EDMONDO BACCI AND THE VENETIAN SPATIALISM

PAINTING IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

“Abstract art had to be overcome because of the implicit limits of decorativism into it that it was already worthless and tired; the several ways of Naturalism, eternally binding to the imitation and out of breath romantic passion and it was still needed to win poetics, rules as such, concerning cubism or futurism, abstractionism or neoplasticism: the free fantasy had to embrace the modernity, without any mortification and prejudice” (Anton Giulio Ambrosini, Spatialism and the Italian painting in the XX century, 1953).

THE EXHIBITION

The Gallery Gracis was happy to inaugurate “Edmondo Bacci and the Venetian spatialism”, in collaboration with the Reve Art Gallery of Bologna. On display there were about 30 artworks of Edmondo Bacci, Mario Deluigi, Ennio Finzi, Virgilio Guidi, Gino Morandis, Luciano Gaspari, Bruna Gasparini, Saverio Rampin and Vinicio Vianello. Some of them came from Venetian prestigious private collections. The spatialist movement was born with the Manifesto Blanco (Argentina – 1946) of Lucio Fontana. It found its own prolific ground of diffusion in Veneto, as a protest against the resistance to the contemporaneity of Venice.

The Manifesto outlined the artists’ urgencies of the first postwar period, that they meant to go beyond the principles which had leaded the artistic doing before the great break caused by wartime events, putting the dimensions of time and space into the artwork.

The spatial artist watched over the visible dimension, directed his look towards the elsewhere, observed carefully the space and contemplated the absolute value of the light and about what constitutes at molecular and particulate level, what surrounds us, but it is invisible. The scientific discoveries, nuclear physics were reasons of impulses and solicitations for the artists. They meant to obtain by artworks a new reality until then unknown, the idea of a tangible space, made concrete thanks to the new technologies and space explorations. In 1947, when Fontana returned to Milan, he continued with the editing of the following manifestos, expanding the movement requests. In other words, it meant adapting the artistic language to the conquests of scientific progress, a process that culminated in him with the exit of work from the contours of two-dimensional canvas.

SOME HISTORY CHARACTERS

The art gallery owner Carlo Cardazzo contributed significantly to the strengthening of the Milan-Venice axis in those years. In Milan with Galleria del Naviglio and in Venice with Galleria del Cavallino, he became the dissemination centre of spatial thought. There were other figures of connection between both cities such as Vinicio Vianello, who since 1946 he attended regularly the Milanese capital, and Mario Deluigi, who since March 1947 inaugurated his solo exhibit at Galleria del Naviglio, where he met Anton Giulio Ambrosini for the first time.
In Venice, spatialism became a collective place where the previous research could be developed, creating debate between different generations of artists and solving the dispute between figurative art and abstract art.

THE ARTWORKS

Taking into consideration those spaces as reality, that concept of universal subject, of which science, philosophy, art, in the context of the knowledge and intuition fed the spirit of the man”: so 1951 Manifesto affirmed, where for the first time the signatures of the “Venetians” Anton Giulio Ambrosini, Mario Deluigi, Virgilio Guidi, Berto Morucchio and Vinicio Vianello appeared. After two years, on the occasion of the Space exhibition at Sala degli specchi (Hall of mirrors ) of Ca’ Giustinian, Anton Giulio Ambrosini published “Lo spazialismo e la pittura italiana del XX secolo” (“Spatialism and the Italian painting in the XX century”), to which Edmondo Bacci, Bruno De Toffoli, Tancredi, and Gino Morandis joined.

THE VENETIAN ARTISTS

Even if their attentive experience was focused on the most futuristic aspects of the scientific and technological reality, the Venetian artists had a very different approach from the Milanese exponents. Their approach reiterated, instead, the individual imaginative freedom. This freedom translated into inclusivity as well, a distinctive trait that allowed many artists in taking part in spatial experiences, even without signing the manifestos. This was the case of Ennio Finzi, Bruna Gasparini, Luciano Gaspari and Saverio Rampin, whose works on display were absolutely compliant with the spatial statements.

The Venetian movement had with Fontana a relationship defined as “intimately dialectical“, using Crispolti’s words. Fontana passed over the pictorial dimension for going beyond the canvas space, whereas the Venetian artists remained faithful to it, preferring the use of the pictorial subject.
For Bacci, the adhesion to the spatialism was conciliated with the first attempt of Factories and Construction sites abstraction. Artworks evoked the author’s sensibility towards social subject matters and, simultaneously, became an opportunity to bring forward the discourse on abstraction. Since 1954 Bacci’s painting changed and became more careful to the authentic sense of time and place: the colour spread into the light, the transition to the abstraction was complete and assumed an explosive and detonating strength.

The termination of spatialism happened around the end of 1958, but during that time period the Venetian set was still extremely vital, solid and coherent around the idea of image spatiality as a place of relationship and incessant metamorphosis of the concept.