Mario Schifano

Mario Schifano: A predatory rampage through the things of the world

Alberto Salvadori

'I would like to take you to a street near Piazza del Popolo to see the pedestrian crossing. That's where I thought of making the monochrome paintings. Everything began for me at that moment.'[1]

The critics and the public follow the work and the artist for a while, then the critics disappear and it is the artist and his followers who remain and do not abandon the work, then only the work remains and proceeds forwards, although other critics and other persons gradually begin to follow it again, on its new course. The circle continues and the work continues its journey.

The journey and the work of Mario Schifano were intense and never left alone in the 1960s and 1970s when art developed and turned to the object, to reality. A new awareness emerged in relation to the city, to human space, to life, to the passions.

A great work, like a great book, a great film, or a great photograph, always and only speaks of nothing, but inside there is everything.

Everything acted on him, on his way of seeing and thinking: films, street signs, advertisements became instruments and linguistic media for the artists, though in his case without becoming the end.

He understood immediately, autonomously, better than the others and was different for this, first from US phenomena like Pop Art and New Dada, and later from anyone else throughout his entire career.

An essential and key element in his life and existence is the photograph, or rather the photographic field, extending to cinema, with a personal slant, in many cases earlier anticipating what would happen afterwards in the elaboration of the image.

That is how the Mario Schifano phenomenon began: everyday, real life entered and became the protagonist of his work. He did not forget lived experience, but exalted it and made it the principal actor of his artistic being. The title of this exhibition expresses the sense of becoming in his work by capturing static or moving images. In the last resort, the nickname given to him by Parise, The Puma, aptly defined one of the great qualities of this extraordinary artist: his feline agility in seizing the moment of life like a wild beast.

His fellow traveller from the first was the camera: initially a 6x6 and a 35 mm, later a Polaroid as well. The screen view understood as a structural and conceptual element became essential in the painting of Mario Schifano and the cinema also became important as another paradigm.

Schifano's three journeys to the USA took place in the 1960s; upon arriving in New York in 1963, he was struck by the black hoardings for the death of John F. Kennedy and photographed them; he photographed the city with perspectives of every kind, with cuts and frames that reflect an unstoppable visual voracity. Walking through the street, travelling, seeing, getting to know, drove him towards a new sensibility that led from the painting-window to the painting-screen.

The monochromes are created with large fields of uniform colour, condensed and broken up by an enamel coating that runs over the border of the screen. The photographic image becomes a visual surface, the images of the street, of life, could be projected and captured on these surfaces.

Maurizio Fagiolo dell'Arco, one of the most acute interpreters of Schifano's work, wrote: 'Schifano's weapon is the gaze, an eye-lens, a mental camera. He does not see something but sees it framed from a certain angle, in other words, he observes the world-of-life from behind a screen, which is the lens but ends up by conferring an 'abstract' imprint on the last fragments of the world'.[2]

In time the photographic images become visionary aggregates, witnesses to unrepeatable moments that in time have become mythical, montages and superimpositions of subjects and sensations. They betray a 'drive to rush into things', 'his predatory rampage through the things of the world', 'the exceptional quality of instinctively aiming at the right targets'.[3]

The period from 1960 to 1962 was tied to the monochrome frame used like the cinematographic screen or taking the form of a 6x6 or a slide. The monochrome remained a recurrent theme down to the end of the 1970s.

The images in the work of Mario Schifano no longer function in the way we are used to interpreting them; we are obliged to reconsider them as the relations of photography as a way of fixating a memory and a truth vanish. What is taken for granted in pictorial and photographic terms evaporates with Schifano, as he confronts us with a new way of approaching reality and creativity, which in his case becomes manipulation through painting. The paper used for the monochromes was soaked in Vinavil glue and affixed to the canvas in the early 1960s; the paper remained his preferred medium afterwards in the 1970s, but accompanied by collage, by the presence of rough surfaces applied like newspapers. The enamel ran, settling in a less controllable way, experiencing a gestuality of its own that was carefully orchestrated by the artist. In both cases he had created a new surface, a new context in which the images taken from life were deposited. The work of the 1960s led him to analyse the functions, uses, social roles, and politico-cultural contexts that he printed in real time on the canvases and on photographic and cinematographic film. In the following decade all of that resurfaced as a generative element giving rise to the question: which are the new creative fields? It was a philosophical exercise connected with the experience of life, a call to analyse real and widespread forms of behaviour as opposed to elitist or specialist ones. In navigating - a word that brings the vision of the works of Mario Schifano up to date - his planet seems to be completely charted and visible, but his strength lies in the unforeseeable, in running into exposed zones, a kind of terrains vagues that seem beyond the reach of painting, photography or film. These empty spaces form a sort of personal iconography to which only he is admitted, becoming the irresistible, attractive, disturbing feature of nis work and personality. With his work - which is also his biography - Schifano appears to us as a companion with emphatic, authoritarian connotations, before suddenly revealing to us, on the contrary, an open, voluntary system that forms part of his art. The radical shift effected by Schifano puts the images at the disposal of all and above all of every use: democratic, conquering spaces and forms of behaviour, resisting and opposing abuses and impositions.

This is the meaning of the aesthetic change.

He opposes use to ontology, accessibility to authority, adoption to appropriation, the attribution of meaning to creativity. Everything is available and can be shared and chosen. From the archive in the making - formed by the heaps of photographs and kilometres of film - as availability of materials claiming totality he moved on to pictorial collation as an exercise in distinguishing, ransacking, selecting, recycling. Memory as record and exercise to pass to other forms of selective, living memory. So it is natural that languages like advertising and the media are inserted, but also the history of art and Malevich's square as the incarnation of life and not just a sublimated subject. Here the affinity is not only formal but conceptual and existential. The square and the dedications to the Russian Suprematist lead us to the title of a text published in 1921 that contains a fundamental concept in the artistic life of Mario Schifano: inaction as effective truth of humanity.[4]

At the same time, the landscape gradually reappears, as well as nature and the natural coming into being of things connected with it: the traffic signs and architectural and compositional features of an imaginary in evolution at the time. Nature contains human naturalness, and the desire becomes clear to reconcile man through a simple painting, without anxiety.

Schifano is empirical and experimental, hungry for the world that opens up before him, and transforms everything into pure painting.

His career throughout the 1960s ran in parallel to those of a generation of writers and poets like the Nuovissimi, protagonists together with him in an essay in Marcatrè by Alfredo Giuliani, or the close friendships with Penna, Moravia, Ungaretti, Balestrini and O'Hara in the USA, film directors like Ferreri and critics like Maurizio Calvesi, a companion and friend from the first together with Augusta Monferini, Emilio Villa, Tommaso Trini, and Fagiolo dell'Arco.^[5]

Everything happened without forgetting, or rather accentuating the element of a life outside the academy and the strictly intellectual dimension: the big tree, the sea, the bird's-eye view of the landscape, and the history of art with Leonardo, Piero della Francesca, Balla and Boccioni above all.

The landscape is verified by Schifano's mind of a painter. He is not interested in full information, he concentrates on details, right from the first, when the detail is a monochrome, and afterwards that of publicity.

He plumbs the depths of things , undeterred by their apparent vastness.

From the focus of the early years, of the first trip to the USA, 1963-1964, a period begins of the accumulation of experiences, information and images, avidly collected from the need to be able to affix them to the canvas.

Life presented as a synthesis of everything.

Nature is bent to his will and everything becomes illusion. The window, that paradigm of the treatises on painting, becomes for him a mental space, connoted by his proverbial laziness that he spent in long periods at home. The works are detached from the notion of the masterpiece; on the contrary, they are the sum of total experiences collected and presented in many paintings. Schifano's highly original novel finds its fullest synthesis in the reactivated monochromes of the 1960s and 1970s.

Painting captures, envelops and stretches, a mysterious uninterrupted message of multiplicity and subdivision and above all a continuous rift in the order of things: it is clearly a conceptual operation. The canvases and papers of Mario Schifano are like apertures wide open to the world.

Starting from the enormous monochrome collages of the early 1960s, the unfailing presence of the mark of a sign or paint, a rainbow of a different colour, that breaks into the delimited field is immediately noticeable. The transition from the 1960s to the 1970s, a decade packed with a different vitality, was already evident in the exhibition of TV landscapes in the Galleria Marconi in 1970, in the emulsioned canvases following the third trip to the USA and the collaboration with Emilio Mazzoli. It continued thanks to the everyday scene that was repeated every day in a Rome ready to accommodate generations of new artists like Kounellis and the Conceptualists from Turin, the Arte Povera group, and above all Boetti who was a close friend. Schifano remained Schifano, close to and collaborating with many, but always autonomous and independent of any new label or categorisation. For Mario Schifano, painting was a form of vagrancy, like stealing from art history, photography, newsreels, love, sex - basically, life!