Alberto Delmonte

Thinking Out Loud

We should accept that any creative effort operates at the limit of what can be expressed, and implies the pretension of spanning boundaries in a way that no one has achieved before.

Any work that does not entail this effort runs the risk of being born dead, without vitality.

Accordingly, all initiating creativity is an essential factor for a work of art, and at the same time it broadens the traditional world.

In this regard, however, what always occurs is that new contributions maintain a profound relationship with the production realized up to that point, in order to prevent these continual human efforts from dissolving into chaotic discontinuities.

It’s as though the integrity of existence were to be reestablished time and again. We can see that this happens with life itself, in the field of scientific knowledge, and naturally, the same can be observed in art.

And this is because a continual, consecutive movement of constant rupture could destroy or threaten the integrity, coherence and historical continuity of human labor.

This is precisely a thing that can be objectified in art. The uninterrupted succession of avant garde movements that accept no precedents, and purport only to initiate wind up, in the majority of cases, showing images—testimonial forms of the plastic arts—that are simply superficial.

On the basis of these concepts, and considering that the creators and movements from the first half of the century were elaborating a new mode of communication that produced a rupture with the Renaissance code of representing three-dimensional space, it is possible to think that we are in the presence of and utilizing a new plastic thinking.

Therefore, just as Massaccio, Ucello, etc. found and developed a mode of operation in the 15th century, while the creators of the 16th century, Titian, Veronese, etc., received a new code, yet their work did not consist of producing a new change, but of being the continuation of theirs, then one might ask whether perhaps some similar function might be awaiting us, the artists acting in recent decades: the mission of developing the plastic thinking of the 20th century?

In this sense, unmistakable signs can already be observed. The avant garde movements from decades ago made sense; they began to become a stereotype of sorts, and for this very reason, to lack content and meaning. The only thing shown by the people cultivating them are confusing works with no depth, which have only served to increase viewers’ incomprehension and distrust regarding contemporary artworks.

I think that our route is definitively to accept a code—one we have not created—and to receive it as our inheritance.

To all of this, which, as I have indicated, constitutes this century’s plastic thinking, we should incorporate elements, adjustments, and variants that affirm it as a mode of communication.

And it is my firm belief that it is here, in precisely these elements and variants, that—according to where each creation originates—the poetics of the place, the people’s cultural patrimony and that of the continent should appear.

Translation: Tamara Stuby