Eugenio Gumirato
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Eugenio Gumirato is one of those painters who is conscious that contemporary art has tried out its infinite possibilities. The philosopher with whom he has identified in life, an icon of himself and of Ernst's Euclid, has made a broad twofold distinction in art: the art of gamblers and the art of those who wear the monastic habit of rule. Eugenio is a surrealist who has taken many of the paths in contemporary visual languages but has kept strong expressionistic features; two variables that still characterise the world of contemporary art and are expressed by the inclusive label 'abstract expressionism'. |
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| His painting has always played with chance and, as often happens, has helped create extraordinary icons. He first found his Christly icon emerging from marshland through an indistinct tangle of strokes immersed in colour; the colour that someone has defined ‘nameless', ‘anonymous', as it embodies a world where things have no name, and is distinctive of the philosopher's attitude. His present painting is the result of research carried out over the years. In its early stages it grew through the osmotic interplay of chance and ideas, as thin matter was laid on the canvas and made to stand out by heavy brush strokes. Later the handling of thicker matter enables us to see structures, forms and symbols which become the painter's world; strokes that create multiple textures traceable to contexts which are perceived in relation to what the viewer wants to see. Matter backgrounds and colour particles are laid out over the canvases and so logically interrelated as to become ‘texts'. Here the paint-brush grazes, emphasises or hides following the painter's states of mind. As a result Gumirato's worlds brim over with meaning. In such worlds every viewer begins to single out events in logical order; according to each viewer's knowledge the sky is the zodiac, Euclid's infinite and disquieting universe, or "binary system matter" moving in eleven dimensions yet in a nutshell. Gumirato's recent works strive to evolve and elaborate forms from indistinct masses. The forms he presents in this exhibition are the tree as a symbol, borrowed from XVI and XX century painters, his field of research as a would-be art historian, the emergence of dream fragments and the remnants of heroes seen through the mist of recollections. The author's idea of light and colour is that they expand in the dark; that is why many of his works are hyper chromatic icons on a black background. Manlio Brusatin wrote that only dreams can render the intensity and the opaqueness of black. Yet for Eugenio the space of dream is poetic half light, a space that Bataille defines as the very place where each man can be himself, the domain where Eugenio's elusive images are given shape. |
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The layout of the exhibition at Spazio Lazzari emphasises the most recent elements in his research: the tree, the hero, fragments of dreams and their relations with the invisible; images whose only constant is Eugenio's way of painting: relentlessly anti academic, opposing above all the dull academicism of inconsistent informal painters. To meet the public in a space where the language of visual arts and fashion are made to coexist is a relevant event to all those who, like Eugenio Gumirato, had their apprenticeship in the 1980's. The spaces of fashion, which some consider frivolous languages lacking any referent, are to others systems of signs in which our contemporaries identify their likeness, the ideal scene where different formal systems can merge. Lazzari's artistry consists in finding complex, refined, genuinely sophisticated yet disillusioned and ironic human features in clothing style. |