It often happens, with conceptual art, that one wonders where the concepts are. This is not the case Sergio Lombardo. In fact, it is enough to listen to him while he deciphers for us the cornerstones of his method to understand that his aesthetic-scientific intuitions are carried out with the most absolute rigor speculative: no imprecision, the use of an impeccable lexicon where the logic of the arguments draws clear figures and procedures in the mental (but also simultaneously acted upon) space of art.
No improvisations, therefore: no concession to that (rightly, and with a hint of elitism, stigmatised) “smart, confusingly arbitrary creativity, to the detriment of theoretical research and the study of less hedonistic values”, a reference to the world of vernissages ready-to-wear, of the residences, of the rampant taken by pedestrian critics, cliques of interest and unlikely collectors. The center of all his work, Lombardo specifies, is the “construction of theory eventualist”, which however revolves around a completely peculiar concept of event.
I will briefly try to explain why, taking up the salient points of two writings, The eventualist theory (1987) e Eventualism (1989), the first of which was programmatically desired by Lombardo in the panel that inaugurates the exhibition. A definition appears where it says that “any mental content or psychological experience is defined as an event intenseoriginal, spontaneous, unpredictable and unrepeatablewhich, since it cannot be known directly by external and neutral observers, must be deduced from the behavior of individuals subjected to specially prepared stimulations”.
Many have grappled with the theme of the event, but Lombardo intervenes in the debate with the maxim originality. Not only because the scope of application is artistic, but because, as can be seen, the event, in his case, is thought ex parte subjecti and not objects. That is to say, an event is not something that occurs in a neutral and impersonal way and with which, only secondarily, an ego can come into contact. Lombardo – and the rooting of his conception in the fruitful chain of post-Freudian psychological research becomes fully legible – reverses the perspective: event is what happens in and to the ‘subject’ when it is intercepted by a state of affairs (Sachverhalt) knowingly configured and implemented.
However – and that’s the point decisive of its theoretical practice – what the eventualist stimulus produces in terms of an event in those who take part in it is not immediately verifiable, since it can coincide, however “intense”, with an ‘internal’ psychic phenomenon, or with something so unpublished and singular that it cannot be categorized using existing standards. It is therefore a question of deducing it from the behavior of those who are intercepted. In other words, an event is the subjective result of something happening: what emerges in the form of a symptom in those who are subjected to a specific stimulus, programmed and provoked by an artist.
I believe that, however excessively condensed, these considerations may be sufficient to introduce the two elements which, in my opinion, characterize the exhibition – beautiful, rigorous and far-sighted – dedicated to the artist by the Municipal Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art of Arezzo (Sergio Lombardo: a programmatic differenceedited by Moira Chiavarini and Simone Zacchini).
The first is that it is not an exhibition culminating in a catalogue, but a book (the Theoretical writings by Lombardo, valuablely published by Magonza and edited by Zacchini himself) from which, precisely with linear programmatic inference, a show. The eventualist dynamic therefore presents itself no longer only within the scope of the single work, but as an integral event: the entire exhibition, designed ex book, is the place where visitors eventually come into contact with what is provoked in them by the installation of the works. Which, therefore – and this is the second point – are arranged and grouped precisely to act coordinated in this sense. The connections – visual, possible – are expertly articulated in the museum space.
We start from the Monochromes which establish the kenotic starting point of the “expressive abstinence” advocated by Lombardo: the semantically overly charged gesture of art must be abolished to leave room for the activity of psychic-sensorial completion of those who receive it: formula structural and not at all emotional to include the observer in the act of constituting the work, as happens with the famous Tachistoscopic mirror with stimulation to dream: ironic induced oneirism.
We then proceed further, crossing the calibrated correspondence between the ‘tessellation’ of a modular Superquadro designed in ’65 and arranged on the floor (which anticipates the subsequent Tiling with random tiles) and the nonsense shape that almost mirror-like surmounts it. This stochastic realization on a random algorithm, like the more recent Quilting, is conceived by Lombardo in automatic black and white purity so that it leaves space and ’causes’ the maximum number of possible (inter)(re)actions. But already in this transitory intermediate step everything plays with – and therefore refers to – what I think is Quilting cinematically more successful, perhaps because it is framed in the spatial cut that conveys sight and experience into the next environment. Where other works appear, this time with lively chromaticisms under construction, but still analytically conceived with the four fundamental methods perfected by the artist: “the SAT method (which indicates a saturation of the plane), the TAN method (whose name derives from the Chinese game of Tangram), the RAN method (which stands for ‘rain of points’) and the LAB method (or ‘stochastic labyrinth’)” (so the impeccable Zacchini).
We are certainly the antipodes of the classical conception according to which beautiful is “that which is universally pleasing without concept”. Lombardo’s is a sort of applied psychological, numerological, dianoetic Platonism. From algorithms to the mental states induced by them. Perhaps someone will be able to stay reluctantbut don’t deny its greatness.
Photo credits: Alessandro Sarteanesi
