Luca Beatrice, a "tester" of Italian art. For a critical profile

Luca Beatrice has always been convinced that Futurism was the only, true Italian avant-garde of the twentieth century. It is necessary to start from here in order to situate his figure as a critic, of equal if not greater importance than that of the caustic animator of the cultural debate, armed with a flaming, corrosive, provocative verve , for which most, in the asphyxiated art world, will remember him at this time (some perhaps even unwillingly). Beatrice had intended first and foremost as a tribute to futurism the exhibition he curated with Beatrice Buscaroli for the Italian Pavilion of the 2019 Venice Biennale: it was entitled Collaudi, the same name as a collection of prefaces that Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published at the end of his career. The choice should in itself be enough to highlight what, according to Beatrice, were the contours of the figure of the curator: not a prima donna, not a character who replaces the artist, but a tester. The exact opposite of the curator sick of protagonism who tarnishes the work of the artists he is supposed to accompany (and whose fates and careers he decides, however), of the curator who follows fashions, who is incapable of historically framing the work of’an artist or who, in the words of Beatrice himself, “frequents airports more than museums,” who “produces nothing but skimpy press releases, concise introductory texts of pragmatics,” who “knows neither art history nor history”(Da che arte stai, 2021).

In that edition of the Biennale, Beatrice and Buscaroli thus sought to “test” a group of artists chosen by virtue of their experimentalism and according to a plurality of languages that was supposed to echo the attitude of the Futurists’ research, their eclecticism, their openness to syncretism, experiment, and the traversal of traditional means. They thus ranged from painting (Daniele Galliano, Marco Cingolani, Luca Pignatelli, Roberto Floreani, Davide Nido... ) to sculpture (Bertozzi&Casoni, Nicola Bolla, Aron Demetz) to photography (Matteo Basilé, Elisa Sighicelli) and video (the duo Masbedo). Beatrice and Buscaroli’s Italian Pavilion thus gathered a congerie of artists between thirty and fifty years of age, all of them strong from a solid and structured path. Collaudi was therefore neither a point of departure nor a point of arrival: one could consider that exhibition as a sort of snapshot of the status quo, a summary of much of the best that Italian art offered fifteen years ago (and that, we can say, it still offers today), as well as a selection capable of reflecting the ideas of its curators. What ideas, then?

One can place Luca Beatrice’s work on the opposite (and, for a long time, losing: perhaps still now) front from that of the followers of Arte Povera who for decades have marked, and in part still continue to mark, the official lines of Italian art, from the 1970s onward. One need only recall a few other editions of the Italian Pavilion to realize that: removed from the imposing, panoramic overdose of the exhibition curated by Sgarbi at the next edition, in 2011, Collaudi was the last moment when at the Tese delle Vergini one could could appreciate a fascinating, accomplished, rather complete exhibition of that “alternative” strand to the poverist direction that saw in Luca Beatrice one of its most passionate, competent, authoritative voices. It has been called “new Italian figuration,” “new Italian situation,” and similar locutions (with additions, in the case of Collaudi, but the implantation germinated from Luca Beatrice’s research on the figurative and, above all, on painting was clearly recognizable): it is certain that courage was certainly needed to take an alternative position. But it was a necessary risk, if Italian art was to be brought up to date and continue to remain relevant outside national borders.

Beatrice had begun her work in the 1990s, a time when art stopped recognizing itself in a more or less unified, or at least harmonious, way in a defined style. Let alone talk about groups, even if in that period certainly interesting experiments were being born anyway (on all of them, to limit to Italy, the Officina Milanese, the sodality of Giovanni Frangi, Marco Petrus, Luca Pignatelli and Velasco Vitali who was perhaps the group with the most consolidated physiognomy).

The fact that art, at the time, in Italy as in much of the world, was going through this sort of identity crisis, did not mean that there was no vitality, that there was no humus capable of imposing extremely relevant phenomena, of which it is possible, more than thirty years later, to trace a historical profile (it will suffice to recall relational art). It was a fragmented panorama, as perhaps it had never been before, but where it was possible to identify the emergence of an art that addressed the anxieties of the 1990s by confronting tradition but also conceptual art: an “area of sensitivity,” as Luca Beatrice himself called this “new figuration” (interview with Chiara Canali, exhibition catalog La nuova figurazione italiana. To be continued, Milan, 2007), which contemplated “within itself very different, even contrasting expressions,” which referred “more to an artist’s talent than to his social relations,” which “relaunched a domestic, and therefore livable, placement of painting, much appreciated by collectors.” Beatrice, who included in the roster of critics of the “new figuration” his colleagues such as Alessandro Riva, Maurizio Sciaccaluga, and Gianluca Marziani, placed the emergence of this new sensibility around 1994-1995, believed that it was a metropolitan art, which had “as its privileged theater the city”, which was comparable to the phenomenon of the “cannibal youth” of Italian literature of the same period, to the music of groups such as Marlene Kuntz, Subsonica, Africa United, that is, to “a whole series of phenomena that are absolutely Italian, of a post-terrorist generation, of post-ideological culture.”

In this context, Luca Beatrice was the “tester” of some of the leading names of a class of artists who gave so much to Italian art. He explicitly recognized Daniele Galliano as the most talented painter of his generation. He wrote of him that “he painted the same things that others have told in words or set to music-urban landscapes, portraits of the best youth of the time, interior scenes-imagining the night as the time when everything was allowed, what he saw and what he dreamed, transforming locales into malebolge, characters and encounters into pale, black vampires. In those paintings he was able to combine unbridled vitalism with a certain languidness and melancholy, rendered through a painting that on the one hand tries to ’remake’ the grain of the first digital cameras, and on the other highlights painterly talent and coloristic felicity, as well as a great facility in drawing”(The Lives, 2023). Of Nicola Bolla he wrote that his work “deals with the useless, the vanity, the fatuous. Where spectacular is the scenery, the stage, the party is already over, the actors gone, the mirror remains, the sparkle of crystals similar to that of diamonds: similar but not true, in the game of illusion” ( Collaudi catalog, 2009). Of Andrea Chiesi’s works since 2002 he has written that they reveal his “absolute primacy in the Italian field and relate him in a wider international fabric, particularly with the temperatures of Northern European painting. Cooling and increasingly crystalline synthesis lead the Modenese artist to sacrifice the metaphorical and symbolic aspect in the direction of a rethinking and reinvention of space.”

The list could go on and on: Beatrice has dealt, for example, with Marco Cingolani, Massimo Kaufmann, Officina Milanese, Pierluigi Pusole, Luca Pancrazzi, Luca Pignatelli and several other artists, many of whom are now part of the canon of Italian art in the 1990s. What instead is the artist of the new millennium? In What Art Are You From, Beatrice took her cue from an essay by Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (2008), in which the American sociologist and literary critic argued for the return of thehomo faber, of theartist who is able to execute a work with his own hands by virtue of uncommon skill, against the mediocrity of most contemporary creations. "Hurray for the old homo faber: he is the ’new’ artist of the Third Millennium," wrote Beatrice, identifying in Bertozzi&Casoni, in the Gardena wood sculpture of Aron Demetz, Gerhard Demetz and Willy Verginer and in the painting of Nicola Verlato a line of recovery of tradition by means of technical knowledge of materials.

We can then say with conviction that there is no lack of disruptive, international, original artists in Italy today, capable of avoiding any derivative language. If anything, there is a lack of everything else, a lack of everything that irrigated the soil from which the experiences of which Beatrice was a “tester” could germinate. One can stop here, however, because otherwise one risks touching on other topics and would end up being too superficial. Certainly it can be added that today there is perhaps a lack of that courage that Luca Beatrice certainly did not lack, and one must give him credit, whether one had agreed with him or considered him far from one’s artistic, cultural, and political convictions and positions. “If we go down in history,” Luca Beatrice said, “it is because we were not afraid to invent it, this history.”

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