Page 4 - Contemporary Art and Old Masters

NEW SUBJECTIVITY

Essays by Achille Bonito Oliva

The political elation of the Sixties drove art towards
the impersonal. The creative force behind the
image was invisible. Now, however, particularly
in works by Chia, Clemente, Cucehi, De Maria and
Paladino in Italy, the hand of the individual artist art
is happily no longer divorced from the conceptual
impulse. This hand shows itself in the capacity of
the work of art to display a subjectivity that makes
use of all the tools of expression and every kind of
language.

The young Italian artists feel compelled however
to use a means expression that is always subject
to the rigorous rules of language. But language
no longer follows the logic or the coherent, linear
paths of recent years. Rather the new means of
expression is rooted in an open, shifting nomadism
that refuses to be trapped in predictable, logical
development. The fundamental idea behind the
Mimmo Paladino, Prospettiva II, 1999 mixed media 98x98 in. | 241x241 cm. new work is that of a drift, a movement with no
Private Collection Sindelfingen, Germany
predetermined directions, no points of departure
and arrival, accompanied by a desire to find each
time a provisional mooring in the gradual shifts of
sensibility within the work.

Subjectivity asserts itself through its very
fragmentation, through the accidental nature of
an image which never claims to be a unitary or
“cumulative” moment; it is always as a precarious
vision, never grasping or attempting to grasp the
meaning of the world and the accompanying idea of
the infinite. Here, the image becomes the repository
of a mere hint of potentiality, expressed through
the means of art, i.e. grace and passion.

The works of the young Italian artists convey not
so much private, autobiographical subjectivity, but
rather the structural elements that characterize
it: mutability, transience, contradiction and
emphasis on detail. The new work is permeated by

4 WORLD of ART