Few have felt the feeling of a “Garden concluded”Enclosed between buildings that evoked squares and courts. Modern transformations canceled that sense of intimacy and familiarity that the original urban space, built slowly over time, managed to convey naturally and harmony
The University of Bari has turned 100. The sculpture of Giuseppe Padogrossi, a contribution to the cultural path of the University
An oil on canvas of 290 cm2 surface, of 1958, exhibited in the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art of Rome, was one of the first works that I studied of Giuseppe Capogrossi[1] And, perhaps, it is no coincidence that the cover of the book on his retrospective held in Venice a few years ago at the Peggy Guggenheim Foundationproposes a detail.
A detail, a strong sign, which has always mentally brought me back to Bari, in Piazza Cesare Battisti. A small green area behind the university where, every morning, we placed our shoulders to a bronze sculpture, erroneously called “Canceled”waiting to meet class friends from the province, before heading towards the promenade and the Bari art institute.
The feeling of “Garden concluded”
Most, perhaps, do not remember the feeling of “Garden concluded”between buildings that, in a mental way, aligned the square/garden with large and small internal shorts of the historic university. Contemporary modifications made the feeling lose “domestica” Of the original urban space self-construction in time and in history, between the ancient university, the Palazzo delle Poste and the new university, visually closed, between via Crisanzio and via Nicolai.
The domestic and urban dimension open to all, the square/garden had gained it over time, with history, events, the system of university buildings around it. That place has always been, together with the twin Piazza Umberto I, the meeting place of the avant -garde alternative political, social, artistic and cultural alternative of the city.
It was the place of public discussions and assemblies which, in the seventies/eighties, marked the cultural development of the city. Story that we must remember, placing the emphasis on what that place was and thatarchitecture Urban composed of the historic nineteenth -century facade of the University, the new Palazzo delle Poste, which still imposes today reverential fear with its forms and materials and the modern university born on Pilotis and delimited on three sides by the bronze gate, a unique sculptural work of art.
The “knowledge” Rende “Free”
That bronze gate for us was a fifth as a fixed scene of the Greek theater where, in front of it, with absolute freedom, every day the real life was on stage unconsciously. Stories, stories, passions, loves, study, adventures of the spirit, took place in a surreal atmosphere.
And on the open plot of bronze sculpture, banners of entire student generations have been knotted, including mine. Aware that the “knowledge” made “Free” and the university, a place of science, knowledge and thought made it possible “freedom”.
That urban place had a soul shaped by history, by the events, by the young people who lived intensely with physical presence the year. The black and white cyclosty sheets, the phrases, the graffiti, the ta tze bao. While, at the bottom of the square, on the Via Crisanzio, in the Cinema Teatro Galleria, the area, the Genesis and the PFM flooded the student thought of sounds and poetry. By creating that character, that idea-soul and that smell-proof of young people who characterized it for years.
It is in that historical-cultural context that bronze sculpture has been conceived and built e Giulio Carlo Arganwith courage, he presented it to the public, on June 13, 1973, explaining it and taking the opportunity to synthesize the whole work of Giuseppe Capogrossi, who disappeared for a few months.
A “Poetics of the sign”
An idea that originated and configured when Giuseppe Paregrossi, after years of pictorial research, passed from painting-war painting to non-physicist (1947-1949) developing one “Poetics of the sign” that Giulio Carlo Argan summarizes later in 1967, introducing his “New” Works in art exhibitions up to the realization of bronze sculpture in 1972.
The artistic path of Paregrossi in the words of Ernesto Quagliariello, rector of the University of Bari
In the first months of 1973, many ventured to summarize the work of Giuseppe Padrogrossi. The same June 13, 1973, Ernesto QuagliarielloRector of the University of Bari who this year copies 100 years, was one of the first together with Giulio Carlo Argan, who in the Swabian castle of Bari, presented the work.
The rector summarized the artistic path of groups with these words: «At this moment I like to remember Giuseppe Capogrossi in our latest Roman meetings; It likes to remember him in his high figure, with his sweetly good eyes, with his penetrating gaze, with his mild but safe voice. I want to remember it in our passionate discussions on the true meaning of art, on the high mission of the artist.
Then came the dark days and he first accuses a slight malaise; An annoying cough often made it anxious; He began his slow but inexorable decline.
And he jokingly repeated “Biologist relative you have to give me suitable vitamins to win my tiredness, because I have to work, I have many ideas held in me; ideas that I have to transfer to the reality of the colors”.
Often he called me “dear relative” because, reappearing in infinitely distant times, we had found in our common Salerno origin some imaginary Avo our progenitor.
This find perhaps had arisen not by a family reality, but from a wonderful imagination: imagination that arose from the spontaneity of the affection and the exaltation for the feelings of friendship.
So often his friend Beppe returns to me and so today I see him next to us celebrated by Giulio Carlo Argan.
Parents used to say “how easy it is to photograph on the canvas what we see without ever reaching the perfection of nature; as it is difficult to transform the visible into an external, infinite, objectively valid design”. And so his sign, his great painting arose ».
A mysterious event of art
In 1950 after detachment from “Roman school” and his friends Cagli and Cavalli constituted the new group “Origin” With Alberto Burri and Ettore Colla.
For many, his paintings represented an enigma and his sign a mysterious event of art. In reality, the enigma of this sign exists only for those who ask painting for a representation. But the sign is never a representation: it is an image that holds a meaning.
An explanation of the sign of dizziness
But, with a difficult examination of unexpressed reasons, if we wanted to create an explanation of the sign of dizziness, we could collect the words of the great artist; Words of deep lighting and very high elevation:
“… I was ten years old and I was in Rome. One day I went with my mother in an institute of blind. In a room two children drew. I approached: the sheets were full of small black signs, a sort of mysterious but so vibrant alphabet that, as far as I did not think at all at that age, I felt a profound emotion. I felt since then that the signs are not necessarily seen, express something within us, perhaps the tension that derives from being immersed in reality.
And they were unable to turn it off the classic studies that, by family tradition, had to follow up to a degree in law. I devoted myself entirely to painting and for many years and with considerable success a “figurative” painter. There are still many people who regret my lost talent, while the most benevolent amaze my conversion to abstract painting. However, I am convinced that I have not substantially changed my painting but that I clarified it. From the beginning, in fact, I tried not to content myself with the appearance of nature; I have always thought that space is a reality internal to our conscience, and I proposed to define it. “
And “case” very difficult
I think nobody can give a more exact interpretation and a higher clarification than this wonderful sign. Perhaps of the only sign that will testify to a period of art of thoughtful travagli and of profound crises[2].
Also Gillo Dorfless He expressed himself on the great master in those early months of 1973: “Capogrossi constitutes today, it will constitute tomorrow for the future historical historians of the art of the twentieth century, a very difficult” case “: the case of an isolated artist, who had no masters and who had no disciples. Who began his rapid ascent in the contemporary pictorial universe already more than forty years old, with a renewed creative and spiritual adolescence that had to accompany him along the stages of a brilliant artistic adventure”.
A very personal emblem
It was in January 1950 that Capogrossi exhibited for the first time (in his exhibition at the “Gallery of the century”in Rome) his new abstract canvases, the result of two years of meditation and assiduous attempts to reach the liberation of the object and the identification of a new expressive signature.
Already then it appeared as the only and mysterious protagonist that very personal emblem that was tough defined by some as “comb” from others like “fork”.
Sign that had a mysterious and cryptic nature in itself. Something magical and scientific together, as if it had been the reappearance of ancient symbols, taken from hermetic texts, by alchemical figures.
A sign does not represent but means
The signs of capograpers “They say” Always something, as all the deciphered or indecipherable alphabets tell it, known and unknown, as the infinite signs that surround us with their cruel warnings, with their commands and their bans, tell it.
In reality, the enigma of this sign exists only for those who ask themselves what it ever represents, without reflecting that a sign does not represent, but means, and mainly serves to restore the continuity between the space of existence and that of the picture.
It is this sign is a constant generator of an infinity of variants, thesis supported by Argan himself in his monograph on the artist.
If we then wanted to seek an explanation, so to speak, psychological of this archetype of dizziness, we could resort to the testimony of the artist himself[3].
(segue)
© Domenico Tangaro Architecture Studio Urban planning Design
[1] Italo in the mons, In the “sign” of Giuseppe Padogrossiin new anthology, n. 2065, Rome, 1973.
[2] Italo in the mons, In the “sign” of Giuseppe Padogrossiin new anthology, n. 2065, Rome, 1973.
[3] Italo in the mons, In the “sign” of Giuseppe Padogrossiin new anthology, n. 2065, Rome, 1973.