This past week was mainly dedicated to art, design, technology and science, so it seems only apt to rediscover today an Italian artist forgotten by many, Remo Bianco.
In 1964 Bianco launched indeed a Manifesto for Chemical Art, in which he called for a mutual understanding and collaboration between people from different fields and disciplines.
Born in 1922 in Milan, Remo Bianchi ("Bianco" in the art world) attended in the late '30s evening classes in drawing at the Brera Academy where he was noticed and tutored by painter Filippo De Pisis. Interned in Tunisi during World War II after the destroyer he was on board was hit, he returned to Milan in 1944.
Influenced by French post-Impressionism, Rouault and Cézanne, and by Picasso as well, between the '40s and the '50s he started painting figurative works in oil, though he soon moved onto very different inspirations.
Fascinated by Lucio Fontana's "Spatialist" research and by the "Nuclear" movement of Enrico Baj and Sergio Dangelo, he began focusing on three-dimensional forms and plaster casts of humble objets trouvés, coming up with a series entitled "Impronte" (Imprints) in which tracks left by tires, asphalt cracks and objects became symbols of a modern archaeology and expressed his need to fix forever the moments of one's life, and his impossibility at accepting a permanent loss of these glimpses of life.
In the '50s Bianco started incorporating in his works stones and glass fragments developing also a series of abstract works on assembled plastic or glass sheets. In the meantime, he received the first acknowledgments and awards, taking part in 1952 for the first time to an exhibition at the Naviglio Gallery in Milan and later on at the Cavallino Gallery in Venice.
During his first trip to the United States in 1955 he got to know works by Alberto Burri and learned about Conrad Marca-Relli, Donati and Kline's works as well as the action painting of Jackson Pollock, exhibiting his three-dimensional works at the Village Art Center of New York.
Back in Italy in 1956 he wrote the "Relief Art Manifesto" compiling also the "Sacchettini - Testimonianze" (Small Plastic Bags - Testimonies) series in which he packaged small everyday and worthless objects including toys, playing cards, paint tubes and shells into plastic bags fixed onto a wooden panel and hung on walls like traditional pictures.
At the end of the '50s Bianco concentrated on his first experiments with Sephadex, a chemical gel capable of dividing substances according to their specific weights, studying its physical and aesthetics properties.
His will to experiment with new forms of art, materials and objects flourished in the '60s: in 1962 he travelled to Iran and created his "Opere Condizionanti" (Conditioning works), "lamps producing deafening sounds and blinding lights"; two years later he published the first "Manifesto dell'Arte Chimica" (Manifesto of Chemical Art) followed by the "Manifesto della Sovrastruttura" (Superstructure Manifesto), launching his cycle of "Appropriations" (Appropriazioni), that consisted in interventions on objects such as the application of artificial snow upon a still life.
A new decade meant a new passion for a different form of art and, between 1969 and 1970, Bianco moved onto the "Elementary Art" cycle, based on primary school pictures, childhood drawings and alphabet books. In the years that followed he worked on performances that included interaction with the public and, in the '80s, he took part in many exhibitions. Bianco passed away in Milan in 1988.
There are quite a few interesting pieces, cycles and series Bianco made that are worth rediscovering. The early three-dimensional works he started creating from 1948 are intriguing as the artist employed in them glass or plastic sheets, wood, metal and plexiglass panels. Bianco combined cut out shapes and drawings in them creating fascinating effects on different planes and stratified surfaces.
His collages and assemblages are also very modern, and include a wide range of mediums (canvas, paper, fabric...) while the series of his Tableaux Dorés is a development of his collage series and consisted in applying golden sheets on a collage surface.
Bianco's Chemical Art was a research on the relationship between art and science and between art and technology and included not only his experiments with Sephadex but also his "talking paintings", made in the first half of the 1970s.
These works consisted in black or white canvases or self-portraits with a recording device installed on the back that reproduced different stories when the visitors approached. This medium allowed the artist to go beyond the traditional dimension of the painting in a very different way compared to the spatial researches that had characterised art since then, interacting with his audience (in one case Bianco's voice came out of the canvas and asked visitors to be less indifferent).
"We usually see a painting with our eyes but we can also see it with our ears, an equally brief and fast way of interaction but with the advantage of greater creative possibilities", Bianco wrote in the presentation of these works in an exhibition in 1976.
It would be fascinating to maybe see a new exhibition about Bianco and rediscover his passion for experimenting with various mediums and materials, but also to ask ourselves the same questions he wondered and try to provide new answers.
Quite a few of the issues he tackled in his life and career, including the need to anchor our memories to objects (think about our dissolving reality and collective digital amnesia) or his studies about art, science and technologies, are still very modern.
When he developed his "Elementary Art", he was for example trying to analyse the obstacles imposed by society on people's creativity, and pondered on a key question that is nowadays torturing many creative minds. "In art too, as well as in everything else, there is a big restriction on freedom," he wrote in 1980, "I have been working on this matter for ten years. How can you survive respecting your own creativity?" Looks like the time is ripe for a retrospective on Remo Bianco.
All images in this post are taken from the site of the Fondazione Remo Bianco.
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