Page 4 - La Biennale di Venezia 2022 issue of World of Art Contemporary Art Magazine

TRANSAVANGUARDIA: ITALIAN NEO-EXPRESSIONIST
GROUP FORMED IN THE LATE 1970s
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 new work is that of a drift, a movement
with no 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
59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, The Milk of Dreams never claims to be a unitary or “cumulative” moment;
Photo by: Andrea Avezzù, Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia 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 a sensibility that is energetic,

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