Añil
Flaminio Gualdoni
"Almost astonished veronicas": when facing Luca Serra's works, Francesco Arcangeli's ancient critical shard (1958) comes up to memory. Another one is the 1890 Maurice Denis' opening line, through which he highlights "the fertile concept of a flat surface covered with colors in a certain order." Both sentences are related to a way of painting, which is anything but abstract - and to a certain extent, the topic of representation or not is one of the least successful in modern art and one of the least interesting for this artist - but they are useful to measure the relationship wanted by Serra between the observer and the art work. It is a matter of doing and being done, it is not an image conceivable without its specific body. The problem of the mental and physical process, in which the artist dives in completely - and always consists of interrogations, never of verifications or even demonstrations - is its own concrete physiology, the story of its own future.
Serra's generation is now mature and did realize that the artwork is not just a matter of moving our body's physical and emotional energy into the painting's body. It does not even consist of releasing experience into the cold essence of minimizations, where awareness is too often replaced by calculation. Neither it represents a prearranged and totally reconceived way of certification, nothing but a further dress added by talent and style.
Recalling Gastone Novelli's solemn commitment ("I will never make a painting in my life again, but I will create only events, and if they will be too big, never mind"), Serra chose to deal with the supremely ambiguous fullness of painting. He transformed it in the most proper place for a tenacious, ruthless and inflexible way of thinking, each time hidden and accessible through those concrete actions leading to the birth of the work of art. Even Serra may say: "I am fascinated by the event, by what occurs beyond my control and my intentions": it must be added he is also extraneous to any hint of reflection about painting. Here, painting is the unique protagonist. He definitely quits the outdated idea of control as moving from an operational planning to a necessary result, whether it may be complying with a dubious ritualization of the pictorial fact, or following what has been brilliantly defined by Jean-Bertrand Barrère as “mentalité décennale”, which was also confirmed by Paul Valéry with his “l’ennui du choc”."If the painting is exactly what I am able to do or give - says Serra - why should I paint?"wonders properly Serra.
He chose and still chooses to assign a place, and especially a time, to his thinking. The location is the suspended and silent space where he works in perfect solitude around Almerìa. His isolation is truly far away from the snobbish loneliness associated with genius, as well as it is physically distant from those places where art discussion becomes too often blague, a chatty farce, a frivolous game lost among skepticism and masturbation. This place conserved a different measure of time, which Serra believes fundamental. This is a mental time, made of reflections and questions, hypothesis and innovative creations, which work as a trigger. It is the long, arduous, complex, examining time of the painting's creation. This is a crucial time, in which everything is crucial, since any choice emanates and absorbs new thoughts and new questions. Serra writes in his notes: "The pictorial work is not literally painted, but is, rather, the execution of a cast of the previously stretched painting on a prepared surface”. Practically: the chain of actions played by Serra to realize the whole operation expects the disposition of pictorial substances, different by nature and density, on a selected surface. Then a canvas, previously treated with adherent acrylic, is placed over it. The substance impression will create another substance, different from the previous one. In simple terms, this action recalls a bit of a cast, a pictorial rip, as well as of Robert Rauschenberg's transfer printmaking, even if this was conceived in a completely different environment, with different procedures starting from existing images. Instead, for Serra the original surface represents only a necessary but totally de-identified precondition. The effective conclusion happens once the canvas had completed its transfer, modifying the initial situation in a definitive way. The transfer concerns the traces of gestures spreading colors, the clear cadences along the two juxtaposed supports, while the same tones are matched through their rough or nervous identities. Through this transfer, surface becomes a totally extraneous image to something handmade: Alberto Zanchetta reads these canvases "as if they were acheiropoieta", "not painted by human hands". As we said, like "astonished veronicas".
It is clear that the primary qualifying element is the removal of the gestural effect, the physical relationship between agent and acted, together with the addition of an essential acceptance of all implicated variations and accidents. So, it really consists of observing the painting's development, helping it to happen, while making crucial the gap between the author's forming imagination, an intention open even to its own partial contradiction, and the final result. To recall Duchampian filigrees, Serra's option is not connected neither to indifference or indetermination. The quantity of unpredictable or unplanned factors - such as the substances' reactions during the process, due to the light, the air, the cast phases - leaves a casual possibility, which is created and welcomed by the artist, an accomplice and not the owner of the event. Because of these aspects, and only for them, the artificiality of this process shows some similarities to the ceramist's activity. He does not work on the work of art, but on its prediction. He accepts the many accidental factors happening between the fabrile process and the solutions coming out from the open oven. He loves, with emotion and surprise, the final result.
By a reading point of view, Serra's works offer a strongly tactile perception, although with a low objecthood rate. In his mature visual economy, where architectural pauses are nothing but visual cadences, they are not the result of a composition, differently from the not-objective tradition they come from, but as a maçonner, essential to sustain the skeleton of visual expectations, spreading vertical and horizontal lines for the balance of space and nothing more. Through a distant confrontation, these pauses are close, in a certain way, to the visual veining in the first chalks and the first Achromes by Manzoni, such as their mere elemental structure, presented in its absolute concreteness and made of partitions created inside substance itself, instead of being imposed artificially following a previous plan. Similarly, they do support, through Serra's basic structure, applications, additions, changes in the pace and volume of substance as well as gestural variations.
Serra's work on tones is even more complex and fascinating, revealing his pure and naked poetic abilities. Even in this case, it is pointless to focus on the naturalistic leftovers hidden in his combustive blacks, the various range of rose ochre colors, the greys coming from cement, his reds at times deriving from dark browns, given the artist's accurate selection to transform them in not-objective statements, as it happened, to a certain extent, to Ben Nicholson in the Thirties. The sour and enchanting nature surrounding Almerìa must have influenced him, who grew up celebrating the ground colors of his Bologna, in a similar way as Horta de Ebro did on the young Picasso. It is simple for him to combine this visual scent and tendency with his discrete and never declamatory approach, full of careful hesitations. Then comes the incursion of blue as a counter-melody (and those who know ancient Greek colors are aware that the primary cadences were already between the ground and the sky), taking important responsibilities regarding weight and movements in the last artworks, even if it avoids meretricious sensitivity or easy visual and stating interceptions. Therefore, many elements are now stable in Serra's painting pot, such as precise pictorial choices coexisting with sharp post-conceptual thoughts, the elaboration of a slow and revitalizing process - time is the artist's first measure - which prefers focusing on operating rather than executing, and the coincidence between the internal story of an artwork and the existential awareness of the artist. His paintings require a different reaction from the observer, in tone or not with an aware expectation of recognition and definition. Looking at Serra's paintings is not a matter of question/answer: it is the experience of temporal extension, taste, intensity.
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The personal exhibition dedicated to Luca Serra at ABC-ARTE is documented within this volume, summarizing the basics of artist's observation analysis. Observing Luca Serra’s artwork is an intense, timeless experience, in which several factors contribute to making it a vision clearly no longer abstract.
The title, Añil (Indigo), refers to the dominant presence of a blue in contrast with the earth tones that structure the composition of the canvas itself. A way of painting, his, which deepens the direct relationship between gesture and surface, leading the viewer to a reflection around the very nature of painting.
In his work, through an acquisition and great technical skill, colour, transformed from tone to timbre (the pictorial work derives from a cast of painting on a sculptural basis), obliges the surface to return the gesture. On the show, unpublished works on paper and canvas have been collected, some of which great dimensions, which are the result of a reflection on the dynamism and energy inherent in the main element of the exhibition: the blue colour.
In Serra, through a gestural representation capable of representing a real volume arranged in solemn and almost sacral scenes, as well as in the Scrovegni Chapel and in antithesis to it, the blue lives in a balance between the gravitas of classical culture and the uncertainties and concessions of unreal contemporary background.
The artist's bond with Spain, lived and absorbed in painting, is revealed unequivocally also in the titles of the works. Anything but interpretative, the denominations of the paintings preserve their suggestions, recalling and satisfying the aspirations of the artist.
Antonio Borghese
Head consultant & director, ABC-ARTE