An atypical Informal

An atypical Informal

by Lucio Barbera

"My beliefs, my dreams, my aspectations, my anxieties, my fears, my joys, my love and anger, everything becomes painting. Painting is colour: free, anarchic, open, full of light, dull, exalted or humbled, but always dense of meaning because meaning is into the colour: in its variations, in its going through the canvas, in its expansion or clotting. It's here where we have to look for stimuli, emotions, thoughts that have ruled it".

I think that beyond the critical examination already done, we must start from these memories, that look like a very personal "manifesto" to come near and realize the long but not finished artistic events of Luigi Malice. From the words of this refined and speculative artist from Naples, but Calabria is the home of his choice, an equation at once is evident : painting is colour. This is a useful indication that will come in bandy when the matter is at hand in order to really look and see his "colour full fields". But the Artist provides us with some useful information: he shows us not only a changeble standard of colour he uses, but he also says that everything he is "becomes painting". His being and colour coincide just as well as the events of life and its manifestation do; so that colour is the possible language not only significant, but let us say, communicative. All is colour and in it - as the Artist says - we must look for the complexity of his material and spiritual past. In short, getting hold of this admission by the Artist on the occasion of his show at the Royal Palace in Naples in 1992, I may conclude as follow: if painting is colour and if Malice's being becomes painting, Malice is colour.

Starting from this conclusion, I'd like to wind off an artistic experience, that begins in 1959, when the twenty-two year old Malice attended an art exibition of young artists in Naples. Malice was young, as I said, but he might count on his apprenticeship with masters like Vincenzo Ciardo, Emilio Greco, Giovanni Brancaccio, Domenico Spinosa and Augusto Perez; they all taught at the Fine Arts Academy in Naples. From 1959 till 1999, forty years of painting, is a lot for a sixty-two year old man. This comment is to emphasize that painting is the Artist's life. Well I stop telling the ups and down of the man, but to consider his work as an eloquent mark of his place in a story that is not only personal or Calabrian, but a story that must be included into the outline of Italian Art. Two are the options to be considered in order to get knowledge of Malice's work, to explain his artistic itinerary or, on the contrary, to follow step by step the above-mentioned itinerary in order to judge hi's work seen as a whole. The first method is quite reliable thanks to the supports of a critical search already tested, but there i's the fear of relaxation too.

The second one, on the contrary is a new bet and carries the risk and the liberty of the first-time, it carries the pleasure of adventure, of discovery and of error, but the freshness too of those who look at ancient tests with virgin eyes. Well, I'll accept the risk and the adventure of looking at Malice's first works with the above eyes. The Artist made his first steps within the ambit of the so-called "figurative painting" . From that time to the end of 1963, it's an ichonographic painting, in the manner of Gauguin, Picasso and Matisse. It's easily intelligible that the Artist is not concerned with the descriptions on the painting of the scene (we don't know if real, invented, painted from memory or reproduced) but he is merely interested in capturing the meaning of it. These paintings are characterized by the presence of a warm and deep colour and sign structure in the manner of Cezanne. As a child who gets acquainted with reality bringing things to his mouth, in the same way the Artist, when a young man, tests his language drawing reality. But the turning point was on the look out: as from 1964 large diptyches painted on canvas prelude the informal painting where colour overcomes sign and gestures.

This date is not fortuitous Malice moved to Reggio Calabria they year before to teach at the Liceo Artistico first, and then at Fine Arts Academy, of which he will be the Principal from 1984 to 1989, and he will play a decisive role in the town's cultural environment. When in Calabria Malice integrates his artistic inheritance both expressive and formal with the visual and imaginative, or better to say language and emotion. Malice takes with him from Naples the stimuli of a renewal that was already being carried in the 50s by artists like Biasi, Persico, Castellano, Del Pezzo, Di Bello, Pisani, Bugli and others who, following the experiences of Domenico Spinosa, Barisani, De Stefano, Lippi and Venditti, gave life to a movement of genuine Avant-guard. As known Informal more than a current was the expression of profound crisis of known and rational values; an opposition linked to Abstractive Impressionism, Dadaist experience, Surrealism and Expressionism. Therefore a movement that became profoundly significant: the evident negation of form both figurative and no figurative arrives at a new formalization, all that finds its presuppositions both in the French Existentialism and American Pragmatism. It's consequently natural for an artist like Malice to be involved in this climet of "all makes painting". But Informal as a complex artistic movement might be defined as plural expression (Informal arts) being formed by three main parts: the gestuale art, sign art and "materico". To say that Malice joins the Informal movement it's true but inadequate, because we must specify which kind of In rmal he agrees to. In his first stage (1964-1968) Artist's Informal is marked by a tranquil painting, static in its image, and however strongly dynamic in the structure. Large coloured masses occupy the surface (the Artist uses rough canvas that not only absorbs colour but reacts with its roughness neutralizing colour that eliminates wholly the distinction between background and images, between form and space. The light colour announced barely as if committed to the softness of his brush. Malice seems to work without following a "project'' a kind of controlled automatism the necessity of making his individuality and painting coincide. The painting surface so becomes a moment of his existence. Just in this first apparent contradiction (the Artist says: I often give free course to yielding and transgressions) we notice Malice's Informal peculiarity, or to be more exact, Malice's peculiar attitude as regards the informal poetics.

In the chaos of painting we notice in fact a firm rational principle of order, so that the urgency to manifest his mood, links together with the control of the painting surface.

Works like "Materia" (Matter), "Paesaggio" (Landscape), "Sole e natura calabra" (Sun and nature in Calabria) and others are a proof of a two simultaneous tensions: the spontaneous urgency and its organized formalization. Large coloured masses take shape like as trying to find not only their own space but also their connections.

The picture usually shows one of its central nucleus round which all the painting develops as a spontaneaus germination. In its apparent indistinction, which abolishes every perspective, an eye catching colour given by a massed sketch or by using a polarizing colour suitable for determining the harmony in every part of painting, is however, almost always contradicted by small concretions of a colour suddenly condensing by minimum signs which bring somehow to mind Capogrossi's technique. As well as Burri's stitches or small tears up set the classicism of structure in the same way Malice's condensed colour upsets the painting serenity by causing a conflictual situation like a "restless expressionism having no peace" (Francesco Gallo's quotation). And the Artist is like a soul in torment. For him it's time for "a muddled magma of present events and memories, of images and ideas, of emotions and reasons".

According to him art is "vehicle of consclousness", where anxiety and choice, energy and imagination, desires to gain and some little disappointment are present together".

That's where these colouristic effects aiming at Luminism take roots from, rather than the Informal Art. That of Malice's is an "all over" painting; every selected colour, every finished gesture, tells a little story.

This is the reason why every work is autonomous. But there's something more in what we call the juxtaposition of Calabrian habitat on the Neapolitan cultural background. Malice can't be indifferent to what he sees: a nature severe and sweet at the same time, a nature tastes of sea and mountain, a nature that reaches its climax in the lights &ad col ours of its nights and days. Man looks at it with the eyes af an Artist.

In these years works (without taking into account their titles as an explanation: on the contrary they often put the knowledge on the wrong track) we just see scraps of nature emerging from painting formal strutture or figures that sometimes allude both to humans and to landscape.

"It happens that landscape with its extraordinary colours, arouses my anxiety: a kind of dismay and surprise, ecstasy and fear. All that urges me to fix their images" says the Artist, but more than fixing them, he wants to regain then, it's a matter of looking at landscape from the sky as birds do: they don't see any leaves of grass or trees, but only coloured spots.

Colour masses seem to have that casual spontaneity as an uncleaned artist's palette. From here the credible supposition of a painter as an "Informal Artist " such as Malice, and more exactly as the "last Naturalist". But we derive it as a supposition, always from his painting, and not only from these, if we consider the Artist, starting from 1968 up to 1980, seems to have given up painting in order to experience other techniques.

To this period refer works that are closer to sculpture technique: works with shapes coated with waterproof cloth or plexiglass works. At the bottom of Malice's works is the great lesson by Lucio Fontana who had pointed another way: the one which marks relations between time and space and perception of colour- ruled by light. Well, Malice's search concentrates now on light and space, but he doesn't renounce colour at all. When the Artist,infact, uses the same colour, he does it with a view of modulating it with light. His painting (so I consider these works more than sculptures or "objects") is something to know through our eyes and through the suggestion of movement. This of Malice's is a moment

of meditation on light, a tireless search for colour-form relation, leading him to a light and shadow synthesis.

It begins so the third period when a different light crosses his painting.

As Rosella Alberti wrote down "No more the neutral, objective and abstractive light ... but the solar one: warm natural and dazzling ... And if conceptual Malice uses light as source and pretext of colour, neo-informal Malice uses colour to convey light" . In about 1980 Malice's informal painting breaks out again with a series of works in which we can see a sort of "cooling" and an endless disenchanted sweetness follows on former impetus.

You can see that his painting changed: sometimes there is a figure, sometimes he resorts to a fading tonality, sometimes he puts a black strip which shapes separate zones.

So in his coming back to painting there's an indication of a consistent evolution following a new behaviour of a man who has learnt sorrow, the meaning of separation and sacrifice,a sense a "crowed loneliness" to live with his own thoughts, with the memory of his longings maybe in an isolated house between the railway and the sea, together with his tormenting nostalgia sometimes altered by a strong sense of rebellion. And right now we can realize how the feeling of nature, considered as a whole, breaks into his painting. Just for this "presence ", which under the iconographic aspect is rather an "absence" we can refer to Malice as to the "last naturalist" Rosella Alberti put forward such an assumption, which is fascinating indeed and true from her point of view, but in my opinion her comments are unbelievable as well as the definition of Malice as the "last naturalist" Morlotti, actually, starts from pure painting to capture nature, while Malice moves in the opposite direction, that's to say from nature to capture painting. Morlotti uses his colours as a mean to imitate the rock solidity, on the contrary Malice steals from the brightness of Calabrian nature and landscape, giving it to his colours. Therefore I consider Malice the first naturalist rather than the last one, an artist who is able to convey into painting both his way of being and his natural roots where his being and becoming is taking shape step by step.

His painting interpretas the seasons of man and life, as colour takes over a though, an emotion, a defeat or a victory in the same way be is able to carry the air, fragrance, the atmosphere, light of nature. In a word, seasons belong both to man and nature, and nature,is part of man as well as man is part of a larger environment. But after considering carefully Malice's artistic itinerary another certainty is put in a critical position. If we consider one by one Malice's four periods (figurative, informal,conceptual, informal), we can notice that emotions and ratio have affected Malice's painting in turn. We can be sure that his painting belongs to informal area, and yet in putting on canvas an emotional and existential situation and an environmental one, he never lost his rational control of painting.

Malice restored order in the chaos of Informal, and built his own cosmos up, which even in its perfect structure never loses the memor of the primeval chaos.

According to me Malice is a breaker even considering his choice: an artist consistently anarchic, that is to say an atypical informal who follows his own way: that one revealing how for him "everything becomes painting. Painting meaning colour: free, anarchic, possessed by light, lifeless, eccentric or humiliated but always pregnant with significance ".

I come back, by force of circumstances (and texts) to the Artist's former confession manifesto where I started from and I realize that the starting point of the Artist agrees with the critic's finishing line.

I realize, I have added nothing to add to what we can see and to what the Artist has told.