CLAUDIO OLIVIERI – VEDERE A OLTRANZA
Light: the origin without beginning
by Veronica Zanardi
There are no footprints. They have not been lost: no one has ever left them, no one has ever walked here, nor will anyone ever walk here. As long as you do not make any noise, you can fly.
Geometric traces under tension would like to maintain a dichotomy, but the sun’s lightning bolts have already broken the night and penetrated it: occult poetry recites both splendour and darkness, while the smell of incense evaporates behind it (Tensionale, 1971, oil on canvas).
The mirrors of fire and night are founded (Untitled, 1991, oil on canvas).
If we wanted to get to know Olivieri solely through his work, we could only do so by adopting a timeless perspective, allowing ourselves to be swept up in the flow of his colours and abandoning ourselves to the consequentiality of luminous becoming, since this seems to be, in concrete terms, his work.
Then it will be possible to think with the viscosity of gold and realise how tattoos are only acceptable if done by dew or spider webs (Untitled, 1969, oil on canvas).
Olivieri’s analysis therefore focuses on colour, the entity that allows us to perceive light in its infinite components, which in turn can fade into countless shades, making us aware that time is not given, but light. The analysis itself becomes perennial, moving with the flows of pictorial matter, freed from geometric dimensions: micro and macro cancel each other out, colour retains its identity indifferently on the wings of an insect or in the reflection of a galaxy. The research, leaving aside the where, focuses attention on its ability to conceal part of the light, only to reintroduce it in an unexpected appearance elsewhere.
The effort of the brushstroke is abandoned: only colour remains, flowing yet settling, or moving ever so slightly, seeking new positions for the next scene, where liquid porphyry loses its mineral breath and pulsates warmly (Rubeo, 2008, oil on canvas).
The weighty lump has melted away, now matter is only light and shows how it is possible to feel the world within oneself, which the author feels the urgency to represent.
Like writing, syncopation is abolished: the chromatic symphony avoids being fragmented, the notes of colour blend into one another in a crescendo and diminuendo of tones, the knots are untied and the liquid amber is combed before being covered with veils of tobacco and laid down on the canvas (Verso l’interno, 2008, oil on canvas).
It is not a place where colours fade and where the source of energy that gives rise to the work is located: memory is the entity that oversees the painter’s creative gesture, it is the awareness of what already exists. Light brings with it the incessant memory of what has already happened, and shadow encloses the same profound darkness from which we ourselves come. Memory leaves trails capable of revealing what cannot be thought: it can appease, with light, a worry and regenerate us by chanting the softness of the morning (Occhio fatato, 1998, oil on canvas), or with a sudden shadow drag us into painful despair. Then a tear without sobs suffers to show its merciless blindness (Perdifiato, 1994, oil on canvas).
The incessant alternation of light and shadow is a life-giving motion; the painting becomes salvation, everything that takes place within it wards off immobility.
Life is a chain of dynamic entities, and in Olivieri’s paintings it dances without pause and without any order of chronicity: flashes of lightning herald floods (Untitled, 1963, oil on canvas); darkness is not blind and observes us with periwinkle eyes (Untitled, 1977, oil on paper).
With an in-depth analysis of colour, some infernal elements may come to life: then the fear of the bottomless abyss creeps in, or one fears being drawn to the non-place where absolute light is born. It is appropriate to walk through the large spaces of Olivieri’s works, allowing the possible details to approach us without our knowledge, breath after breath, as happens with Claudio Verna’s segments, letting the last shadows of twilight be coloured with desire and offer us wise wings for these rarefied atmospheres (Adombrare, 1978, oil on canvas).
The light, receding, absent-mindedly scatters nuggets (Untitled, 1965, mixed media on paper), a blue appears to dress the night (Untitled, 1971, oil on paper).
Day and darkness are generated simultaneously.
It may seem inappropriate to rely on titles in order to better enjoy the works: there is a fear of wanting to fragment a perpetually growing entity, whose existence depends on its absolute integrity. The most appropriate use is therefore to read them as amalgamating into a single body, listening to them as words of an ode to the dynamism of colours, which reject stagnation and obligatory sequences, where the final order is the one that is still taking place. Olivieri’s titles do not come to life from intellectual formulations, but they do make us aware of how his artistic sensibility was also forged thanks to cultural and mythological knowledge, and how his work can be reworked and read as a literary subject. If anything was missing from his work, it would have been the unwillingness to acknowledge this, and this is what Olivieri added to it. Even his early drawings are fragments laden with representational responsibility. Elegance does not allow the
mark to be exhausted by the strict imposition of the paper support, but allows it to overflow beyond its boundaries.
The sinuous traces of female bodies, as well as the obliquity of the ink lines, invite us to experience the enigma of the night, where everything is so far away and so close. The mark, both absorbing and volatilising, already foreshadowing that mild but inflexible desire for perpetual change, contains in nuce what his painting will become.
The deep breath of light
by Matteo Galbiati
One of the most profound and deeply rooted lessons that Claudio Olivieri left us as his legacy is undoubtedly his unshakeable and inalienable faith in painting, which was constantly renewed throughout his human and artistic journey and continues to be renewed in the testimony left active in all his works, whether they be his most famous canvases or his lesser-known works on paper, which are equally intense in their expressive tension and mirror the paintings. lesser-known works on paper. For him, the act of painting became an expression of an intellectual tension pushed beyond the finiteness of real things and, therefore, was always the unfathomable manifestation, albeit partial and often elusive in an ultimate and decisive indeterminacy of the issues raised by preventive hypotheses, of his characteristic, continuous and repeated thinking.
Yes, because Olivieri, although it may seem provocative, was not an artist – moreover, according to the current definition we give it, he would be reluctant to identify with this figure or role, and certainly wary of accepting it – because he experienced artistic and aesthetic practice as a true intellectual. An intellectual of colour, the only element with which to debate, confront and struggle, a friend and antagonist to whom to devote energy, resources and time. That is why considering him an artist would be a simplistic limitation with regard to the powerful impact of his tireless work, in which colour was his accomplice. Colour was, therefore, the true and original medium of his painted poetry, an exclusive conduit through which to pour extreme trust in an attempt to capture, in lyrical terms, a distant, elusive principle of truth. For him, colour could also be a vulnerable, susceptible, alterable, impermanent element which, expressing itself in an almost infinite range of constantly evolving and changing colours, broadened the scope of his expressive abilities each time, transforming a goal into a new beginning, a limit into a frontier. Olivieri then set out in pursuit, painting to create environments of transcendence, where he could obtain a passage, a threshold of access through which to scrutinise the hidden side
of knowledge and understanding and thus start again, returning to try yet another painting with which, perhaps, by venturing into an arcane and ineffable fate, he could accomplish his eternal mission and arrive at a proclaimed universal truth.
According to what he has taught us through his painted testimonies over more than sixty years of uninterrupted reflection, and borrowing one of his exemplary definitions, painting has the task of attempting the path of extreme vision, a mission of no small importance requiring time, effort, perseverance and consistency. Not only for him, who creates works by debating with an infinite modulation of refined and elegant colours, pure and at times intensely dramatic, but also, or perhaps above all, for the observer, who is left silently alone before the totemic presence of the painting. The dizzying space of dimensions opened up by Olivieri, with the effort of traversing the pictorial medium, pursuing small shifts and minute variations, arrives at the most important determination, which for him is an unexpected achievement that for others, given the slightest intuitive reverberation of their sensitivity, would have been a resounding failure: the point of arrival is to have understood that the sign-gesture that produces Painting is not, and never will be, resolvable. This unsolvability opens the doors for Olivieri to develop a colour that is experienced as an inseparable absolute space-time identity and then finds, in light, the resonant power capable of arousing the vibration of every colour, both in the modulations of shadow where it retreats, reducing itself to a minimum but without disappearing completely, and in the highest peaks of brightness where it seems to surpass, in value, everything. Colour – whether painted or drawn – has, in fact,
been praised by a wise philosopher, so much so that the images that sprang from his visions never remained frozen as plastically immobile subjects on surfaces, but rather became a place permeable to emotions and reflections, a membrane of intelligible space stretched to otherwise inexpressible depths.
In darkness and light, he searches for the deep breath of light that has always drawn him: alchemically hermetic, his colours find their raison d’être in the mysterious flickering of light. The luminous factor, after all, gives and grants, but also takes away and subtracts something from his painting that makes it perfect and precise in that courageous and daring dispute with colour. Here we return to the concept of the extremity of seeing, which in all his research is not anchored to a circumscribed and limited request to intensify the value of perception; it is not just a perceptual hypothesis and, for this reason, accepting to go beyond the dimensional threshold of the visible requires light to be an active, true and concrete substance. The solutions he has found become a territory where rarefactions and densifications, incandescence and extinguishing want and demand to admit the value of their manifestation as an existing reality. And to do this, the mind and soul must reason, commit themselves to resolving the questions of the gaze that lingers on the indefinite in which Olivieri scatters traces of his aesthetic-philosophical investigation.
Seeing his painting presents itself as an ontological possibility of light, because as we observe the painting we transcend its objective limits and place ourselves in a position to insist on an ongoing process of that entity which appears in the chromatic material. The more this substantial colour lightens, moving from the dark tones of the 1970s to the bright tones of the 1990s and 2000s, the more it highlights the forward shift of his acquired insights and, paradoxically, the more he shows us, the less we seem to understand. The vital core of his work lies here, in trying to immerse us in the never superficial duty of viewing, to the bitter end, a form of painting that, by dematerialising itself, cannot be possessed or conquered, but continues to make us think and understand and, returning to his words, is elusive and fluid.
In this sense, the exhibition, through a careful selection of works covering the artist’s entire career and summarising the entire trajectory of Claudio Olivieri’s complex language of expression, promotes the primacy of a style of painting that is never satisfied with itself, always precise and alive, which, far from compromising itself too much with the partial and relative inconsistency of reality, still today seeks to give an account of the intangible.
