GIAN BERTO VANNI: 70 YEARS OF PAINTING

Taken as a whole, Vanni’s pictorial work is marked by an extremely personal vision, far from the currents and movements that characterized the second half of the twentieth century. Nonetheless his research does not lie outside that of his contemporaries and nor does it shrink from commenting upon the surrounding historic and artistic reality.

The issues he confronts are profoundly contemporary, and it is interesting to observe here, briefly, how they have evolved parallel to the historical phases through which he has passed.

After an initial phase, where he was interested principally in European art and the investigations undertaken by the historical avant-garde movements, Vanni began to integrate increasingly diverse and distant realities. These developed over the course of the years, in a parallel cosmogony, where metaphorical structures assume multiple meanings, tied by contradictory relationships. With these complex structures, he has been able to express his experience of a contemporary world that finds its most significant characterization in the globalization of languages and contents.

Vanni’s formulations are not meant to be a critique of this condition, but rather a growing awareness that it is accepted as a given. But his work also expresses his world’s unresolved contradictions: for example, how the complexity of the communications network does not necessarily correspond to a generalized comprehension; or how the simultaneity of languages is resolved in the multiplication of contradictions and misunderstandings; or how a proliferation of information hides the substance of contents.

Vanni has chosen to express this phenomenology with his own pictorial means, which he attempts to devise with continually renewed formal solutions. Parallel to the evolution of reality, in only a few decades, from a Eurocentric and Cartesian structure to a global structure, Vanni’s paintings have grown into increasingly complex and rich compositions.

As we have seen, since 1965 Vanni has been successfully formulating his pictorial syntax, in a dialectic based on syncretism. His earlier work consists principally of a progressive acquisition of all its constituent languages. In the period immediately following this early work, he explores the consequences of his research, coming up with solutions that move beyond the painting in space and time. This was an obligatory stage, which provided him with temporal discontinuity, a fundamental element for his approach. If spatial-stylistic ambiguity is immediately evident and already present in his works of ‘65, temporal ambiguity comes into play ten years later. The simultaneous presentation, on the same canvas, of various moments of the pictorial process, in fact, represents a rupture of the unity of time, now added to the previously abandoned unity of space. In this way Vanni expresses his synthesis of the two movements that had most influenced him in his early years as a painter: Futurism and Cubism. His language thus becomes enriched by all the elements needed for the development of his poetics.

This is articulated in spatial contradictions created by conflicting elements, superimposed on various levels, affirming their own existence through the negation of presupposed systems of logic that support other alternative readings. To achieve these complex structures, Vanni also refers to grammars taken from literature, such as a Pirandellian interpretation of reality, or the delicate balances dictated by counterpoint in music.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, the images that take form are expressive of a synthesis of disparate experiences. In this way he arrives at a systematic eclecticism, to express the increasingly manifest superimposition of heterogeneous linguistic references, through the use of extremely diverse formal components. The choice of a syncretistic structuring of language finds legitimacy, not only in the interpretation of everyday reality, but also in the importance that Vanni places on a dialectical comparison between the contemporary artist and any moment of artistic research in the past, released from chronological hierarchies. This confrontation, while liberated from the concept of evolution in terms of the history of art, underlines a need to keep alive, in the present, ties with figurative situations that have come before. However Vanni does not want this influx to be confused with anecdotal quotations, with which he finds himself in open contention. If anything, he intends to confirm, through the insertion of these elements, the actual coexistence of esthetic stimuli freed from their spatial-temporal placements. In this way a museum can end up being as stimulating as a contemporary art exhibit. And in a further expansion of the concept, this is how, today, one can be subjected to equally diversified visual and linguistic experiences, in a continuous succession that juxtaposes the most disparate images. Indeed, the microscopic detail of cellular life can coexist with a satellite image of areas of desertification on the earth. Vanni uses these references in his complex architecture, aggregating them with references from the psychical realm of his memories. In this museum of memory of his own making, space and time merge in a myriad of perceptions that are multiform and in a state of constant transformation. It becomes clear that this is not a simple operation of assemblage. Rather it is a process of bringing to the canvas the infinite interpenetrations that take place in memory, between experiences accumulated over the years and the all-encompassing dimension of the contemporary. And these then combine, both within the same canvas and through series of paintings: Byzantine fragments and primitive scratches, with the structure of a coastline or the cellular organism observed under a microscope. In a continuous multiplication, external references combine in turn with other, internal ones: elements of earlier paintings, a fundamental part of the visual legacy from which he draws, re-emerge within new structures, modifying their significance. The result is a complex world where formal episodes and compositional structures present multiple interpretive possibilities, revealing an existential doubt about the true significance of things, and the equal importance of different truths, despite contradictory appearances.

If ambiguity, metamorphism, and multiplicity are the terms that best characterize Vanni’s work, it is no accident that he has chosen New York as an observation point from which to operate. In fact, this is where all the contradictions of the contemporary world coincide, creating a constant urban metamorphism in the simultaneity of opposite realities, also underlined by the eighty or so different languages that are spoken. In counterpoint to this fluid and mutable reality, Vanni interposes long periods in his studio in Greece, where he can compare these stimuli with the essential elements of nature and sea, in the light of Mediterranean culture.

His research develops from these presuppositions and evolves according to a principle of formal eclecticism, in a tangible manifestation of conceptual syncretism. In fact the artist is in constant pursuit of the expression of a single theme: the small, fragmented element of a reality corresponding to a system of diverse signs, in conflict with natural elements, governed by a fascination with chaotic irrationality. The result provides confirmation of Vanni’s intention to resolve, through formal solutions, the philosophical and existential issues that the artist is called upon to face.