Gianni ATZENI

COSMOGRAFIE

Mutazione geologica.
Io che cedo sotto il suo peso.
Subsidenza,
e il mio lento sprofondare.
Ma in verità non cedo
sotto un peso, poiché gli sono sopra,
scendo, sto sopra e scendo, Toboga,
e il suo peso è un tirare
dal basso, un prendere forma attirandomi
giù, sabbia da sabbia,
perch’io riappaia capovolto come
filiale di me stesso
al capo opposto
di questa clessidra genetica.
V. Mangrelli

Le opere di Gianni Atzeni dal titolo “Cosmografie” realizzate tra il 1990 e il 2002 (a Dicembre oggetto dell’esposizione curata dallo stesso artista) testimoniano, attraverso la continua sperimentazione della tecnica incisoria, non solo lo sforzo che lo tiene impegnato in una ricerca paziente tesa a toccare nuovi esiti, ma marcano anche il percorso di un artista che si relaziona con la dimensione spirituale che esiste indipendentemente dai cambiamenti apportati da Internet, dalle realtà virtuali, dalla cibernetica…
Con la tecnica dell’acquaforte e della collografia la sua arte dà memoria a simboli aperti alle suggestioni dell’informale a carattere segnico, immagini di conoscenze primordiali, alfabeti antichi dal tratto veloce ed essenziale che, come in “Contemplazione mistyca”, danno origine a grafie semplici sospese in uno sfondo giallo ocra acceso da guizzi d’azzurro.
Negli “Stati”, complessivamente dieci stampe di piccolo formato, senza multipli, è anche il marcato mescolarsi di luce ed ombra che informa l’immaginazione, per esplorarne gli angoli remoti con sprazzi di luce che sono in alcune stampe piccoli bagliori, si fanno scie luminose in altre, per esplodere come una meteora luminosa al centro, nell’ultima, come in un’aurora polare. Nei sei “Stati”, tre disposti a mo’ di leggio in un lato della sala in attesa del direttore d’orchestra che consenta loro di rompere il silenzio, piccolissimi nella dimensione, la materia è rigidamente contenuta al centro dello spazio bianco che marca ancor più la linearità convulsa della composizione racchiusa come nelle miniature di certi manoscritti del ‘300. Ma, alla fissità, all’ordine, all’affabulazione pacata ed esaustiva nella composizione di quelle, Atzeni contrappone il movimento del tratto, della linea, del graffio, per dare espressione a segni cupi dai quali scaturiscono immagini che richiamano segreti della memoria, dell’immaginario magico. Memorie “dimenticate da lungo tempo, fardello sul nostro fato, sangue che scorre e gesto che si leva dalla profondità del tempo” (RILKE).
Come la musica con le note, la poesia con la parola, l’incisione di Atzeni vuole penetrare lo spirito attraverso la porta del segno e della materia.
In altre quattro grandi lastre vere e proprie installazioni che l’autore ama designare “I guardiani” l’intento di costruire figure reiterate (protagoniste mute della mostra) sembra richiamare, come in un rituale magico, sfere sacre, religiose. Nella lastra e nella carta, come nella corteccia degli aborigeni australiani, viene rappresentato in sequenza il ciclo della vita. Da quelle quattro teste dalla patina scura che richiamano la statuaria Fang o quella dei Senufo della savana sudanese -figure antropomorfe dal capo eretto con sporgenze geometrizzanti-, si allunga e si sviluppa un ventre che genera esseri che la terra (la lastra arriva a toccare il suolo) sembra sottrargli per ricominciare (quattro sonno i ventri partorienti ma potrebbero moltiplicarsi a dismisura) un ciclo vitale perpetuo di vita-morte-vita. Di vero effetto la puntinatura in rilievo il cui spazio bianco perimetra irregolarmente le figure. Cerchietti disposti a distanza regolarmente cadenzata l’uno dall’altro che richiamano le orme lasciate dai danzatori che accompagnano l’evento e suggellano in maniera rituale lo stretto legame tra arte e dimensione religiosa, tra ricerca formale dell’arte che si coniuga con una concettualizzazione di valori espressi con richiami simbolici che affondano nelle radici mitiche, che ci hanno dato origine e forgiato per essere ciò che siamo ancora con “uno spazio interiore che non potrà essere allontanato da noi perché è insito in noi” Anish Kapoor.
Recensione di Caterina SPIGA

Gianni ATZENI

COSMOGRAFIE


Nostalgia di Thélema

Le Cosmografie di Gianni Atzeni fino al 31 dicembre a Cagliari, nella “G28 Gallery”, presentate in catalogo da Antonello Zanda. L’artista sperimenta, come sua consolidata abitudine, alcune delle affascinanti tecniche della calcografia, una mai sopita passione che gli fa raccontare il suo armeggiare con lastre e inchiostri, come fossero storie appassionanti.
Nella mostra in corso nella galleria di Palazzo Marini (via Ada Negri), Atzeni propone opere di differenti misure e procedimenti. Alti e secchi, i Guardiani, sorta di severi custodi assemblati su tre fogli di carta collegati da piccoli ganci. In ferro, acciaio e zinco le matrici, scelte per differenziare arti smembrati e astratti, che soltanto sulla sommità acquistano le fattezze riconoscibili di un viso.
Studia il rapporto fra tempo e materia Gianni Atzeni, come dimostra nella serie dei piccoli lavori che, partendo dall’indefinitezza del segno, arrivano in quattro passaggi a comporre un paesaggio di tipo classico. Interessante, anche per il riferimento storico, l’utilizzo delle pagine della rivista Thélema come materia pittorica: il recupero dei fogli scampati alla distruzione di un periodico culturale dalla breve e tumultuosa vita.
Bellissima e intensa pubblicazione, Thèlema (teatro, letteratura, musica, arte) accoglieva saggi, poesie, disegni, collages, opinioni ed invettive. Voci e parole che oggi, pur martoriate dalle morsure di Gianni Atzeni, sembrano prendersi una beffarda rivincita riapparendo, impallidite e un poco cancellate, nelle sue incisioni. In una recente installazione, l’artista aveva chiuso le pagine di Thèlema in bottigliette piene d’acqua, veri messaggi da naufrago bene ordinati in ampolle da alchimista.
Gianni Atzeni costruisce personalmente i supporti delle sue opere, le piccole teche scure, le lisce cornici, i listelli di legno su cui issa lavori minuziosi, uguali all’apparenza e in realtà unici, caratterizzati da maggiore o minore levità, da un punto di colore, da un gesto più deciso, dall’affondo del bulino.
Recensione di Alessandra MENESINI

Gianni ATZENI

COSMOGRAPHIS


Testimony to the order of matter in Gianni Atzeni’s engravings

“Even the small fragment that you represent, o wretched man, maintains
its intimate relationship to the cosmos and is oriented with it, even though
it may not seem that you are aware that every life comes into being
for the whole and the fortunate condition of universal harmony.”

(Plato, Laws, Book X, 903c):

Cicero said that man is born to contemplate the cosmos. And he can do this for he is but a small part of that perfect cosmos that his thought penetrates and synthesizes. The sign of this contemplation is knowledge, the understanding that man elaborates as a testimony to his belonging and doing in the world. The special and specific doing of the artist produces worlds that confront one another within a plurality of possible worlds, among which, and from which, one abstracts the uniqueness – assumed because presupposed – of the real world, that order of given things with respect to which we measure the reliability of each of our interpretations. The deeds of artists, their “knowledge”, as “poetic doing”, is based on an intentionality that cannot change the cosmic order, but only come to terms with it, with due respect and observation.
Gianni Atzeni’s works represent a pause for reflection in this play of relationships and occupies a specific poietic position. His “cosmographs” bring together and synthesize an attitude, which is part of the man and the artist, towards reality. Their material actuality underscores the fact that the artist’s work condensates both in the work objectively created and in the energy expended in its creation. This is the sense of the “pause for reflection”: the world it re-presents is specular in that the order of the reality observed coincides with, and at the same time shows its profound difference from, the point of observation. The term “cosmograph” is thus the concept that best contains the sense of doing and the artistic statement.
The world captured in the work, its consolidated and condensed order, is at one and the same time the very form of observing, the sign of the same effective vision, of the specific expression concentrated in Atzeni’s hand. The duplicity which arranges dialectically (and is thus an accomplice) the molecular resistance of matter to the artist’s labour becomes manifest in the specular reproduction of the print which detaches itself from its matrix as from its cosmic being. The print emerges from its cosmographic intimacy and reveals itself as a kosmos that abstracts itself from the non-actuality of the many-sided and the unexpressed, the implicit, to the actuality of the expressed, the explicit. In a word, that relationship of man to being is determined in the emerging of the image which is not a brute copy but the sign of a truth which up to then was only apparent. The artist’s poietic doing coagulates in the sign of a many-sidedness that becomes another world, another order of things. This “other”, which is the concrete manifestation of otherness, reveals like a warning light the double movement of aesthetic contemplation which brings together the values of nearness and farness in a cosmographic sign.
The image speaks of this two-fold value, and in this we find its narrative, but also meta-narrative, strength. The question comes to mind: why does the act of contemplation have a special relationship with this artistic way of doing? Because our western world has exalted the role of the image; it has made our vision, seeing, our most important faculty. Unlike other civilizations (Chinese, Hebrew and Arab for example) ours has developed in a contemplative direction favouring the horizon of the image, and when it interprets the world we speak of specific “world visions”. If we go back to the origins of our thought we recognize (precisely) that when Plato speaks of the idea also in a philosophical sense, of eidos, that eidos is what we see, and when we speak of theory we must not forget that the root of the term is orao, which means to see. Our language, not only philosophical, is dominated by terms that refer to vision.
In his doing, the artist is aware of this potential dimension of the image; it is bound up with this as a part of its very nature. The cosmographs are in reality images of a cosmos that is given in the identity of the image. When we use the term kòsmos we mean the world inasmuch as it is order, that is, something that as such is neither the creation of a god nor of man but is, in itself, perennial, underlying. The cosmographs show the underlying fact - the kosmos - as if it were a sign of the artist’s doing. In his many years of activity, Atzeni’s works have always shown, at the purely emotional level, in the immediacy of the first glance, the density of his work, the creative commitment that measures itself against matter arranged in its order. The cosmographic work is a contemplative action projected towards such matter to open it up, to make it speak, to allow us to understand its language.
The cosmographs – but the same can be said for Atzeni’s previous works – show in what way it is possible, through engraving, to find a sign, a kosmos, an archetypical order mediated by the language of the gesture that engraves, that bites into matter, scratches it to reveal the living flesh within, the internal logos that speaks through the signs that betray the aperture. It is a way of thinking whose privileged instrument is the sign torn out of matter. Every curve, every groove, every bite of the artist’s gaze rises up to become the horizon of the gesture originating it and describes a movement of vision that defeats and imposes itself on the surface. The signs generated do not arrange themselves, they do not become a system; but if anything they open up a system, an order, a kosmos, to language In this sense, multiplicity breaks out onto the surface and condenses into cosmographic actuality. That aperture is indeed an inflicted aperture: with the act of inflicting, the gesture opens the mouth of matter and prepares it for the vision that listens for the light that brings out the sound of its internal harmony, the logos, specifically, the kosmos.
The artist’s creative position, when he/she is about to do, is suspended between an order of matter that is still abstract and the still abstract matter of the cosmos. This is a position that can be assumed only by one who prepares him/herself poetically to face the world. It is not by chance that Freud said that poets know a number of things between heaven and earth that our knowledge does not even suspect. Atzeni’s actualizing sign appears to be born of an implicit and immediate knowledge, designed on the curvature of the gesture of the hand that models itself as if by metamorphosis into his instrument (whether burin or drill), but with his cosmographic configuration he exposes himself to the presumed mediacy of the kosmos in progress. The consistency of the artist’s doing is equivalent to the consistency of the aperture inflicted on matter.
In any case, it must be kept in mind that in the work of art important roles are played by the different constellations – systolically converging and diverging – active in the emerging of the image. There is the poet and the artist with his/her psychic, physical and metaphysical beings on the one hand; on the other we find matter, with its plastic ductility and abstract inactuality. The apertures produced by the incisions do not lose their communicative nature when they tell their tale in inverted order in the print. The communicative moment of the work is pregnant with contemporaneousness, in the sense that Jung also underscored when he said that art is similar to nature: it simply is, and signifies nothing. The contemporaneousness contained within the physical space of the work is created by the coincidence of the artistic process with the still-pulsating vitality of the finished work. The work of the artist survives the temporal dispersion of the gesture. In Gianni Atzeni’s work the temporality of the medium is returned to its elements. It is in the present of the work that the different elements of temporality come into play, the incommensurable trickles which find a synthesis in the actuality of the work, which is different from the hic et nunc of its moments. In the motionlessness of the work, in this freeze frame, the aesthetic ghosts of the processes that make it this work and not another, move. If we tried to see an instant in the life of the kosmos, we could never say that that instant that we succeeded in stopping is the same instant as that of the elements that define it. We see a faraway star shine, but the here and now of our seeing, of sight, is not the here and now of the star, whose present we know nothing about.
The actuality of the work thus consists of its non-actuality: it consists, that is, it moves in the space of precariousness. This vitality of the temporal moment is revealed by the etching technique, the creative event triggered by the corrosive action of acid on the plate. Time is the decisive variable that determines the final form of the matrix. The penetrating action of the acid is proportional to the time of exposure to its bite: time penetrates into the structure of the metal and acts in obedience to a molecular logic, cutting through the static order of matter which is mute because it is compact, without sign because it is not actual. The action of the artist sets off and guides the chemical dynamics without dominating the microcosm: the order it reveals is that of matter transposed into an image that speaks of its order. Gianni Atzeni’s “guardians” triumph over a mythical statute by withdrawing from myth: they become narrations because they abandon the narrative of their elementary order; they become macrocosms, thus revealing the tension of the microcosms. Within Atzeni’s system of cosmographs the guardians express the aesthetic transcendence of the hand’s movement, the passage from the formless (informal) time of matter to the temporal subjectivity (or form) of observation, of looking.
The time of matter, of its life, is within the cosmic rhythm that the work of creation reveals. In this action of the engraver we have the manifestation of “thinking cosmologically” which, however, does not mean a reduction to the linear movement of history. The time that the artist narrates in the phenomenology of his work is thought and reconsideration of the self in its doing. This reconsideration is not merely a remembering of the past, but a seeing of what techne could not reveal. To thaw out is not to create a truth, but to prepare to be such, to listen to its word, first mute in that it is unheard. In the time lived in Gianni Atzeni’s cosmographic works what is told is the event of his creative commitment, his elaborative capacity measured against the apparent compactness of matter. This so innervated temporality in the structure of the reality of doing confers an experimental dimension upon the artistic gesture: the unveiling leads the eye towards the truth of the work. The prints and copperplate engravings – for which it can be said that the doing strides across the stage of the sign – present minimum differences, and in them the truly temporal nature of the artistic process is defined. It is as though the cosmic background showed an order that does not undergo development. Its becoming is the manifestation of being as what is most intimate: it is kosmos. The copperplate image that Gianni Atzeni subtracts from matter is the image of its time, that is, the internal order that we call kosmos. Copperplate engraving in particular is a discipline characterized by a strong expressive charge that does not place it on the same plane as the canonical arts such as painting and sculpture. Gianni Atzeni’s artistic doing has a clear experimental connotation, and it is for this that his research is oriented essentially towards the exploration of the not easy pathways of technique to arrive at new expressive solutions.
There is a deep line of intimacy that binds the image to matter, time to the kosmos. In a certain sense we can say that the engraver approaches the truth while maintaining his distance. The thought of difference draws to us the far in that it is far away, and it is the poet’s calling to grasp what is near at hand in its remaining far away. When Proust said, “I see things clearly in my mind as far as the horizon. But I persist in describing only things that are beyond the horizon”, he was doing no more than repeating the famous aphorism by Heraclides of Pontus that nature loves to conceal itself. Art captures the truth of this: it removes the hiding without removing the form of hiding. Gianni Atzeni’s visual thought is obviously connected with the poetics of the informal. The informal removes the structuring form of the creative act, but does not remove its internal form, the kosmos. The informal restores the original force of matter that form tends to tame. Historically, the informal includes a series of artistic experiments performed for the most part in the 1940s and 1950s which were inspired by a phenomenological relationship with the sign, no longer in terms of the constitution of a world, but as an aperture onto the world, of which it shows the flesh, the intimate order. The informal has been characterized by its irrationalistic interpretation of the artist’s work, but the term irrationalistic certainly does not mean an absence of reason, a cultural impregnability of doing, even though the (abstract) and Dadaistic impressionistic frames evoke procedures that do away with culture. Here we are not dealing with absence, but refusal, of reason (intended on the logical and linguistic plane): the poetics of the informal takes its (otherwise) formal momentum from the (temporal and spatial) coincidence of the creative act with the artistic deed. Thus the traditional means of expression are deprived of their traditional meaning: matter is no longer the means through which the artist speaks, but the artist’s task is to be the means through which matter speaks.
As an artistic deed the fact is conceptual, but the concept bares itself in front of the artistic deed: the doing: the materialization of the kosmos is indeed an unveiling. The cosmographs tend precisely to remove the veil: they are signs because they keep to the theme of veiling. The scratch, the sign is at one and the same time aperture and veil because in any case, as an artistic materialization it is situated in a time that is its own time. Artistic doing indeed never exceeds its limit: it does not impose order, but opens itself to the order contained in matter. The sign is not the breaking of order, but it is surely the dramaturgy of the artistic act because it tells of the tension generated between the world and the artist. Time responds by preparing itself for the aperture that the sign impresses in its becoming. Atzeni moves within this world that belongs to him in that the graphic gesture, the curvature of the engraving, the etching and the painting, belongs to him. His artistic work, not only of a graphic nature, tries to express an ethics of our time: he observes it and through his signs he questions it. His doing is an attempt to overcome the obstacles of daily existence and to condensate into an eternal order the kosmos he finds in the matter he touches. Thus the corporealness and the subversive force of the engraved sign, the painstaking care with which the matrix is inked and printed, bear witness to an aesthetic project centred around graphic language. The cosmographs represent a moment in an itinerary pregnant with going-beyond as well as marking an aesthetic horizon that models and inspires the aesthetic awareness of an artist whose thought is contained in the metaphysical organ that is doing.
Presentazione di Antonello ZANDA