Figure della notte (Byebye Flexor)
For his third solo presentation at the gallery, MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique is delighted to present Figure della notte (Byebye Flexor) by Gianfranco Baruchello, a painting produced between 1997 and 1998.
This large-scale painting is emblematic of Baruchello’s ability to transform his relationship with the space around him into art, combining the poetic and philosophical, as well as political and social narratives.
The canvas is scattered with miniature characters, words and shapes that populate Baruchello’s inner world and his artistic practice: the most recurrent themes are those of the realm of the house, in which interiors and rooms describe physical and emotional states.
This exhibition echoes the presentation of Psicoenciclopedia possibile by Gianfranco Baruchello at the Kandinsky Library of the Centre Pompidou in Paris (September 25 - October 24).
Psicoenciclopedia possibile at Centre Pompidou
"The Psicoenciclopedia possibile is constructed as if it were a volume of the Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani, but it is not. ". G. Baruchello (2020).
The Psicoenciclopedia possibile, a major project initiated by Gianfranco Baruchello in 2017 and concluded in 2020, offers a sort of deconstruction of the very system of the encyclopedia. Commissioned and published by the Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, the volume subverts its structure. In 816 pages, Baruchello creates a complex system that links, through unexpected cross-references, 1,200 entries (in the first part of the volume) and 200 picture plates (in the second part).
The entries are taken from writings, published and unpublished, notes and transcriptions of Baruchello's dreams, while the images are the result of a long selection and editing process from various sources.
Baruchello therefore puts to the test, this time in a book, the systems of organization (causes, effects, narrative sequences, links) of seeing and knowing. As in all his other works, from painting, to the object, to the installation, the encyclopedia also dismantles the safest and most anchored links to venture into the uncertain, into the possible, into the "pleasure of thinking", through an ars combinatoria which does not exclude the different or the insignificant. With Psicoenciclopedia, an exemplary work, Baruchello questions the 21st century, entering into the plurality of possible points of view.
The Artist
Gianfranco Baruchello (Livorno, 1924 - Rome, 2023) lived and worked in Rome and Paris.
In his long artistic research he has experienced and crossed the main tendencies of the Post-World War II, from Pop Art to Conceptual Art.Since the late 1950s he has used different media: painting, film, installation, objects, sculpture and performance practice. His first solo exhibition was in 1963, at the La Tartaruga Gallery in Rome: big paintings and small objects focused on the idea of formulating a first alphabet of images he calls Need, Hostility, Fear, Error, Desire, etc. In 1964, on the occasion of the exhibition at the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery in New York, he exhibited works that presented a significant point of arrival in his research: fragmentation, dissemination on canvas of images reduced to minimal elements and conceptual decentralisation of space.
From 1960 he began to produce short films, including Il grado zero del paesaggio (1963), Verifica incerta (1964-1965). Baruchello brought the very idea of fragmentation and montage to his experimentation with the painting, sculpture and moving images. In the same years he produced artist’s books such as La quindicesima riga (lines of text taken from hundreds of books) and Avventure nell’armadio di plexiglass (Adventures in a Plexiglas wordrobe). In 1962 he met Marcel Duchamp, to whom he dedicated the book Why Duchamp, published by McPherson, New York in 1985. In 1973, he started Agricola Cornelia S.p.A., an experiment between art and agriculture, which engaged him for eight years. In 1998, he set up the Baruchello Foundation with Carla Subrizi.
Baruchello’s works are part of museum collections all over the world: Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea and MAXXI (Rome), MoMA and Guggenheim Museum (New York), Hirshhorn Museum (Washington), Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia) as well as Barcelona, Munich, Hamburg, London and Paris.