be a large exhibition at Palazzo Reale, curated by Roberta Cerini and Chiara Gatti, in the meantime, it would be nice to have news of “The funeral of the anarchist Pinelli” (initially thought for Palazzo Citterio, will it then go to the Museo del Novecento?).
At the Braidense, in the Sala Maria Teresa, Baj’s elective affinities are celebrated through these artist’s books: display case after display case, we discover book-sculptures in the most varied materials (aluminium, plastic, tapestries, trimmings, caps) that tell us about the relationships by Baj with Raymond Queneau (what a gem their “Meccano”), with Jorge Luis Borges (“Manual of fantastic zoology”: another gem). “His works follow this polytropic predisposition to grasp the most grotesque and ironic aspects of the society that was contemporary with him”, comments Angelo Crespi, general director of the Pinacoteca di Brera and of the Braidense, and in fact in the ten sections in which the the exhibition moves, in complete freedom, from bestiaries to “nuclear epigrams”, from nudes with lace to metal robots, from apocalyptic drawings to a tie-sculpture (The tie never goes as a medal, with Lego brick covers, silk-screen prints and a colorful multiple is among the most enjoyable pieces). The journey ends with some book-sculptures, including the 1968-era The biggest Artbook in the world, Do it by your self, a play on words and irreverence with Edoardo Sanguinetti, ten tables and a dozen modular wooden cubes. We should be moved – after all, it is one of his last works – in front of On Water, made with Giovanni Raboni, but the irony of The Plumber Woman, with the funnel instead of the nose, prevents us from doing so. We do it in front of Baj Merini: he takes her portrait, she gives him a poem dedicated to his son Angelo (“you who are the happy scion / of a dynasty of the sublime”), the volume is embellished with aluminum decorations. An artist’s book in which everyday life becomes poetry: it was born – last anecdote – in one of the many lunches in Vergiate in which Alda Merini, a more or less regular guest, had the typewriter brought to the table to fix her thoughts in verses. It must have been nice to be Baj, and to have been friends with him too.
