allegato scansionato - Archivio Crispolti Arte Contemporanea

00A_Saggio CrispoltiOKk2:02_Saggio Campiglio 12-03-2009 14:57 Pagina 15
The Scandal of a “Discordant” Trajectory
(within an “Introjected” Historicity)
Enrico Crispolti
1. “… before the definitive impact”
(with a foreword on duration)
“There is a remark by Kafka that I find very mysterious:
‘Our only salvation is death, but not this death.’
It is as though my ship had sprung leaks all over and
was set on a collision course for the rocks. Well, I depict
these minutes of waiting—which turn out to be
decades and perhaps even a century—before the definitive
impact, after which I do not know whether I or
anyone else from my ship will reach shore safely. This
‘beyond’—beyond death—remains as though suspended
for me, perhaps awaiting the other death that Kafka
talks about.” Sergio Vacchi made this observation in an
interview with Marco Tonelli published in the catalogue
of the anthological exhibition that I organized
within the framework of the Fifth Scipione Prize held
at Palazzo Ricci, Macerata, in 2002. 1
There are substantially two reasons for placing these
words at the beginning of a highly demanding exploration
of the motivations, methods and phases of the
work developed by the initially Bolognese then Roman
and now happily Sienese painter over some sixty years
of intense creative activity. The first of these reasons is
the fact that, unlike at least some of the masters who
served as points of reference for his development, Vacchi
has undergone no dimming of creativity over the
years and shows no sign of starting to wane. In short,
there has been no perilous slackening either of his imaginative
tension or of the relevance of the rationale implicit
in his oeuvre. Indeed, his creativity has been
recharged over the years through changes in imaginative
circumstances, right up to the extraordinary intensity
of the last ten years or so happily spent in conscious
and alert withdrawal in the Castello di Grotti in
the Sienese countryside.
In assessing the creative contribution of many of the leading
figures of the twentieth century, it is very often necessary
to focus primarily—if not indeed exclusively—
on what was achieved in their youth or early maturity.
(Even with reference solely to the Italian sphere, the examples
include Carrà, Balla, De Chirico, Campigli,
Burri and Morlotti, whereas the exceptions are very few
indeed: certainly Fontana and Cagli as well as Arturo
Martini before them, but then also Moreni, for example,
albeit in a creative trajectory that was not, all in all,
quite so prolonged.) In terms of rich fertility and motility
of iconic-visionary invention, the further creative
phase experienced by Vacchi—now in his eighties and
hence chronologically in his “old age”—since the late
1990s and on into the new millennium has proved to
be one of most memorable of those developed during
his sixty years of impassioned and utter identification
with a form of pictorial communication nourished by
sound existential roots. It is unquestionably one of the
peaks of his creativity, and not only in a sense that could
be described as complementary with respect to other past
periods of creative intensity (as in the case of Fontana,
with such moments spread out over a period of forty
years). At its highest level of imaginative intensity and
complexity of problematic probing, and within a new
phase of fertility and further and sometimes extraordinary
spontaneity of symbolic invention, the period encapsulates
and enhances intentions variously formulated
by the painter during his long experience.
The second reason is that, precisely through this extraordinary
new operative intensity, the host of motivations
underpinning the imaginative monitory challenges formulated
over the years in Vacchi’s painting now almost
appear to afford a glimpse (ideologically of course, but
through emotively involved intuition) of a perilous final
goal, almost a prophetic teleology of an antagonistic
creative course that is deeply involved in existential
terms. This has in fact finally arrived at an ultimate and
definitive question in which what is at stake is both the
artist’s identity and ours, the identity of the times and
the individual and social behaviours we experience, in
terms of a vividly prefigured human eschatology of an
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