PITTURE DOMESTICHE, Federico Luger Gallery, Milan – solo show

We are now getting swallowed into the Zone, and pause to contemplate the cosmos conveyed in each work, stunned by the outcome of multiple deflagrations. The explosions, however, haven’t obscured the architectural ruins leaving the surviving relics bathed in light. One can sense the first signs of life emerging from the debris fallout; through the dust of time one can almost catch a glimpse of the tributes to the history of Western painting: here and there we come across Goya’s darkness suddenly brightened by Vermeer’s light, and unexpected combinations of high-pitched dazzling Fauve notes, waning, like soiled, into the Informal. These paintings recall and witness the vestiges of the past, translated here and now into fragmented visual messages presented in a format that is more congenial to our age, marked by posts and twitters.

It’s a flavour some, domestic, everyday kind of painting, aged like good wine through suggestions cohabiting into the mind of the painter. Barbieri offhandedly flaunts a deep visual linguistic knowledge that allows him to ‘pull apart’ with ease the ‘inner working’ of images, ranging from the revisiting of the Cubist papier collé to echoes of Giotto’s anatomy, or from the naïve weightlessness disclosing the poignant humanity of everyday life to the visual poetry of a text message. In an age like ours, where culinary art is glorified in a number of TV programs, it would be interesting to follow Barbieri in the act of ‘cooking’ his images, quickly ‘glazing’ some ingredients or painstakingly ‘whisking’ some others. Painting like cooking, daily. His are, however, ‘bastard’ paintings, with an uncertain pedigree. The genetic mapping of such mestizo works includes obscene drawings, notes, numbers and names, hints and points, a lot of attempts but few doubts. His unconventional style of drawing, lends itself to carnival-like figures stumbling into the surface matter of the ‘panels’. The coexistence of cultural Mitteleuropean vestiges and suave Franciscan idylls is almost like the offering of a fusion seemingly celebrating a ‘bucolic dimension’ of painting. Following the clues scattered in his kaleidoscopic images is an inviting temptation that makes it easy to risk losing one’s starting point. Mapping his works is like attempting to draw the topography of a territory that is at the same time unexplored and hard to explore, a Zone where it is impossible to rely on sensorial certainties, because we are constantly attacked by synesthetic experiences smelling like yellow flavoured carillons. A background murmur rises from Barbieri’s works; the entire composition buzzes, and generates unexpected solutions. They are like luminous ruins, reminding us of a honeycomb structure, whose origins precede the beginnings of the ‘search’. Perhaps his paintings are like the walls of his own mind, displayed after a daily inspection, like depths that one needs to plumb to be able to start laying out, cataloguing and archiving ghosts, noises, dreams and notions.

Perhaps painting is a therapeutic practice, a discipline that needs to be mastered in order to perform a sort of personal exorcism. Gerhard Richter attempts to express the inexpressible with a few words: “Polke believes that there must be something in painting, because most mentally ill people start painting instinctively”. The spontaneity of sensations is like a spring and painting is like a net structure that can seize them. “There are two manners to overcome the Figurative (that is, the Illustrative and Narrative together): towards abstract form, or towards Figure, Cézanne calls it quite simply: sensation”. With these words Deleuze highlights how fleeting is the object that we are attempting to analyse, so elusive as to be literally represented by a particularly suggestive French word: sensation. Capturing sensations is a particular activity requiring an archaic tool, the ‘painting of bygone times’, and Barbieri himself perhaps hints at this in a sentence rigorously in the dialect of Brescia, taken from a 2007 footage: “el fattò l’è, che la pitüra, l’è miä pë chelö dè uno öltä!” (“the thing is, painting is no longer like in the old times!”). So the act of painting starts from far away, from the depths of time: “I like to think that painting was born in a cave and that these are like wall paintings making room for a layer of images anchored to the frame, holding to it as if it was the last place one could go”. The artist’s words shed light on the panorama of his work. And a work in progress this is, following the steps of a portrait of Barbieri, made by a familiar figure for him, a sort of ‘archetype’ that is simultaneously prophetic and crystalline: “[…] myself, immersed in the woods, with two oaks towering above me while I am bending on a rock, like an alchemist caught in the act of refining matter with a view to a life devoted to the tension of rising”.

NICOLA CECCHELLI