Mario Raciti

Mario Raciti, a painting that breathes the air of elsewhere
by Sandro Parmiggiani

Writing an introductory text for Mario Raciti’s exhibition at the Butti Museum in Viggiù may seem like a fairly simple task, at least for someone like me who knows the artist’s work, has been familiar with him for forty years now, presenting him in personal exhibitions of an anthology nature and having recently curated the publication of the Reasoned Catalogue of his painting. However, as I look through the images of the thirteen expertly selected works on display (paintings on canvas and paper covering a period of sixty years, from 1962 to 2022), I soon realize that I could perhaps still add something new about Raciti, perhaps developing a reading path of the past that was abandoned too soon. Yet, enigmas and mysteries continue to intrigue me, to emerge: his work is truly an inexhaustible treasure trove of suggestions. Thus, the conviction grows that much more could be written about the richness of this work, which continues to be a source of ideas and reflections, of connections with the tradition of painting and with the very conditions of living in the difficult times it has traversed and in which it came to life. Some light begins to shine, telling me that in Raciti’s paintings there pulse things, perhaps obscure, that come from afar: from artistic experiences, from poetry and narrative, from the beloved music and from the gaze upon one’s own interiority, which Mario has so diligently cultivated. Slowly, two words begin to emerge, “new” and “ancient,” upon which I begin to reflect in order to approach the planet Raciti – perhaps fragments of a distant memory: the verses of a poem that many encountered on school benches, The Kite by Giovanni Pascoli, with its opening “there is something new […] indeed, something ancient…”
There are many declinations of the “new” in Raciti’s painting: first and foremost, already at a first glance – which should never be hasty, as unfortunately many customs of our time induce us to be – we understand that it escapes every easy classification. In fact, we are confronted with developments that would be difficult to categorize into any of the many movements that have succeeded each other over the past eighty years – the trends, the groups, so beloved by those who enjoy delineating the charts of modern art, alas, always elusive to them, since it is not always possible to determine where the finis terrae of a way of applying painting or accurately defining islands and archipelagos within which to enclose certain artistic experiences can be found, especially when they are complex and rich like the one so peculiarly conducted by Raciti. There are, indeed, in his work, fragments that here and there surface: a wandering line, often trembling and uncertain; the fraying and exhausting of a tone; the sudden condensation of a color; the emerging of a shape that withdraws and suddenly dissolves before reaching a defined and identifiable configuration to the eye. These faint presences, these larvae of allusions, perhaps elusive and never fully representable in their entirety, float in a kind of amniotic liquid, indefinable, uniform, or sometimes marked by some slobber and color drips: something that is both superficial and deep, that has stolen something from the sky, the sea, the darkness of water – in the recent Sources, here are the silvery twists of a waterfall, when the iridescent splashes capture the air – that might lead us to suggest some sort of settlement, which would soon, however, prove to be suffocating. The paintings on display from One or Two Figures, dated 2016 and 2018, are closely linked to the previous cycles of Why and The Flowers of the Deep; after all, in Raciti’s painting, there is never a sharp divide between one season and the next: certain formal and tonal acquisitions are not lost, but pass naturally into the new developments of his research, fertilized by the discoveries his intellectual and existential reflection is making. In short, we are facing, in the artist’s work, a kind of “eternal return”: a passing of signs, forms, tones, spatial divisions, which have been constituting themselves as his peculiar language and syntax – completely original landmarks in the painting of the last sixty years, making him an authentic protagonist, destined to last, and not to become a fleeting fire like so many lauded experiences in the art system, which we have been traversing for decades now. Here is another reason to argue that throughout Raciti’s work, “new” and “ancient” constantly coexist: the persistent innovation of his research, the exploration of the “presences” gravitating in space or the visionary worlds that sometimes break through, merge into a personal, ever-changing declination of the achievements he has reached. Indeed, in his work, there is a continuous exploration and circling around certain signs, certain clumps of shapes, certain tones, as if they were an inexhaustible source of further conquests and new adventures in painting.

Let us pause, as it is always useful to do, in front of the works in the Viggiù exhibition, in a face-to-face encounter that reserves new discoveries and revelations. The mixed technique of 1962 is a superb emblem of a very happy season for the artist (the 1960s), imbued with irony and freedom, when an enchanted world, a fairytale, took shape, with visions stretching upwards (sometimes recognizable as antennas, probes, cable cars, hot air balloons, tunnels to the unknown), and the charm of a painting already mature, capable of the most subtle variations and nuances, which presents itself to us in its splendor.
The Presences – Absences of the early seventies, of which the Viggiù exhibition presents two significant results, show how Raciti chose in those years to create atmospheres that seem to want to defy the understanding of our gaze: a trembling red line; a chromatic agglomerate that breathes air; traces of wandering whites that multiply, and almost daze, the possibilities of identifying the direction the gaze must follow in order to comprehend the unknown territory it is exploring, towards a goal never predetermined, always unknown. Everything in these works breathes an elsewhere that stays beyond the edges of the canvas.
In the two Mythologies in the exhibition, both dated towards the end of the 1980s, the fragmentation has softened and recomposed, so that we can now identify a possible vision of a landscape or a defined shape, alluding to hills and mountains, islands and borders of worlds, sometimes frayed, though of uncertain configuration. The spatial complexity has increased, and a possible sense of unity has been gained, as if we were witnessing the recomposition of the disjecta membra of an universe – that of the previous decade – shattered, fallen to pieces. We know that the artist is grappling with the evocation – always in fragments and allusions – of myth, revisiting some of its most famous stories, those that have steadily become part of our imagination, and have nourished it. Mario revisits these stories with the memory of the pictorial representations made of them – while being fully aware of not wanting to replicate them in any way, but rather to propose new, steep ways of storytelling – with critical readings, especially those developed by psychoanalytic interpretation. Raciti remains, always, the singer of what cannot be seen, which manifests only through clues and hints, in a world where the fragments of what does show soon dissolve – once again in the spirit of that Symbolism that has so tenaciously fascinated him throughout his experience. It is Mario himself who sheds light on what he has been doing: “Painting shadows, and expresses. The one that shadows more, sometimes, is the most intense.”
The five pastels on paper created at the turn of the millennium, between 1999 and 2003, are of absolute charm: the strokes seem to have darkened and concentrated, occupying the entire surface, like a forest in which no clearing is glimpsed. In other outcomes, spaces of infinity can again be breathed, with the vision one might experience if looking at the curvatures of our planet from above: the artist is fresh from, but still within, the experience of Mystery, in which he had alternatively immersed himself in the darkness of the abyss and in the wide breath of the sky.
The paintings on display from One or Two Figures, dated 2016 and 2018, are closely linked to the previous cycles of Why and The Flowers of the Deep; after all, in Raciti’s painting, there is never a sharp divide between one season and the next: certain formal and tonal acquisitions are not lost, but pass naturally into the new developments of his research, fertilized by the discoveries his intellectual and existential reflection is making. In short, we are facing, in the artist’s work, a kind of “eternal return”: a passing of signs, forms, tones, spatial divisions, which have been constituting themselves as his peculiar language and syntax – completely original landmarks in the painting of the last sixty years, making him an authentic protagonist, destined to last, and not to become a fleeting fire like so many lauded experiences in the art system, which we have been traversing for decades now. Here is another reason to argue that throughout Raciti’s work, “new” and “ancient” constantly coexist: the persistent innovation of his research, the exploration of the “presences” gravitating in space or the visionary worlds that sometimes break through, merge into a personal, ever-changing declination of the achievements he has reached. Indeed, in his work, there is a continuous exploration and circling around certain signs, certain clumps of shapes, certain tones, as if they were an inexhaustible source of further conquests and new adventures in painting. In the case of One or Two Figures, the title is not at all cryptic: on the surface of the canvas, a more defined shape emerges, of which we can follow the outer boundaries, and another phantasmal one, caught in the transition between being and non-being, hinted at by lines, fragments of the body, spatial tensions – often, these figures seem engaged in the twists and movements of dance – that the inquiring eye, lover of the subtleties of true painting, slowly comes to grasp.
In recent years, Raciti has re-proposed veils and overlays of whitish filaments, happy tonal coagulations, which are confirmed and developed in the intense cycle he is currently working on: the waterfalls of water, almost audible in their rush, within the light’s reverberations that the current holds – and here, closing the exhibition, Source, a mixed technique of 2022, with Mario quoting an expression dear to him: “the prophetic light of blindness.”

In recent years, during the complex work of preparing the Reasoned Catalogue of his painting, in which Mario participated with intense, total personal involvement, even emotionally, the artist has entrusted – like messages enclosed in a bottle cast out to the waves – two truths that, together, are the final arrival, and a sort of self-portrait to transmit to those who will come, of a man, Raciti, who has never ceased to reflect on his work and on the feelings with which he has faced it over time – just read the many personal texts, quite illuminating, contained in a precious volume recently published. The first message that Mario entrusts to us is the phrase from Goethe’s Faust, “we can redeem the one who, always reaching, wears himself out”: it seems the artist is telling us that he has worked tirelessly, without faltering, faithful to an awareness he gradually acquired and made his own over the years. The second truth that Raciti gives us is that he set himself the goal of “substituting the great painting of the past, not renouncing it, as those dedicated to the present do by focusing on the banal, the futile, the ephemeral, but rediscovering its ethical values through the impossibility of re-proposing it: freeing its ghost, hoping that, by doing so, a cathedral will begin to be built, and hoping that, one day, an altar will be constructed.” These brilliant, enlightening thoughts – along with the precious legacy of the paintings he has created and which remain – are the essence of a life and a journey, now seventy years long, through the territories of painting, and are the spiritual testament that Mario entrusts to us. Words of existential truth that we must keep within ourselves and that can help us as we seek to grasp the enchantment and deep meaning of the paintings in Raciti’s exhibition at the Butti Museum in Viggiù.