Ars Hbrida

VISUAL EXTRAPOLATIONS

Extrapolating from reality

Sometimes we can plan a journey or adventure months before, but circumstances, together with passion, observation, and exploration, play more often a determining role, contributing to a result that all the more surprising and unexpected. Who has never played, when as a child, with newspaper clippings? Child's imagination has no limits so that flipping through the pages of a newspaper is like flying through unknown worlds and landscapes, valleys, plains, vast cultivated fields, and glittering rivers and horizons as far as the eye can see. One of my favorite amusements, when I was a child, was to cut newspapers into clippings with a pair of scissors and then reassemble them according to different shapes and colors. I could not tell you why I did it, but it was a pleasure for me to kill time in this way, following dreams and mysterious fantasies. It wasn't a little fun, but, from my point of view, it was real art, which required commitment and sensitivity. A large amount or quite everything was left to chance, to the imagination. If I should define fantasy, fantasy was freedom for me, freedom of thoughts that flowed excitedly in my mind, sometimes attributing bizarre and mysterious meanings to the objects, even the most insignificant of them. So a boiling pot could turn into a fighting helmet and a simple cardboard box into a racing car.

But we grow up, we study. Childhood becomes little by little a pale memory, a faded photo, a yellowed book, a broken toy, an abandoned attic corner.

So I studied art history and, by chance, I came across Max Ernst, a surrealist painter who, by some coincidence, owed his success right to newspaper clippings His working method impressed me and I couldn't help but verify how much similar to mine his approach was, in particular to my childhood passion for newspaper clippings.

Ernst used to cut and divide books, magazines and newspapers into smaller elements, to create, putting them side by side, fantastic creatures and objects, which seem borrowed from mythology and then brought to light, with surprising ability, from the darkest zones of abyssal mind. And his mind was right on edge between reality and dream, a "conscious state" against a "dreamlike state".

So I started, for fun, to compose my first collages, which were of reduced dimensions and had no claim to be proper paintings. I realized, however, that my way of proceeding was a bit different from that of Ernst. My collages didn't expect to produce meaningful images, but they didn't want to produce nonsense too. Therefore, we couldn't define them surrealistic. Surrealism aimed to overturn the common sense of things, to bring out alternative meanings and interpretations of reality. He intended to operate, ultimately, with the dark unexplored side of our psyche.

My collages, on the contrary, tended to an ideal balance of shapes and colors, to a more abstract scheme. They didn't mean to convey a message or a sense. I liked them that way, in their naturalness.

In the beginning, since my purpose was to create paintings of a certain size, from 50 to 70 cm in width, I directed myself towards painters like Braque and Schwitters, as it was necessary to assemble pretty larger surfaces. Newspaper clippings weren't enough, but it was sometimes required to use entire cardstock sheets and colored papers (Matisse, for example, used colored paper cuts), or even packaging and recovery materials, fabric, and so on. In some circumstances, I used advertising posters, ripped off the walls. I had to do so because, with only a few, small newspaper clippings, I could fill a scarce A4 sheet.

So I combined collage and frottage. Frottage to fill up emptiness, background gaps, missing or connecting parts; collage, instead, to give shape, color, and thickness to the composition and its objects (e.g. triangles, circles, rectangles, etc.).

First, I created a background. I put my picture over rough abrasive surfaces, arranged together, such as canvas bags or pieces of wood and any other non-smooth material, and then I rubbed over them with pencils of different softness (conté, chalks, pastels, and so on), thus allowing them to form unpredictable, irregular, nuanced textures on the drawing.

In the meantime, I got interested in American painting of the '50s and' 60s, Pollock's action painting and Warhol's, Lichtenstein's and Rauschenberg's pop art. Three sacred monsters fascinated me: Gauguin, for his warm, deep colors; Matisse, for his freshness and his bright tints; Paul Klee, for his uncompromising, minimalist, even ascetic painting.

One of the first collages, entitled 'Thunderstorm', inspired by Max Ernst's surrealism. The use of newspaper clippings is evident.

In one of my first collages (Thunderstorm, pictured below), a particular "surrealist influence" is still evident: the background is metaphysical, surmounted by a dark sky, on which strange geometric shapes stand out unreal, unstable and suspended. There are three versions of this work:

1. the first one is a collage on a letter paper, so its dimensions are tiny (I took newspaper clippings from old-fashioned magazines, often from advertising inserts);
2. the second is a 100 x 70 water marker, which reproduces my first original collage on a larger rough drawing paper; but I lost its traces, since I gave it to a friend, many years ago;
3. the third reproduces once again the original collage on canvas; I used mixed media techniques, including water markers, colored inks and acrylic tempera (below).

Framed paintings. Below: the last copy of Thumderstorm still left in my living room (cm. 100 x 70); two paintings with geometric shapes (tempera and pencil); in the end, water marker with acrylic paint, pressed with rough materials, in order to imprint them a knitted texture.

"Thunderstorm" is a fundamental picture, as it starts a "method". We will call it, from now on, "art of assemblage" or "modular craftsmanship" or "hybrid art".

Art of assemblage, regarding the creative process that, in all its phases, from design to final production, consists in experimenting and assembling very different techniques and solutions.

Modular craftsmanship, regarding its progression, which is scalar: we start from an intuition, an idea or a set of circumstances, often accidental, and we add new ideas and solutions, new "modules", as in an interlocking game, until we reach our plan (our "optimal" result).

Hybrid art, regarding the plurality of techniques applied to our research and, above all, to the range of artistic experiences that more or less implicitly or explicitly contribute to enriching or vice versa influence, both from an artistic and cultural point of view, the overall gestation of our work of art. These influences, besides, can have different natures and multiple origins (schools, styles, genres, etc.).

Such "method" maintains, however, a certain constancy. Once we have experimented its effectiveness and applicability to different contexts and circumstances, in fact, we exploit it and reuse it with only little variations, until it doesn't exhaust its "creative potential". What changes, thus, are intuitions or those ideas that, from time to time, oversee artistic creation and are central to it. Here, we talk about "projects".

The picture above is part of a collection dedicated to the Aleph by Borges and depicts the City of the Immortals, described in the metaphysical tale 'El immortal'. It is one of the first collages, but its processing is entirely different, as it uses Pantone colors for its backgrounds, water markers for its shapes, pencils and pens for finishes. The goal is to emulate a real canvas.

Projects divide into several phases, within pre-formulated coordinates and paths whose purpose is to create artworks we can easily "recognize" for their belonging to a certain evolutionary phase or a specific "period" since they share common intuitions and a nucleus of "basic concepts".

The entire collection of my first collages, many of which I later moved to canvas or cardstock, belongs in fact to a project called Visual Extrapolations. I chose that name because we can think to forms, elements, and symbols as if "extracted from reality". So, arranged according to particular, even random configurations, they could generate, at a perception level, original artworks, with solid bright colors. I could create fancy, abstract, and well-balanced compositions, that enchanted visual conscience and fulfilled aesthetic sense. Obviously, it is a form of indirect extrapolation, since we apply it to a "mediated reality", in the sense that all the elements used in our compositions (for example 'collages') originate from those "media" (press, TV, photography, cinema, etc.), that just describe that reality.

While traditional painters draw inspiration straight from nature or society, in "Visual Extrapolations" we use on the contrary newspaper covers, photos, and advertising inserts to stimulate our imagination and artistic creativity, so the transition towards virtuality, multimedia, and world wide web, is more and more irreversible and clear.

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VISUAL METAMORPHØSES

Reinterpreting reality

As we have seen, collage allows us to create abstract compositions with harmonious and vivid colors. But it doesn't allow us to manipulate shapes and colors further, applying effects and techniques that are only conceivable in traditional painting, where the "brush" still plays a fundamental and thus undisputed role. It was for me all the more evident and impossible, since I had not yet learned those exquisitely graphical techniques, such as "rasterization" or "tessellation", which would have later allowed me to expand on canvas or cardstock my tiny and accurate "amateur collages". These techniques would have allowed me, besides, to apply to the final medium, with often heterodox methods and tools, a set of chromatic corrections and physical alterations intended to emulate those effects and refinements that only great painters sometimes, with spatula and brush, can get, through a skillful mixing of colors and a very personal touch.

As I didn't know these techniques, I was almost resigned to collect, therefore, in a sort of art book, all my favorite collages, promising myself in the future, if I had the opportunity, to increase them in size (all or almost all).

Then I continued to experiment with new techniques using, as there were no alternatives, my tiny collages as a research laboratory. Thus I conceived the Visual metamorphoses. It was no longer a matter of extrapolating from reality forms and elements that, arranged in accord with specific patterns, could generate, on a perception level, abstract compositions with a real and not only aesthetic "meaning".

Figure n. 1 - Smarties mosaic

It was now a matter of transforming those little compositions into something new and uncommon. There were many possibilities. I understood, in the end, that I could get, from a single image, many others, by multiplication or subtraction of elements, or by bringing out latent qualities and characteristics, for example by inverting colors or transforming nuances.

Figure n. 1 shows a classic example of transformation by multiplication or subtraction of elements: I first enlarged the photo of a bathroom mosaic, I recolored it with water-based markers and black ink and then I added newspaper clippings and other objects of different colors and shapes.

A useful example of this way of proceeding lies in some small collages called "The canon lens spectrum" (also reproduced on a larger scale, some years later). I use, for the occasion, a newspaper advert, that of a Canon camera, of which I remember I did a lot of black-and-white photocopies, some in color. Later, I collected some samples from each photocopy, cutting them out, and then I altered them, with different techniques.

Figure n. 2 - Piranha

As shown in figure n. 2, entitled "Piranha", for each photocopy I cut out many times the same shutter button of the Canon camera; afterward, I placed all buttons together, forming like an alienating texture, which reminded me a piranha shoal, with dilated eyes, ready to attack. I moistened all components with colored inks and an alcohol solution, to impress it - so to speak - an "aquatic" shade.

But the most exciting experiments were done by manipulating camera lenses, which I photocopied, cutting them out numerous times. I sprinkled photocopies with vinyl glues, adding granular materials, sands, colored inks, acrylic tempera, etc.; afterward, I placed on them and the glue, before the glue dried, wooden, ceramic and glass tablets or newspaper sheets (for example, glossy magazines). In the end, I removed everything, with disastrous consequences, you can imagine, but in some cases, the results were impressive. The glue, not yet dried sometimes, kept part of the granular materials I had sprinkled, with effects rather often similar to Seurat's "pointillism". In other cases, this caused the paper to detach from photocopies: the effect was like Alberto Burri's paintings, the so-called "bags" and "tars" of the 50s.

To sum up, I sprinkled photocopies with glues and acrylic colors which then I arranged following right the circular and concentric orientation of Canon lens impressed on each photocopy. For each specific surface, besides, I chose a different pressure and a different material: for example a glass tablet or a ceramic plate, etc. and then I removed them before they adhered to the photocopies. This operation took away much of the color, still damp, making the black toner of each photocopy (i.e. the background) emerge, with impressive effects, as you can see in following figures. Sometimes, I used the spatula to distribute colors, others I scraped them, with results often similar to graffiti (figure n. 4).

In figure n. 5, below, I immersed my photocopies in trichloroethylene and then I placed them on cardstock, pressing them to get faded images (I used to call it "transport with trielin technique"). Here's how it works: subsequent applications of the same matrix on the same cardstock produce, as a result, faded images of the original. So, using Letraset markers (whose colors expand), I applied a thin layer of 'light indigo' to the cardstock.

Figures n. 3, 4 and 5 - Paintings of the 'Canon' series (with manipulation and deformation of the camera lens): respectively tempera on plywood, mixed media on canvas and trichlorethylene on rough cardstock.

"Visual metamorphoses" belong to a kind of experimentation and painting we could define as "traditional" since they use techniques and methodologies that are still largely manual, but they contain the germs of a new survey, which preludes to the world of digital manipulations and special effects. These peculiarities take form through the intensive and systematic use of computers. However, to better clarify the objectives of this project, see figures n. 6, 7, and 8 below. Pay particular attention to the "finishing".

Figures n. 6, 7 and 8 - Close-up photos with a macro lens. The first two paintings are framed, so it wasn’t possible to eliminate glass reflection. In the figure n. 6 the finish is obtained by light strokes of acrylic tempera; in the figure n. 7 the density of the color and the brushstrokes are decidedly more marked; in the figure n. 8, finally, we aim at a "material consistency", using a spatula and a palette knife to distribute the color.

As you can see, the "main purpose" of the project is to develop, through image and color manipulation, a solid core of basic techniques designed to solve, in a definitive and lasting way (and with a careful and innovative use of 'materials' and 'media'), all the problems and difficulties related to "finishing", that in painting means: relief, thickness, density, physical consistency, touch, depth, brush orientation, color brightness and, again, an accurate choice of paints and transparent 'fixatives', and so on.

Only in a second moment, I realized that these experiments, as bizarre as they might appear, preluded (well in advance) to digital manipulation of images, as we know it today, through computer graphics and photo retouching.

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INNER LAYƐRS

Beyond the appearance

Inner Layers represent, in some respects, an even more critical turning point than the "Visual extrapolations".

In those days, I attended the European Institute of Design (Istituto Europeo di Design - IED), specializing in graphics and computer graphics, which was taking its first steps at the time when the first Mac Classic came out.

But what matters most is that, right in this period, I learned to use, for my first time, those graphics and design techniques that, afterward, would allow me to transfer my little collages (collected in "photo books"), on larger media.

I had also discovered Escher, an authentic revelation, because I soon realized that many of his techniques, although complicated in appearance, could easily apply to my painting, including "deformed lattices" or tessellation and grid method techniques. Also, through grid method, I could experiment with new possibilities. For example, when I was expanding a grid, I could discover details I had never noticed before, maybe because they were difficult to grasp when working on such a small scale. We could interpret, besides, or assume some of these details as pictures in embryo. Why? Because, they were already complete, maybe perfect in their simplicity and asymmetry, made of balanced shapes, lines and colors. Besides, they were like fragments or parts of a larger and complex whole, like compositions that were however probable, i.e. susceptible to further development, even if not formed yet. Yes, sure! Worlds to come, to "assemble", layers to stratify, to compose and put on paper.

Figures n. 1, 2 and 3 - From the infinite to the infinitesimal: levels of hidden perception and fragments of reality to decipher.

From the infinite to the infinitesimal: reality fragments into in smaller parts, which can combine in ways and geometries that aren't straight recognizable, but need to be learned, identified, distinguished and, thus, extracted and re-semanticized. These units intertwine, confuse and overlap each other, so they are difficult to detect. You should check them through a sieve, as when you scan the sand of a river in search of gold fragments, or perhaps you should look at them as strata, as when you peel an onion, unveiling its layers one by one. I called these strata "layers" because I think there are multiple levels of interpreting and decoding reality. I also called them layers, by analogy to computer graphics, where layers, according to Adobe Photoshop user guide, are: like overlaid glossy sheets. Through the transparent areas of a layer, you can see the elements of the layers Below you can move a layer to position the content, as you would do by sliding a glossy sheet into a stack. You can also change the opacity of a layer to make the content semitransparent.

The term "inner", in contrast, can have different meanings. Sometimes it means "secret, hidden" because we must discover and explore its levels. An untrained, inattentive eye can't access them without a discernment, an exercise, a competence, an "artistic sensitivity". But "inner" in English also means "interior", to underline that to produce art it's also necessary an inner involvement, a personal attitude to peer into reality, discovering elements and details ("layers") that perhaps nobody else can see. Then, our art should "lead them to see".

The "Inner Layers" project represents another step toward image manipulation. Images are no longer extracted from reality. So we won't rework them through "hybrid", unconventional techniques and procedures, but we will investigate their intimacy, looking for a sense and intrinsic aesthetic completeness. For the first time, I replaced my collages with compositions that, already at a design stage, I had conceived and created on my computer. Graphics and design come now into play, going to fill those gaps and inexperience that only a persevering and systematic study of painting, with its entire capital of ancient and modern techniques, could have filled. They activate thus a mixture of genres and "tools" which, from an expressive point of view and not without reason, justifies the name of "hybrid art", as assumed in this discussion and its introductory remarks.

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HØRIZONTAL PLŌŤS

Horizontal schemes

Horizontal plots  and the subsequent "Vertical plots", if we want to consider them from the view of experimentation and technical innovation, can appear maybe as two less demanding projects than previous ones. But it's not. "Horizontal plots" comes from two needs:

1. the need to produce, once we have gained the capacity of master methods and techniques such as "tessellation" and "grid method", pictures of ever larger sizes, to show them both in art exhibitions or installations;
2. the need to create "visual paths", alongside corridors and walkways, roads and parks, according to two different approaches (modes):
1. a serial mode, that is many successive frames, belonging to the same thematic group, arranged in "series", with slight and often irrelevant differences (for example a difference in terms of color or image positioning or a difference in terms of angle and grade, and again, a particular artistic effect rather than another, e.g. solarization, negative, gray-scale, etc.)
2. a "monumental" or landscape mode, where large size compositions, if not gigantic (concerning resources and time), however large, are arranged "horizontally", in length, so they can occupy a whole wall or a street corner, in a perspective which is both ideal and thematic.

Figure n. 1 - Expo Wall, a large picture belonging to the 'landscape mode' (size 5 x 1 meters)

To the serial mode belong compositions inspired, in part by pop art, Warhol first, and in part by action painting, while to the landscape mode belong all those projects I haven't yet transposed (for lack of time and money) on a larger medium. At the moment, they are only available in limited numbers, on A4 papers, as ink-jet prints, or on small media, like monitors, even if their inspiration originates from murals, those in the streets and those in great museums and art galleries.

To conclude, the project named "Horizontal plots" aims to experiment the potential of that "decorative" value which, according to our reflections on hybrid art, implies above all an architectural and urban value, not only a visual one. As explained in previous chapters, it has a "polyvalent value, within complex conceptual spatiotemporal paths".

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VERTICÁL PLŌŤS

Vertical schemes

Spaces and paths of contemporary civilization reflect, in broad terms, dynamics and processes of globalization, that first is mercantile and thus cultural, but impersonal and, for the same reason, without identity. They don't aim to commemorate meanings, events, and ideas of a specific culture or a particular historical consciousness. We have already talked about Marc Augé's "non-places", where the measure of the standard, that is also the measure of a generic, anonymous mass consumer, prevails all over the world. Paths of globalization are planned for transit, for anonymity, while in the past they were appropriate for socialization, pause, entertainment (as squares, for example). Stop, confront, discuss, express yourself.

Vertical Plots arise therefore from the need to correct, modify, divert or reorganize these paths, from simple passive transit places to moments of self-reflection, conscious break, and pause. Thus verticality takes shape as an exact antithesis to horizontality, that of transit and convulsive movement. A solemn and austere verticality, as a replacement for a lost monumentality, which in ancient squares manifested itself often through celebrations, anniversaries, events, dates, sites, people, facts, ideas, convictions, fights, values, empathies, utopias, etc..

Figure n. 1 - Trittico, transl. triptych, three symbolic paintings used as 'totems' (height 3 meters)

Compositions develop now no longer horizontally, side to side, outstretched or lying down, to accompany paths or decorate walls, but in height, as symbolic totems, stairs towards a higher and intimistic level of existence. As in meditation, in prayer, the concept of medieval triptychs and altarpieces is central, a revisited topic. Abstraction becomes asceticism. The more the form is abstract, pure, linear, the more it pushes upwards, towards commemoration and testimony.

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OßLIQUE CONVƐRGENCES

Unexpected convergences

Techniques, methods, approaches, solutions, tools, everything seems to converge towards a new expressive mastery and a greater awareness of art, of its potential, but also its limits and its codes. Art or no art, It is like questioning the meaning of existence, a vain, perhaps senseless query. Is there a purpose beyond life? Is there a destiny? Do things happen by chance or should we instead envisage a pre-established design beyond transience of things?

Nothing, there is no answer, or better there are so many answers as the beliefs or the subjective points of view to which we adhere by faith or habit, without being able to prove them, unless we force people to believe our opinions and conform with them, even with violence and threats. But it would be a crazy world and maybe it is, right now. Perhaps it has always been.

As a lover of Zen meditation, I can only point to the universe with a broad gesture of the hand and say: don't ask, live in silence and let live. Experience the truth, day by day, and don't care of those who break the rules of universal harmony, because the universe has its laws and they act according to invisible, latent and underground ways. Yes, things happen and we don't know why.

So, my attraction for art and my passion for Zen merged in the river of life. Everything flows without pause, moment by moment, and there is no distinction between art and life, just as there is no distinction between inside and outside, consciousness and reality. The world comes and goes and so do our activities and creations, that make us so proud, even if they are sometimes unnecessary, maybe arrogant, even dangerous. But this is only a consequence of what Buddhists call "attachment", "illusion", a mixture of ambition and egocentrism and frustrated desires.

So, as I learned to use "techniques" that, little by little, would have allowed me to create larger paintings and compositions, and as I perfected my art, translating it, day by day, into reality, through concrete products and handworks, I worked and lived perceiving a continuum between conception and execution, design and manual dexterity, inside and outside.

In the end, everything becomes art, life, and even the most trivial objects turn into inspiration sources, into "inner layers" (i.e. aspects, stratifications of reality that only wait to be discovered and recognized). All these layers expand, according to schemes (plots) and projections, which can be vertical or horizontal, but always end up in the flow of life, the uninterrupted flow of life.

If then everything can turn into inspiration, a hint and, therefore, an artistic creation, what is aesthetics, what is the form? Which objects can satisfy our natural and yet personal aesthetic taste or our sense of art? There is no answer. Unless we recognize that we can fulfill our aesthetic taste in infinite ways, some of which derive from personal experience, others from cultural references, like books and thus everything we learned through study and mass media. Sometimes we can unexpectedly satisfy the sense of art. Just a little ray of sunshine, a light breeze, a distant echo, and the world changes its aspect, its perspective... such a sudden, natural, fortuitous thing.

These are "Oblique convergences": everything converges, according to unpredictable modalities, towards a barycenter, a point of equilibrium and universal harmony. It is not a linear or a logical or a pre-established procedure, it is an unknown, multi-directional, transversal, and polyvalent convergence. Consistency is the whole, the olos (όλος).

So I happened to discover, between one thought and another, that some objects thrown on the table by chance were, from a compositional (and aesthetic) point of view, much more interesting than many others I had assembled on my computer or canvas, after hours and hours of laborious work. From then on, I got involved for fun in "pictorial algorithms", being an IT specialist by profession. I wrote macros and applications that allowed me to generate random images and colors, with often shocking, unpredictable results.

Had that minimalist laboratory perhaps transformed into a factory?

No, it had broadened its horizons and enriched its communicative potential. But its method and its purpose, which were perhaps even more existential than aesthetic, continued to be those of Zen, that is Zen practice and discipline.

Yes sure, proceeding according to "stochastic" methods ("random" in computer jargon), I couldn't help but wonder if my work was artistically correct and honest.

Figures n. 1, 2 and 3 - A mathematical algorithm generated the first image; the second image, instead, was deformed by random parameters; in the third case, the algorithm altered the colors.

Figures 4 and 5 - Complex algorithm: a cubist technique is applied (in the image n. 4 the algorithm changes the colors randomly).

But the world changes and an artist who nowadays intends to produce Art must unavoidably know information technology. Information technology is a part, with its strengths and weaknesses, of human knowledge in the third millennium and doesn't exclude, therefore, the use of techniques and methodologies of the past, like manual skills, as we already showed.

But you can't imagine my surprise when, almost two years after these experiments, I learned about "Reflection", the new album by Brian Eno. It's a work all based on an intuition, which is similar to mine, with the difference that, in this case, what we deal with are instead musical and not pictorial algorithms. Music that is always new, never the same, and doesn't tire, doesn't repeat itself.

Eno restores unrepeatability, uniqueness. But not in the way Benjamin would have expected, rather in the typical style of Zen philosophy, for which each moment is unique and unrepeatable, different from any other one. Satori (enlightenment, awakening) is this: it happens "here and now".

Perhaps art is destined to experience new horizons, nothing will be like before; we look to the future and we must adapt to it, so as not to perish. Therefore, I open my eyes and I tell myself: even today is a good day to work, to continue living. Things are what they are and we too are what we are, it's the only way to regain our freedom and the sky.

If you want to reach the true Path beyond doubt, place yourself within the same freedom as that of the sky. How can you define it right or not right?

(Nansen)

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