Relazioni Invisibili: Alan Bee

The enigmatic figure of Alan Bee – the pseudonym of a prominent businessman, art collector and leading personality in the European artistic panorama of the last decades – is a contemporary artist known for his deeply expressive and astutely innovative artistic production. Distinguished for his creative use of a particularly lively palette and visibly composite textures, he has often combined traditional techniques with advanced approaches, resulting in captivating and profoundly evocative works. All his works, which belong to the post-informal expressive period, deftly range from abstraction to figurative representation. In exploring a vast thematic range, they operate within the triad of identity-culture-nature. All this makes Alan Bee a versatile and dynamic artist, able to communicate through a surprising variety of visual idioms to engage an ever wider and more heterogeneous public. Moreover, in positioning himself between the observation of mass production, introspection, and the incontrovertible need to forge an identity, Bee harks back to that ancestral division between Homo naturalis and Homo œconomicus and resolves it by means of a forward-looking practice that faithfully emphasises the imperative urgency to re-establish a new balance between humans and their environment. Through the potential of the transformation of material, he follows a unique and unmistakable trajectory that even extends to an interest in the irrational, in the hope that this may trigger further or unprecedented illuminations. He is driven by the indefatigable desire to rise above earthly trivialities to generate a new harmonious and aware spiritual balance between the most tangible industriousness and the most unfettered impulses. He is also particularly fond of Lucretius’ poem De Rerum Natura for its belief that the reality of nature is directed by a ‘natural order’. Alan Bee is determined to reinforce all those wildly erosive dislocations that draw the industrialised world ever further away from the natural one. In fact, from his great love of nature to his passion for painting, he has always embraced a passion for the bees – choosing them for his artistic nom de plume – and for their extraordinary universe that perpetually appears before us as an example of solidarity, equity, working together, industriousness, order and cohesion. In assuming the role of spokesperson for the rights of all the creatures that inhabit our planet and enlivening that role through his consistent, dense and powerful painting, right from the start he has supported fundamental issues such as human solidarity and the equality of the sexes, at the same time refusing any form of abuse of power, war and objective cruelty. As an artist he has been particularly fascinated by the anti-traditionalist Joseph Beuys and his passion for honey, that sweet nectar like human blood that, as it passes through the entire organism, distributes the life force to every single constituent cell. Bee generates his art conceived in the form of a remote beehive, a tribute to the remarkable society of bees that forms a sort of miniature kingdom in which each component has a precise and inescapable role. As Seneca wrote to Lucilius, at this point we may ask ourselves: ‘Do you not see with what precision the bees construct their home, with what general concord each attends to his respective tasks?’. The organisation is so rational that some believe that, as the bees are always engaged in producing the celebrated food of the gods, they are endowed with a divine mind. At any rate, ever since then they have been universally recognised as a symbol of industriousness and diligence, fertility and nature, purity and sweetness, regality and power, wisdom and knowledge, immortality and rebirth. Moreover, the hexagonal structure of their honeycombs has made them the object of admiration and study for the geometrical perfection they attain. On the other hand, besides their history and symbolism, they are fundamental for the ecosystem because as pollinators they are essential for food production and biodiversity. In conclusion, they are fascinating and multifunctional creatures that have influenced human culture in many ways, symbolising positive qualities and playing a crucial role in the macrocosm. As symbols of the beauty and complexity of the natural world for their distinctive social structure and habits, unawares they afford a perfect description of the unique aesthetic and formal research of Alan Bee. In view of the Lucretian doctrine that all living beings were generated by the earth, as Virgil says, we can allegorically state: The elderly assume care of the city to protect the honeycombs, and to artfully construct the hives; the young return weary late at night with their legs filled with thyme; they range far and wide to feed on shrubs, blue-grey willows, cassia, the red crocus, succulent lime leaves and rust-coloured hyacinths’. In this way, the industrious bees continue to keep alive his indescribable impulse as a painter that never seems to end.