By Alberto Fiz
Basically I just work for myself, in order to find out a bit more about what I see. (Alberto Giacometti)
The second half of the '90s was characterised by an almost obsessive wish to employ the body as a constantly changing element. The cybernetic revolution, scientific discoveries, plastic surgery, and genetic experiments have all deeply conditioned our perception of ourselves: the self has been modified to the point of being transformed into something beyond the body and controlled only with difficulty. As Sci-fi movies have suggested, the alien is a part of ourselves: it has led the way to a new construction (or deconstruction) of the body as an artificial evolutionary process offering cybernetic man the wholly virtual possibility of denying his own existence. The Post Human that Jeffrey Deitch postulated in 1992 is, if we look closely, only the latest, most fascinating variant of a long and venerable tradition of rites, masquerades and ceremonies aimed at warding off the shadow of death. Basically the means change but the ends are always those of eluding the inevitability of nature. The body, from this point of view, becomes a governable object, the field for experimentation and artifice that slowly takes an autonomous path by detaching itself from the self.
Giovanni Manfredini is opposed to this view. He is convinced that the basic aim of art is a process of self-awareness in which aesthetic inquiry manages to possess the individual for what it is in itself. He alters the relationship between the elements and disregards that eternal conflict between nature and artifice, the alien and the alienated, metaphor and metastasis that characterises a large part of contemporary inquiries. Obviously he does not oppose this, but he thinks of it as something already a part of a debate leading to a different approach, one that is more linguistic in character. In fact Manfredini begins with a different aim and considers the body, his own body, as a subject worthy of inquiry in itself and not as an object in the hands of some Frankenstein-like artist. Creative power derives from the existence of matter as body, and not as material.
So there is no longer a separation between the body and creative action as a result of the symbiotic relationship that Tommaso Trini refers to: "Manfredini doesn't paint even today. If anything he prefigures. Except that today his work can well be called painting. A mutant form of painting. A symbiotic painting." This is one of the main aspects of his work which he does not consider figurative but, rather, as a place for becoming, somewhere where reality takes on a precise meaning through the respiration of the skin. Manfredini's body is imprinted on the film of his painting leaving behind it the traces of a physical and vital landscape. Contemplation no longer exists, only action in a synergetic exchange with the surface which absorbs and, at the same time, emanates energy.
As we know, the artist prepares his canvases with an experimental technique mixing natural elements, an impasto of vinyl glue, water, and crushed shells. This mixture, worthy of the proto-chemist he is, is dried and 'painted' with smoke and fire which completely cover the available space until it is uniform. It is now ready to receive the indelible imprint of the body, almost as though it were the maternal womb. So the canvas becomes the place where the work is absorbed as part of a physical process of visualisation, and where the support participates directly in the creative transformation.
References to Yves Klein seem too obvious for comment, but it is as well to note certain key differences with respect to the French artist's Anthropometries. In the first place, there is the use of the artist's own body (whereas Klein was the director of an operation enacted by the models) which demonstrate the artist's direct participation, a transference between the represented self and vision. Secondly, we should analyse Manfredini's two-fold creative act in which he not only leaves his marks on the canvas but enters into synergy with the material, creating a kind of complicity and integration with the surface. which is itself an active element of the representation. And, finally, the artist does not in any way emphasise the planning stages of the work: he carries out his performances in the silence of his studio where he creates his self-duplicates by pressing himself for an instant against the canvas so as to create a dematerialised copy which results from the projection of himself.
Both skin and soul, then, adhere to the surface in a Tentativo di esistenza ('an attempt to exist'), as the artist calls his works, which takes place within the surface by way of a passage from one identity to another. This is perhaps the first time that painting reacts and becomes itself an integral part of a physical process and not simply a representation.
The fire Manfredini employs does not attack the canvas nor does it change its elements as happens, for example, with Alberto Burri. On the contrary, it takes on a compositional role and becomes a field for physicality, producing a monochrome effect that reminds us of old photographic prints: there is no violence, only an intimate harmony that allows the material to display itself as a living body ready to absorb another living body.
"My duplicate appears on a surface that is a kind of skin over which I spread darkness, various layers of smoke that blacken but are not fixed by the surface. Two skins touch and exchange energy, leaving a mark, a kind of Holy Shroud", Manfredini explained in an interview with Maura Pozzati. Basically his art is a kind of rebirth, part of a progressive recapturing of being. The body, in fact, is the only light within the black surface, almost as though it wished to represent symbolically an underground cavern or, rather, the darkness of the cavern. The body is born from this dimension of the subconscious in a kind of mysterious and primordial initiation. On the other hand, the body is the only outlet for an inquiry in which the artist-creator is denied the possibility of facing the light. In fact Manfredini can use a flame on his work but only in order to darken or negate, never to discover or unveil. This is an important thought for an inquiry into the confrontation of life and death, of ghenos and thanatos, darkness and light in a progressive appropriation of the visible as it emerges from the shadows.
Manfredini's inquiry comes as a reaction against globalisation. He is aware that to be freed from this it is necessary to use the individuality of the body/imprint and deny the seductive play of appearances. "My work changes because I change too: there is no need to invent a new position because that emerges on its own account", the artist has explained. He is not concerned with a narcissistic and self-referential operation but suggests himself as a metaphor for an art that becomes aware of reality.
Deep down his task is that of awaking sensibility by pursuing an investigation into the living body where skin and soul, reason and feeling, matter and form coincide. His art (though we might just as well call it painting) has no place for antinomies but, instead, looks for a relationship with existence, understood as something both to see and to be seen by, the subject and object of contemplation. Gudrun Inboden has written, "The subject no longer knows the world from a distance but has become an essential part of it due to the fact that it touches it and is touched by it". So it is evident that in Manfredini's work perception is not only an element that has to do with the visible but one that has the aspect of an organic and tactile process that continues following a physical and psychological relationship representing the basic foundation of his art.
(1) T. Trini, Simbiote una forma di vita in Giovanni Manfredini, Fondazione Mudima, Milan, 1996; catalogue of the show at the Fondazione Mudima, Milan, November 1996-December 1997, p.5.
(2) G. Inboden, Il logos del corpo vivente in Il logos del corpo vivente, curated by G. Inboden, catalogue of the show at Castello di Rivoli, 16 March-15 September 1996, p.12.