Strategic subtractions
Gloria Gradassi
Veronica Montanino’s work moves between the two different poles of the conceptual and the hyper-decorative, thus showing that it belongs to a sphere of artistic language independent from the standard forms of expression, overcoming and transcending every orthodox convention. With lucidity and spontaneity the trans-avant-garde movement and its theorists had gone beyond already the repetitive and doctrinal mechanism of the avant-gardes, stubbornly denying the prospect of a coherent evolution for the artistic means of expression deriving directly from the premises of the early 1900s. This was an act of liberation and an apparent return to the possibility of individual expression – generally perceived as a weak element at that time – but which actually created the premises for post-modernity, giving the possibility for a discontinuous evolution of contemporary forms of expression, full of backsliding, short-circuits, social commitment, individuality, citations and mannerisms: all the free incursions that are the basis of artistic language in the era of globalization. Aperto '93 was a confirmation of all this, a real opening in every linguistic and geographic direction. Veronica Montanino belongs to the post nineties generation and she, like her contemporaries, has a free approach to the issues of artistic language, a facility of access, communication, contrast, comparison and manipulation, which also derives from the internationalization of artistic phenomena and the consequent possibility of all-round contacts with various forms of expression and different cultures. From this miscellanea, that gives one the idea of a new "primordial soup", various different combinations of identity are always emerging: Montanino brings the Orient and the Occident together, the rational logos and fluid formalism, bringing it all into a playful neo-pop sphere. That which was absolute acquires another existence: it changes its nature while previously opposite poles attract each other and co-exist harmoniously in the fluctuating explosion of images and colours with which the artist invades the creative space.
Her absolutes are: colour, that exists as a universal incarnation of life, isolated from every ulterior determining factor and creates joyful neo-pop imagery; the forms of truth, that are based on a minimal and essential vision of an everyday humanity and constitute a philosophical image of the human being in an almost platonic but hyper-contemporary world of ideas; and finally fluidity, that involves weightlessness, lightness, transparency, wave-forms, and above all a lack of spatially defined dimensions. These are the elements of Montanino’s form of expression: the concepts that she lucidly investigates through successive mental subtractions, until the cognitive and aesthetic dimensions are perfectly superimposed. The operative mechanism is exquisitely conceptual and its goal is an essential and minimal aesthetics aimed towards determination. But this component, originating from a lucid and rigorous gaze, evolves and changes its nature, incorporating the procedures of interaction, fusion, combination and the dismantling of the rules: aesthetic strategies that contribute towards an overflowing and yet organized vision, structured with rigor but always open and invasive.
Order, control and planning are the means of successive mutations through which the elements that are individuated, separated and divided up can be transformed into a plausible new and alien reality that Montanino translates into concrete apparitions with her psychedelic paintings on Plexiglas, digital aggregations of chromatic bubbles, fluctuating wall decorations, and site-specific installations. The dimensions of her interventions are not important: whether it be a small and precious visual fragment, compositions of suspended discs, or the real places languidly investigated as if with a flexible tongue, Montanino’s works extend outwards in an invasion that confers an impalpable quality to the concrete space. Apparently deprived of any measurable dimension, floating, amniotic, there is a sense of limitless extension, whether it is a square centimetre of Plexiglas or a Renaissance loggia. It is as if reality had been untied from its moorings, with every organizational logic and every structural order removed. Objects lose their measurability, proportions are no longer subjected to any scale, every form and shape lives exclusively though its visual, mental and poetic weight.
The images of the world, lightened by their simplification into elementary shapes, slip around in a dilatable, deformable and essentially fluid space, virtual in as much as it is a stranger to every limit imposed by the demands of concreteness. This movement towards immateriality, which has such an invasive character, is the way in which Montanino deals with real spaces. Her site-specific works introduce an anomalous perspective into normality, instituting different relationships between the things of our world. In her remarkable intervention in the Renaissance cloister of Palazzo dei Capitani at Ascoli Piceno, the artist sets up a dialogue with the space first of all by opposing herself chromatically to the white travertine stone structures that appear even brighter and clearer as a consequence. But the relationships created do not only consist in the opposition between non-colour and colour, since one of the characteristics of this work, as in many others by the artist, is to separate, but at the same time it is also able to mix and combine.
Thus the intervention is detached from the context because of its chromatic impact, but at the same time it insinuates its way into the setting, with flowing vitality, traversing and piercing the elegant and dignified composure of a space that is closed in on itself, with the transversal fluidity of a non-measurable space. The point of greatest contiguity and closeness between history and the contemporary intervention consists in the combination of the Brunelleschian Renaissance module – expressed in the repetition of the arches in three superimposed orders – with the pointilliste explosion so that, by means of the dynamism inherent in the artistic process and its procedures, it is as if by following the repetitive and regular rhythm of the arches the past were transported to the present and reconciled with it. In this way a direct comparison is made between the measurable space, typical of the Renaissance vision, and space seen as variable extension, typical of the contemporary attitude, whose condensed and symbolic expression is identified by Montanino with the spherical element, amassed in multiple combinations, and turned into a new contemporary module.
Every weight appears de-materialized; the perfect and ideal proportions of the cloister are deformed by a gigantic black human shape that with its fluctuating body cuts across the architectural orders, further contributing towards uncoupling the structure of the building from the rational construction that holds it to the earth like a grid or matrix. The effect is one of joyful suspension and floatation, in an imaginary dimension that becomes real in our own three-dimensional sphere, with images suspended at various different depths in the heart of the cloister, which is thereby transformed into a source of emission of vital energy.
Also in her wall installations Montanino mixes the choral story of the anonymous and essential figures, with colour, letting everything slip and slide in her fluctuating compositions. There are no orders or rules to frame the apparition of the images, which have varying proportions and are arranged like a fragmented story, as the product of free associations representing an abstract and generic humanity, which is both absolute and at the same time intimately close to the observer. The figures make minimal gestures, with no emphasis or accents. They possess a particularly epic quality, since they are a condensation of humanity, released and liberated in a sort of shadow-sampling of contemporary life with simple outlines and clearly defined shapes in white or black.
But while everything fluctuates, nothing ever really gets mixed up or confused. Montanino uses the contemporary strategies of expressive artistic language in order not to confine her work within some rigid form of orthodoxy. She clearly organizes the reduction of every element to its essence, isolating it in order to remove it, infinitely reproducing it in a sinuous overflowing, well organized and yet hyper-decorative. It is very interesting to observe how such apparently distant categories can be brought together, subtracted, isolated and ordered, but also reiterated and infinitely reproduced in a visual excess that nevertheless does not become chaos. I believe that this attitude pertains, more than any other modality of expression or language, to the essence of the contemporary. It is a sort of strategy of cohabitation with the excesses of production and of information, with the imbalances between reality and its representation, and with the invasive use of images, that deprive every form of meaning, whether it be a word or some other sign. The language of expression includes on the one hand the need to individuate, to divide, to understand, to find meanings, and on the other hand it offers images that go beyond the solitary icon, by now isolated and impotent when confronted with the repetitions of mass production.
Working with these themes in art leads one to a sphere that, freed from political and social commitment, formulates an aesthetic formulation of the language of expression and the elaboration of formal structures with independent contents, thus producing worlds that are not ways of escaping from reality and the truth, but are alternative representations of it. As mechanisms of individuation the clear separations between colour and non-colour, fluidity and condensation, matter and spirituality are certainly the essence and nucleus of Montanino’s personal vision. These abstractions and subtractions free the essence of things, thereby revealing the conclusive aspects and final elements of the reality behind the purely visual. In the aggregations on Plexiglas the space is dominated by free and multidirectional development and movement, and upon this atmospheric field of evolution the colours and figures drift and roam, with Matissian levity. Two distinct worlds enter into a relation through the gestures of the human shapes that, at times, seem to play with the other world of colour or, separated and estranged from the chromatic presence, they point it out from afar. On one side there are the figures and on the other the dazzling flow of enamelled bubbles that appear, in their chromatic luminosity, to be capsules of beauty. This anomalous pointillisme is ambivalent, since it has a hyper-decorative redundancy that at the same time possesses a conceptual dimension, involving the isolation of the colour as an absolute essence which is distinct from the things it represents.
In her reflections Montanino observes how, in nature, this last factor is linked to the vital functions and the urge towards survival, while it is virtually absent in man, since his dominant characteristic is thought. In fact he uses it, transforming it from matter into idea, thus clearly marking and emphasising his separation from nature. In this way the faculty of thought is placed in a realm that is far from the primordial vitality of nature. But the essence of colour, protected and preserved by Montanino, who isolates and reproduces it in an infinity of chromatic bubbles, can still express the energy and primordial vitality that it originally had. It is as if her chromatic points and dots, organized and arranged into flat compositions or layouts and collections of concentric circles, were emissions of pure energy and beauty that slide about to combine with other sources of emission in a miraculous thaumaturgic and regenerating flow. For Montanino colour has this power, this absolutely positive quality that expresses both beauty and vitality. In the artist’s own words: "For man... colour is not literally life, but it is the representation of an idea-image of life. Colour suffers this transposition due to the hand of man: from function to expression, from matter to non-matter, from reality to idea".
Montanino thus brings it back to its original function, and makes it the absolute subject of her work, while at the same time revealing its conceptual quality. In their combinations with other elements her colours are elevated to a supremely decorative purpose and function; a waving and undulating repetition that expresses, in its excesses, its connections to other contemporary forms of expression. Behind the façade of excess one can detect the organizational method and the manual practice that Montanino performs on a daily basis in her laying out of the pure colours, and their superimposition one upon the other. Her art is like a psychedelic beauty therapy, dazzling, obsessive and liberating, in which the artist immerses herself: a pop utopia with regenerative power, with which she wishes to flood the world.
