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Misprints. About Alessandro Gasbarri’s pleasant errors.
Alessandro Gasbarri starts up from colour, and I’m surprised by this after “Aufheben, getting over retaining”, his exhibition displayed last year in Frascati’s Scuderie Aldobrandini, where unnoticed objects, reassembled in a conceptual crescendo that gave them back a meaning, were the main characters of his works.
An imperative urge of painting seemed then evident, mainly in the chromatic explosion of the three paintings “Social hypochondria. The Good, The Evil, The war”, a test of the remarkable expressive possibilities of pharmaceutical colouring used in medicine.
In this new twenty-five small panels cycle, strictly disposed like an army of disciplined soldiers along the perimeter of the Scuderie of Palazzo Ruspoli in Nemi, Alessandro sets a choreography of signs, in which each painting displays itself as a theme variation, inside a rhythm based on number five: five works made with five different inks/colours: black, red, green, purple, blue.
For the title of this series, “Misprints”, the artist borrows the language of typographers and editorial drafts, now used in everyday’s language also: technically, a misprint is a composition error made by a switch of letters or signs: “Here’s a misprint: art instead of act!”. And it is exactly for the intent of “correcting himself” that Alessandro’s impulse for repetition begins, in a research of Beauty arose from chance too, returned by rhythm’s happiness, by the unreleased gestures assumed by the composition: just like the audience in a theatre that loves to be astonished from what they are actually expecting for, as the famous Jean Louis Barrault used to say, Gasbarri weaves joyously with his inks, thrown on paper with strong deed, mindful of Informal art movement, a chromatic symphony that imposes itself for severity and determination of purpose, but it is as well able to involve the observer in a “happy repetition”, as Massimo Mila wrote about Schubert’s music themes.
There is something about oriental sensitivity and philosophy, in this “Misprints” serial operation: the aim of proposing the esthetical experience as an attitude towards the rite, being able to see the difference within the repetition of the identical. A model that Japanese culture uses for everyday’s sacralisation, which gives symbolic value to each act of the individual, pulling him out of Time’s indistinct flow. And Gasbarri understood clearly that this is much more true for the creator of the “carmen cum figuris”, a prayer with images that, just like a repeated invocation, needs a leading voice: the officiant artist and minister. If, in our western culture, the proceeding of experience reveals itself through a sequence of tests and errors, thanks to which we come to our scientific “truth”, Gasbarri’s “Misprints” demonstrate that during the research for Beauty the artist proposes errors as the highest truth. Evidences of a sidelong thought, unlike a logic one – correspondence between object and concept -, the twenty-five soldiers displayed in this exhibition fight for “pleasant errors”: those esthetical ideas described in Kant’s “Critic of Judgment” which “in the free contest of Imagination and Intellect, even without a correspondence with the given object, really are worth thinking about”.
An imperative urge of painting seemed then evident, mainly in the chromatic explosion of the three paintings “Social hypochondria. The Good, The Evil, The war”, a test of the remarkable expressive possibilities of pharmaceutical colouring used in medicine.
In this new twenty-five small panels cycle, strictly disposed like an army of disciplined soldiers along the perimeter of the Scuderie of Palazzo Ruspoli in Nemi, Alessandro sets a choreography of signs, in which each painting displays itself as a theme variation, inside a rhythm based on number five: five works made with five different inks/colours: black, red, green, purple, blue.
For the title of this series, “Misprints”, the artist borrows the language of typographers and editorial drafts, now used in everyday’s language also: technically, a misprint is a composition error made by a switch of letters or signs: “Here’s a misprint: art instead of act!”. And it is exactly for the intent of “correcting himself” that Alessandro’s impulse for repetition begins, in a research of Beauty arose from chance too, returned by rhythm’s happiness, by the unreleased gestures assumed by the composition: just like the audience in a theatre that loves to be astonished from what they are actually expecting for, as the famous Jean Louis Barrault used to say, Gasbarri weaves joyously with his inks, thrown on paper with strong deed, mindful of Informal art movement, a chromatic symphony that imposes itself for severity and determination of purpose, but it is as well able to involve the observer in a “happy repetition”, as Massimo Mila wrote about Schubert’s music themes.
There is something about oriental sensitivity and philosophy, in this “Misprints” serial operation: the aim of proposing the esthetical experience as an attitude towards the rite, being able to see the difference within the repetition of the identical. A model that Japanese culture uses for everyday’s sacralisation, which gives symbolic value to each act of the individual, pulling him out of Time’s indistinct flow. And Gasbarri understood clearly that this is much more true for the creator of the “carmen cum figuris”, a prayer with images that, just like a repeated invocation, needs a leading voice: the officiant artist and minister. If, in our western culture, the proceeding of experience reveals itself through a sequence of tests and errors, thanks to which we come to our scientific “truth”, Gasbarri’s “Misprints” demonstrate that during the research for Beauty the artist proposes errors as the highest truth. Evidences of a sidelong thought, unlike a logic one – correspondence between object and concept -, the twenty-five soldiers displayed in this exhibition fight for “pleasant errors”: those esthetical ideas described in Kant’s “Critic of Judgment” which “in the free contest of Imagination and Intellect, even without a correspondence with the given object, really are worth thinking about”.
Marco Nocca
Prof. at Fine Arts Academy of Rome
Prof. at Fine Arts Academy of Rome
