Armando Verdiglione, Milan, 4th October 1998
Alfonso Frasnedi is born in Bologna. Where he is never at home, never comfortable, never at ease within the life of the province.
Bologna: or of the nomination. Bologna, as Jerusalem. Impossible, for him, to speak in his own tongue, to quarrel, rumour, chatter. Impossible the compromise with the academy or any other national, local nomenclature. Impossible the servilism of common place. Bologna is the basis of the a-tongue. And through art and invention the city can now be constituted, with no more duration. The city makes the way, instead of the opposite: there is no more empire.
His first schooling occurs through American magazines and international litterature, namedly French and American and through museums and art galleries. As Jorge Luis Borges for poetry, Alfonso Frasnedi is, formerly and latterly, a reader: Reading stands at the tip of his painting, of what remains. Along an itinerary of query, of questioning, of investigation, of research and of happenings around the text of art and litterature.
Alfonso Frasnedi recognises he had an art maestro, Regazzi, and a life teacher, Virgilio Guidi. "From Regazzi I apprehended the technique, while Guidi showed me how an artist lives." And he adds:" However, I'm convinced that the years passed at school had almost no influence at all on my work or my choices. I have never been able to stand the teachers I had. All my preparation, practically, occurred out of school." One of the teachers, Arnaldo Gentili, puts the students on guard against the impressionists, that he considers too avantgarde.
Alfonso Frasnedi starts his first exhibition at eighteen years old, in 1952. And in 1956, at the age of twenty two, he takes part in Venice's Biennial exhibition of Modern Art. And this crowns a series of recognitions and verifications he's already had and an international consecration as an artist. The exhibitions, moreover, are already in many Italian and foreign cities, in Europe and elsewhere.
From 1956 to 1961,Bologna's Collegio Venturoli assigns him, together with a monthly allowance, a studio. "I've had a big and beautiful studio which I'll regret all my life, for five years, until 1961, when I came back from Paris".
Alberto Giacometti, encountered in Paris, where he lives and works for two years, tells him that the studio is of no consequence. In fact, "since he started off in a basement, he preferred to go on in a basement".
Alfonso Frasnedi has never taken the trouble to be first in running after merchants, critics, hustlers and the like. The first is not the original. And the logic of Alfonso Frasnedi's painting results being far from the ordinal and the ordinary. In his text, cardinality is what is important. The success of those who arrive first in a bycicle race is local, limited, finished. Alfonso Frasnedi's bycicle serves arithmetics, instead of algebra.
So, is there something right? Does something work? Is this painting liked? Can it be successful? In no stage of the itinerary does Alfonso Frasnedi subside, delay, loiter, get accustomed to and start winding, around his audience and around himself.
Duplicating, multiplying, cloning: apparent and easy creation helps to commercialise, to codify, to discipline, to signify. With no word. No intellectuality. No engineering. He declares at the congress of Jerusalem (7-9 december 1983): "To write or talk about painting is the usual mistake one makes when one tries to explain it. Explaining always implies abuse" .
Since the Fifties and since the very beginnings, there is nothing ideal in the text, no idea deputed to act: each thing results extreme, unneedy of catharsis or of whitening or of transparency. The original word emerges in it's three dimensions, which are the very dimensions of life: resemblance, language, matter. Immediate and always undeniable, undeferrable and irrenounceable is matter: the matter of two and three, the matter of logic, the matter of structure and it's writing. Matter of itinerary, matter of pictorial sign, matter of painting's language.
In the five decades, from the Fifties to nowadays, the age, with it's ideology of art and culture, is never faced with polemic, with rupture, with criticism, with denunciation, with vindication, with resentment, with recrimination, with rancour. It becomes instead material, pretext, element of the fable. And even formerly, of the apparently perfect future: an aspect of the contrast, of that which Leonardo calls the shadow, of the irreconcilable.
The same contract is not social or political compromise, but contrast, sarcasm, antiphrasis, irony, mode of relation. No fantastic animal. No genealogy. No zoology: the phoenix that dies and renews itself does not affect it. No spectacular moral conscience. No zoological family album, between the representation of pain and the representation of delight, between suffering and substantial and mental sacrifice.
The context is already a trace. Alfonso Frasnedi clears the relation from circular, genealogical animality. And spares the reader the burden of each memory, showcase of feeling. Analysis is in execution: it must not be accomplished by the reader.
No interest, in Alfonso Frasnedi's text, for the knowledge of negative and for it's tolerance. Absent is the psychopathology of art and invention, it's sad cortège with the economy of evil, of incest, of sin. Time, the other time's immunity follows poetry and drags it towards writing.
Alfonso Frasnedi denotes: "Logic and not, between these terms is all my work". Dyadic logic. Of unhealable contrast.
From which proceeds the itnerary in it's equivocations, in it's treacheries,in it's misunderstandings. In ambiguity itself. "There is no more mystery. Free arbitrium is no longer consented". Freedom pertains to the original word and not to the subject.The infernal and supernal constitute the sky: body and scene. No gnosis that privilege circular anfibological animality, that be stuck to the infernal, to the negative, to death. Irony is not morale. And law, ethics and clinics are law, ethics and clinics not of speech, that is of death, but of word.
Alfonso Frasnedi agrees with the Leonardian vanification of the postulates of Western speech: impossible to eliminate the contradiction, the difference of the One from Itself and the Other. Here lie contrast and debate. Here lie the two and three. Three: singularity and triality of dimension, of point and counterpoint, of function and operation. As also the tripartition of zero: zero, one and interval. Three proceeds from two. As also all of the elements.
The inconciliable that is in contrast cannot be assumed nor spoken in one's own tongue. Contrast, future, hope. Hope without any more subject. Without any more subject the contrast. Neither all light nor all dark. But light and dark. Neither all positive nor all negative. But positive and negative. The open issue is irony. Or and moreover, the way of opening. This the unnatural sky of Alfredo Frasnedi. This the impossible squaring of the circle. This verticality that cannot prescind from horizontality. This separation that cannot prescind from juncture. Body and scene.
From this sky, from the original two stems each of Alfonso Frasnedi's works, the work is not the painting, vision of the world, point of view, ideal perspective. Square is not square. A false square. An impossible square. High and low. In and out. North and South. Simmetry and asymmetry. Tie and untie. Verticality and horizontality. Square, like bridge, like bar, like cross, leaves way for trace, the sky's mode. From here stems memory, what is written about it, painting. From here come beat and debate. With no more dialogue, that is with no more monism. From here proceed the battery's dispositive and the battle. From here stems the itinerary in the arithmetic of satisfaction, as the battle is written. With no more homage to whole, line, sum, double. In fact, Alfonso Frasnedi writes:"Traces, allusions, beating of wings convulsively agitated allow a bird to take off in flight. That beat - not the bird's image - persists in the retina and shakes my brushstroke.
Is that rapid tracing of the paintbrush a scrawl? It may seem so, but it is shaken by the same logic that allows flight, that to become such must be orderly and rational in it's movements".
Beautiful apologue. And a splendid interpretation of Leonardo da Vinci, that no artist had ever treated with such decision and such "conclusive brevity". Also an aphorism of Alfonso Frasnedi's entire itinerary. That also notes how art does not act in support of evidence. From contrast's irreconcilable and from colour's insufferable, the itinerary proceeds by integration, among ambiguity, misunderstanding, bending. And light is incompatible with illumination. It insists on what one hears and intends.
"We are not aware of colour", writes Alfonso Frasnedi. Imperceptible, invisible, untouchable the semblance in it's colour, in the incarnation. Condition of the intellectual itinerary. Colouring denies it. Notwithstanding, in it's property, it be undeniable. The colours that, as he goes on, he finds himself using pertain to colour as a condition. With no accentuations, no caricatures, no colouristic representations.
He writes:" Since the war's aftermath onward, gradually, the body of painting has been bared, reducing visual expression to few guttural sounds (white, black or gray), while Kandinski was proposing four sounds for each colour".
The idea of colour. The image of colour. And so: "The real line in itself is never there. And not even the circle". For this also, "If I had followed the market's requests, I would have always painted the same things". Both in the dimension of semblance and in the dimension of language, painting as a writing of poetry stands out through the listening. The image is sonorous, acoustic. And in fact the colours become sounds and vibrate in the ears.
Alfonso Frasnedi's painting is incompatible with the vision and representation of presumed things to come and presumed future. "The vibration is what makes colour live. It is the moment when the coin, spinning around itself before levelling onto the plane, oscillating, shows both sides simultaneously". Painting like numismatics.
And yet "The colour of the authentic: if we wanted to get to a definition, we would say that it cannot be black, white, red or blue. But it shall be gray, orange, green and violet, because the only authenticity there exists in art is the ambiguity, the uncertainty and the not absolutely undisputable". And still: "The night is green with shadows. Green is the logic of natural. Black is irrational folly, is the obscurity of the unknown". Painting has green-black blood. Or green-red. From visual to acoustic".
Nothingness or the shadows: hacking. Sheer word on it's own principle. Word's matter is the matter of painting, the matter of shadow, the matter of colour, matter of light. Without in fact algebrical lighting. "Onward, open-armed, to empty oneself to ever gather". What is gathered is available to the hearing of the new. And it becomes an acquisition, by writing and qualifying itself".
"The road lies in front of me, not behind". An axiom and a theorem. Respectively. When the road is behind, it is the animal that devours it's own tail, death, negative and, in this fashion, it goes in circles. And art and invention make way in it's structure.
The aphorism is worth an entire painting: "Eyes fixed on the horizon, tall, large and as extended as a measureless sea, as the soft foot-print of a cat. Beyond the sheet's margin, the traces disappear. Where headed? ". Painting with no subject. Painting in which his friend Jacques Henric would not find the sign of many Twentieth century avantgardes, that is evil and negative in the experience".
To separate flour from bran, fine grain from coarse grain". Essentiality, linguistic tension, rythm, intensity: they proceed from separation and juncture, from the relation". With no more genealogy. In fact, Alfonso Frasnedi's text results being exempt from gnosis and from purgatory. Enjoyment and desire, pain, instinct, need are not dramatized. They are found inside the text, instead of being absorbed by the speech of art and it's presumed history".
Neonaturalism, informal, pop art, conceptual, postmodern,new age... Alfonso Frasnedi crosses through the age, finds it again in the OSSIMORO, analyses it. Does not accept it. Or employ it. Or ride it. "I felt like making a work on the rim of the moment, neither too backwards nor too forward". No relation, thus, with Hegelian or anti-Hegelian dialectics.
False nature, false box, package-box, square, false square: from contrast to debate, rythm follows the intellectual dispositive: labyrinth, paradise, in writing themselves, land on quality. The matter of landing, matter of pleasure (in the dimension of language) and of happiness (in the dimension of semblance), results in being with no ideality and no meaning.
"There is no informal in my work". And he precises: "Well, my informal can be summarized with this definition: it makes no reference to pre-existing forms. This is my only relation". Irony, detachment, combinatory. With no reference to what has been or was before, to forms, sense, knowledge, or truth. So it happens also regarding pop art, that shares nothing with it's age, that has entered interrogation, irony.
Besides, the namedly informal way, in the war's second aftermath, represents "The first moment when Italian art comes back to measuring itself with European and American art", also notes Alfonso Frasnedi. And he adds:" I so believe that it should find a stable high position in the international second-part of the century art panorama".Art Autre: this Michel Tapie's 1952 essay. Alfonso Frasnedi reasserts the absence of reminders and references beyond the text, the painting, it's matter, it's gesture, it's act.
And afterwards, in the Sixties, instead of in Walt Disney, who represents animals in their animation, Alfonso Frasnedi gets interested in the comic strip, the cartoon with human figures, especially the coloured American one. So, the cartoon strip also, with no more zoology or anthropomorfism, becomes irony.
Successively, in the Sixties, Alfonso Frasnedi reads Giorgione's Tempest and other painters. "Giorgione's Tempest is a mute image, an image that doesn't tell: it stays and lives on account of a series of vibrations that rise from the work but do not become meaning. This is my re-analysis ". He reads Goya, Manet, Velasquez over and over again... Painting writes painting and litterature. And reads them.
And then. Matisse, Albers. More than Malevic. The square: in-out, over-under.Impossible quadrature. The horizontal (separation) demands the vertical (juncture). As the South demands the North. The original contrast. With no more pre-eminence on behalf of the separation. With no more knowledge of the negative. With no more gnosis. "By dint of making the square, I got to making the line of the horizon. The square has become so big, that only one of the four sides remained, and it became a horizon". Incommensurable is the side.
Instead of a language of words about things, instead of a system or speech over language, the language of Alfonso Frasnedi painting is the language of things.A language as unsubstancial as un-mental. A language that proceeds from contrast and feeds debate. A language you write things with. Things that, by telling themselves, look for and make themselves. "Play all to win nothing. To roam with doubts and proceed by uncertainties. Is this the road? Yes, to conclude with a question mark so as not to conclude what cannot be concluded. Words, far off". Alfonso Frasnedi's painting concludes at it's quality. It becomes quality.
Realism? Yes, when real is the impossible of syntax and sentence and their painting as writing, flowing into the uncodifyable and undecidable. But the impossible is not real, contrarily to what the terrorist ideologic dictates, even when under the flag of avantgarde.
A certain Surrealism prefers to realise the impossible, converting it into possible, conciliating and composing, even in the last fragment, infernal and supernal.
Pragmatism? Yes, in absence of the odd-man-out principle: and the tale is enriched by the reasons of the other. Rational is pragmatism in it's own contingency. And irrational is real in it's impossible.
This the gallery of Alfonso Frasnedi - beautiful, splendid, very munificent, immune and without purism, with no refernce to androgyn - it is the gallery of paradise, handed over to the twenty first century, to stay. Marvel is the fruit of hazard and points to what is new, according to particularity.
Through Alfonso Frasnedi, modernity disproves all compromise with what denies it or considers it finished or adorable.Original modernity. Mode of word. Means and instrument. Way of means and of instrument. Mode of relation. Mode of dissidence. Mode of time, for which things, by bending them, are written. Insuring the future. Presentism is the other face of pastism. Alfonso Frasnedi lives in the future. In the future of his painting.
And each element is ciphral, each thing essential in it's text: the dice throw result is of quality, it has no need to be considered positive or negative. Hazard is already on the other's terrain: and what happens, in the tale, with the tale, through it's doing, gets written, in order to qualify itself. Semiology, tributary of gnosis, is not present in Alfonso Frasnedi's text anymore.
And linguistic rarefaction stands poles apart from calvinist purism. Trace, memory, history and poetry must pervene weightless and in immunity, to the simple, to the only, to quality. Analysis helps with the fantastic, that intervenes to operate on the painting of experience, or on it's writing.
And the city does not signify, but is ciphered. In the unimaginable. In the incredible. And in the inopinable. The city's glory, arithmetic, is the glory of the combination of body and scene.
No ideology, no postideology, in their vulgarity and their bleakness, weighs upon Alfonso Frasnedi's text. They come back as ingredients inside the context, in the way of opening, in the trace of word.
Alfonso Frasnedi does not fight the age of neonaturalism and of informal, nor the age of pop art, nor that of conceptual, nor that of postmodern, nor new age. He passes through them, he positions them behind his shoulders. And in the essential of word and of his painting he finds the fable again, the fabula, the typography, ciphratic of happiness and pleasure.
Are art and culture dead? Must one pull a line down in order to edificate another one? None of the postulates with which romanticism , down to it's epigones in new age, reacts to the modernity of the original word present in Alfonso Frasnedi's text. Other the logic. Other the structure, constituted by very art and culture. Other the city and it's writing. The city of life.
Debate in fact turns out to be without polemic, as Virgilio Guidi was already noticing in 1956: in other words, no conventionalism is accepted. In the itinerary's property therefore, there vanishes naturalism, that is always provincial. To the point that it's other face is nationalism. Even that of an only city, be it native or elective.
At the basis of Alfonso Frasnedi's palimpsest there insists a stratification of matter, as C. Millet would precise in Paris, in 1957, about an exhibition in Florence. There insists a stratification matter. Layers, instead of lines. And layer matter. Matter of syntactic web. Matter of phrastic tissue. Matter of cloth. The layers follow the cloth's rythm, up to it's folding and up to the matter of reaching quality. Up to the matter of getting ashore. In brief, up to the ciphering of word and up to the matter of ciphering.
So it's very nature is unconceivable and unconceptual. The nature of sign. The nature of word. Nature in it's own matter: impossible to prescind from the nomination without which nothing would have birth.The nature of semblance: from here stems that painting of gesture, that Renato Barilli pointed out in 1958. And Reneissance of language.
The nature of Alfonso Frasnedi's painting is unneedy of origin, nor does it look for one: that is, it does not give in to archaism to satisfy local exigencies. And Renato Barilli would add that Alfonso Frasnedi's painting, imponderable, is aimed at cipher, it ciphers itself. Imponderable and imperpendicular, with no gravity and no weight.
On his behalf, Alfonso Frasnedi would note, in 1958, that the spatulade was the vehement technical means used by Alfonso Frasnedi in his intense road, without dramaticity. The rythm has no animation, that is, infundamental. It's dispositive is of force and direction.
In the presentation of the 1962 Venice exhibition, Toni Toniato evoked, concerning Alfonso Frasnedi's painting, "a layer of infinitesimal vibrations". The infinity of word follows the tale in it's occurrence and it's opportunity. Paradise is built upon this matter of abuse. Matter of infinity. Matter of poetry.
As Franco Solini wrote, regarding the 1967 Bologna exhibition, Alfonso Frasnedi does not accept the civilisation of well-being, that is the civilisation of death that dictates the uniform of survival. And invents another reality that moves from the open issue, a new reality.
Opposition, rebellion, dissent, revolt, participate in the OSSIMORO, with no more regime to consecrate, they enter contrast; they never prevail to convert debate into dispute, never do they form a line to maybe counterpoise to another line. Alfonso Frasnedi's painting has nothing to do with the painting of opposition.
Rupture, conflict, epistemological cut, tabula rasa and getting over, capsizing and renovatio represent romantic themes, easy appanages of laicalism with which also certain representatives of avantgarde and post-avantgarde would mask themselves. Such sentimentalisms and such emotionalisms in all their erotisation, prove themselves extraneous to Alfonso Frasnedi's text. To say this, in his own way, was Francesco Bartoli, in presenting the 1968 Mantua exhibition. He added how in Alfonso Frasnedi's case "to research the ideological degree in his painting is out of place".
Alfonso Frasnedi invents another rhetoric, inedited. And another formalisation of things, up to the writing of semblance and of language. Cartoonistic and commercialistic pass beyond into contrast and debate. As Angelo Dragone would observe, referring to the 1970 Turin exhibition, Alfonso Frasnedi keeps to the essential, in each phase of his itinerary, to the essential of particular and of detail, to the essential of logic and experience. Up to the cipher of life.
He doesn't accept that the planet of word should change into a one-room flat, totally animalised. He does not accept the consumistic naturalism of zoology. And the fact that Alfonso Frasnedi's painting springs out of the science of word, rather than the science of speech, had been understood by Silvano Ceccarini regarding the 1974 Bologna exhibition.
Gregorio Scalise, while presenting the Bologna exhibition, in 1978, noted the levity and the irony of Alfonso Frasnedi's work.
Levity, air, liberty, intellectual temptation, anorexia: these virtues of word's principle are unseparable from Alfonso Frasnedi's works. And irony takes advantage of it. Experimentalism pays it's tribute to memories, lingering over presence, it follows natural inspiration. It plays conventional and feeds it.
Alfonso Frasnedi's work is far from experimentalism, in all it's forms and it's revisions, in all it's turnovers and it's ruptures. To say it, in a certain way, was Paolo Fossati, in the 1981 Bologna exhibition.
Albeit aware of painting's trends, orientations and ways, never does Alfonso Frasnedi fall in the tussle of congregations, or in each polemic's conventionalism, even if imprinted with avantgarde. Fabrizio d'Amico himself would indicate this,in between lines, in 1993.
Read Dripping, of 1953. Dripping. GLISSAMENTO. Lapsus. Structural mistake. Things start by nomination. And structurise themselves. Analysis consents research and debate to write themselves. Already behind his shoulders, so to speak, is contrast. Non dramatic hope already: could it found the future perhaps? Success comes from infinity and from time in it's policy, qualifying itself through painting.
Read Journey in the sun, 1959. The plot, the appointment, the encounter. Journey with no solarity. Without the negative's economy in the experience. The sun is obscurus, the colour as a condition of the journey. The sun also proceeds from the contrast and provokes each beat. In each instant.
Read The Wedding of the Century, 1970. Mediatic visible, that amuses the times, enters the fable, becoming a cartoon, without the mediological system any more. Abuse passes over the definition by abstraction, as proposed by Giovanni Vailati: the material, cited, now serves the fabula, transposition induces it to a wholly different bending. From irony to shore-landing to quality and it's effects of truth and laughter, by way of abuse, by way of misunderstanding.
Read Near the Sea the Cloud is far off, 1973. The cloud is not represented, the sea is not represented. Of the cloud remains the diagonal. Of the sea remains the linguistic combinatory, on the beat of the wave and on it's debate. The battle remains, in it's contingency. According to particularity, which is triadic.
Read The threatening Cloud and the Steele of Tranquil Sea,of 1973 again. The menace, instead of attributing good and evil to what will happen, points out good and evil in the contrast. The threatening cloud: impossible the circle. The stele of tranquil sea is the stele of Rosetta: the stele of the atongue, the stele of painting, in it's calmness. Or in it's audacity and in it's humbleness as a disposition to listening.
Still of 1973, read Tree Sequence. Sequence with no succession, nor progress, nor evolution. Sequence with no genealogy, a sequence incompatible with a line. Rythm of combination. The tree does not found the economic reproduction of word, thus of fact, it does not found the sheet. The tree is an aspect of the sheet's surface. The surface as an opening. And nothing is plane. Neither the apparent square, nor the impossible circle. The surface is not plane.
Read 1974's Sea Vibrations with Apparition. The vibrations follow the rythm with it's intellectual dispositives. Colour and light also proceed from the sky. And can the apparition be solved in the social and political parade or in the genealogical apparatus, if it does not relate to being and to death, if it implies no system and no immanent or transcendental structure? The apocalypse in this song and in this culture has no hiding place and sticks, in fact, to a proof of truth and of laughter. With no strip-tease.
Now read At All Horizon, 1983. The horizon finds it's condition in colour and insists on the cut, in this case on the surface as a cut. No line again, but pleonasm of rythm. Pleonasm for which things get arranged and directed to quality. Right and left, over and under, inside and out, north and south: here lies the contrast, without founding colour's specularity, visible, tangible and light's anthropoforia. Where stays memory, blossomed and whitened? Where remains the gravity of a florilege without memory?
Read 1983's Azure from High to Low. Sky-blue moves from high-low, from the contrast. Blue: labyrinth and heaven, in their tranquillity, find their condition in point and counterpoint, in their flesh, in the incarnation of colour. And light is what you mean when you do what you write. With painting. And in painting. Illumination takes away light, it needs to see, to portray, to represent, to personify the Other. In the name of purity, candour, stupor. Illumination is the weapon of the avenger.
Read "The Giorgionesqes". 1986's Tempest with Yellow Horizon. Giorgione and The Tempest in all their litterature and their national and provincial comments? The work results in the theme seen as perennial acquisition, as an absolute novelty in the writing of life, thus in biography. And in the dimension of semblance, formalisation becomes telewriting, that helps tipography.
Of the following year, read Blossomed Green with Shadows (Giorgio Morandi's table). Logic or semiotic square? Dynamic morphological system with it's black box to contemplate all catastrophe? The memory of Giorgio Morandi to moralise and discipline, comforted by shared habit? Homage, proceeding from diagrammar, where trace is the way of the inconciliable, takes memory towards the grammar of painting. Other painting. Painting of quality.
And still. Read A Sea's a Sea Even If It Doesn't Seem So n. 2, of 1992. Linguistic rarefaction. Actual infinity, in which hazard is never the same. Pulsional intensity in research, in the miracle and in their writing. Linguistic intensity. Is it or is it not a sea? Does it seem or does it not? The ciphrature is accomplished in the absence of art history and of it's universal and university plumage, in the absence of the white death's mnestic officiation.
The works of the Nineties insist upon the ciphratic of light with the dispositives of heaven and simplicity. Read 1992's A Sea As If It Were The Sea. No more the sea as literary and pictorial genre, but landscape becoming aphorism. And not only the planet, but the galaxies inhabit word and it's painting: their book, what is written about memory, is stressed in the text. That is ciphered. instead of signified.
Alfonso Frasnedi is a poet, an artist, an intellectual of the Second Reneissance.
|
