Pittura a stampa
Large scale engravings from the Albicocco art printing house
Curated by Alberto Vidissoni
It might look like a calculated choice: the last two editions of Palinsesti shed light on a single artistic medium each, photography and printmaking. Arte e Fotografia in 2024, On Paper today. One of last year’s protagonists provocatively called us all to action: “let’s correct”—with these words he exhorted the audience—every poster of the festival, as only one minimal intervention would be required, that of a diacritic mark to change the conjunction “and” (e) into the verb “to be” (è): “art is photography”. Now that equivalence attempts to become concrete: Pittura a stampa, ‘painting on print.’
The generosity of Corrado and Gianluca Albicocco made this exhibition possible, but it is not a history of their work. That would inevitably be partial: only some episodes have been selected across more than thirty years of activity. It certainly is not the film-of-a-lifetime whose snapshots Corrado has confessed he would leaf through. That is to say, this is not an exhibition about a printing house, but rather about some works which originated from the printing press and the constant and laudable work of a printing house.
The strong will of insisting on the specificity of calcography proved to be a perilous path. Suggesting an atmosphere within evocative descriptions runs the risk of losing sight of the real object of our attention. The environment of typography, rendered through the image of metaphors alluding to unfathomable technical knowledge, secrets, magic and alchemy, wizards and demiurges, lay rituality and miracles, might, at the most, constitute an evocative starting point. Moving from the idea of legitimizing art printing from alleged forms of prejudice, we have achieved—by heterogony of ends—the opposite result. That is to say, confirming rather than refuting such prejudices, thus falling back into nineteenth-century categories and stressing some principles of exclusivity.
It is far more interesting to observe how all the artists reunited in these rooms (some of them are active in Friuli Venezia Giulia, others come from other centres both in Italy and abroad) used to be painters or still identify as painters. Some of them have been practicing calcography for a long time, while others have approached it only recently: yet all of them have done so to widen the potentiality of their artistic language, shuffling the deck and playing on multiple levels at the same time. They felt a connection to printing and experimentation, to the point of pushing its limits towards new horizons. The exhibition itinerary develops from the archetypes of engraving, according to the techniques codified across centuries of tradition. Yet, soon it is the quick mark of the paintbrush running over the carborundum slab to build the shapes through color and with a strongly paint-like feel. Whether the starting point is an image of nature or a tormented existential sensitivity—one characterised by in-depth psychological analysis and biting morality—the gesture of scratches and spots puts together a symphony of black. A giant chandelier seems to enter a dark space, gloomy, almost funereal: bodiless shells perceived as if they were backlit, figures becoming their own shadows. Finally, even geometry, from the most rigorous constructions or within the hypnosis of shapes, welcomes color within a lyrical mark and arabesque.