allegato scansionato - Archivio Crispolti Arte Contemporanea

00A_Saggio CrispoltiOKk2:02_Saggio Campiglio 12-03-2009 14:57 Pagina 27
that alters our perceptual structures, detonates our sensibility,
and assigns a new destiny to the image. We
gradually enter the culture of the new civilization of
global communication, which art is supposed to serve
as a humanistic vehicle. Art necessarily becomes communicable
or ceases to exist. There is no more room today
for ivory towers or gardens of Arcadia, for painters
arousing outcry and scandal, and a fortiori no more
room for the cultural night of a Sergio Vacchi.”
At the end of the encounter, which could have no outcome
other than a dialectically adversarial presentation,
the French critic did, however, acknowledge that the
painter—first Bolognese, then Roman and now the lord
of a castle in the Sienese hills—have a role of prophecy
and testimony for the future. Pointing out that, “after
so many premonitory visions, Vacchi had also foreseen
this realm of total communication or comunicationis
religio” in his paintings of 2000, where he in fact “clearly
defines the apocalyptic atmosphere in which we are
living through this period of meditation that heralds a
change in civilization [...] This is the point we have arrived
at today: the sensual horror upon which Vacchi
has drawn in Abraham’s night of the ages in order to
present us with its organic permanence, canvas after
canvas, all the way along his existential pathway, naturally
leads to the apocalypse of our third millennium.
In the monumental solitude of the Castello di Grotti,
Vacchi has witnessed the last spasms of a moribund culture
awaiting the inexorable arrival of a new mankind.”
According to Restany, while this new species “will be
conditioned in its perceptual approach to the world
by the impact of electronic information and the
progress of biotechnological science through intelligent
cloning,” it will also be able “to decipher the dual premonitory
sense of the apocalypse gushing out in the
bosom of Vacchi’s cultural night: first of all, the explosive
negation of the linear sense of time, an immemorial
concept that we have made into a universal
law, from birth to death. Vacchi’s apocalyptic vision
deliberately combines symbols and figures from different
cultures and eras in a unified setting. […] Then
we have Vacchi’s second premonitory dimension: the
organic symbology of the primary language of the
body crosses the boundary into horror. […] Another
view will be taken of Vacchi’s tortured, mutilated and
debased bodies as conceptual evidence of a more complete
melding of the sensory and the mental.” As the
critic concludes in a final and meaningful act of acknowledgment
to his mutually antagonistic challenger
and interlocutor, while Vacchi will certainly “not see
this new mankind, he hands it the key to a world of
premonitory riddles that will be palpably evident truths
tomorrow, something like a message in a bottle thrown
into the sea.” 14
In actual fact, however, the painter’s monitory projection,
which is also recognized by Restany, does not only
constitute the reason for a confrontation with no safety
net between different mentalities, passions and
worlds, given concrete shape through the interplay of
the two different positions in the meeting with the
French critic on 10 June six years ago at Rozzano in
the offices of Domus and in the resulting text for the
catalogue of the exhibition in Macerata. Above all, even
if we leave aside the confrontation highlighting it, it represents
the central significance of the crucial challenge
that Vacchi’s consciously “discordant” and substantially
non-standardized creative trajectory as a whole has
come to pose on the scene of contemporary society
through a markedly antagonistic diversion adopting a
monitory and critical stance toward a facile form of
“modernity” in the name of an extreme defence of
handing down the experience of the humanistic legacy.
And this is a process unfolding over half a century
through different moments of exploration and dissection
of the possibilities of imaginative pictorial communication
developed with a freedom that is absolute
even though by no means easily attained. It goes from
the horizon of the perception of the initial domestic and
behavioural invasiveness of technology in the years of
the Art Informel experience, opposing the reduction of
contemporary man to “one dimension”, already within
a perspective of consentient consumeristic persuasion,
all the way to challenging the purported dehumanizing,
deindividualizing, homogenizing, globalized
standardization within a planetary, induced and accepted
reduction to consumeristic availability.
3. “for future reference” in a form of historicity
“introjected” through “self-devouring”
Enrico Crispolti
Restany was certainly not equal to Vacchi in his perception
of the process of deterioration underway, the
wearing entropy of the “planetary influence of the media”
and the mentality of exaggerated consumerism that
appears to motivate its invasiveness and lethal suppression
of any opportunity for autonomous creativity. The
French critic therefore made even acknowledgment of
the oppositional thrust of the painter’s work a matter
of future reference. Perception of evident signs of this
deterioration (among other things, not revealed but
tragically confirmed by the events of 11 September
2001 in New York) instead offered Vacchi convincing
evidence of the possibility of his visionary testimony
proving effective in the shorter term. 15 In other words,
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