Sign as painting
by Luciano Caramel

1. Beyond painting, in painting
"Beyond painting" was the leitmotiv that dominated the whole of the more advanced artistic panorama in 1959, the year when Agostino Ferrari, at the age of twenty, decided to go in for the profession of painter. On this side and that of the Atlantic, there was a growing sense of dissatisfaction with the specifics, a feeling for which non-representational art had prepared the ground, often in a radical way, with the importance that it gave to the actual process of painting, to the consistency of the material, and to the central role played by sign. In the United States the crisis in action painting, but also its development, or at least its legacy, opened the way for Johns' turn toward "objective" images or for Rauschenberg's rehabilitation of objects in his combine-paintings, which linked the taste for painting - still present - with the assembly of heterogeneous materials. There were forays too into the territories - along with a mutual give and take - of music and drama, in the works, for instance, of Cage, Kaprow, George Brecht, Higgins, and Cunningham, with the first "happenings" and the preparation of what was to become Fluxus, and with the increasingly common references to Dada and Duchamp, in precisely this area, but also in the more "artistic" situation that was given the name of new Dada. In Europe, along with interdisciplinary situations resembling the American ones referred to above (it was in 1959, and in the preceding year , that Cage himself gave seminars in Darmstadt together with Stockhausen), in the work of artists like Vostell, Gustav Metzger, or Bazon Brock, there was also an evolution in non-representational art. Once again, this was in the direction of the object, anti-pictorial and yet pre-conceptual: from the work of Burri and, in a different way, Fontana to the proposals of those who were already preparing for the definitive turning point of the sixties, artists like César, Klein and Manzoni.
But with Manzoni we have already reached both the generation of Ferrari and the city, Milan, that was in the front rank of this trend, with an extremely broad and lively range of experiences that were coming to a head in that year of 1959. The year which saw the first issue of the magazine Azimuth, (1) edited by Castellani and Manzoni, which significantly published reproductions of works that, while they were heterogeneous (just as in any case there was a great difference between the presuppositions and the lines of work of the two promoter-coordinators), were connected with the aforementioned developments. There was, in the first place, Fontana. And with him there were Johns and Rauschenberg, accompanied by Schwitters (whose text "Una definizione di Merz" was also republished by the review, along with the testimony of another Dadaist, Picabia). Then, of course, there were Castellani and Manzoni, together with Klein, Bonalumi, Rotella, Novelli, the young Roman artists Angeli and Marotta (at that time going through a phase of particular attention to the material), Giò and Arnaldo Pomodoro, Mack and Piene, and the other members of the German group Zero, from Wagemaker, Romyn, Schoonoven, Dahamen, and Manzoni himself, to Sanders, Bohemen, Schumaker, Tajiri, and Pieters, in whose work the surpassing of the non-representational within non-representational art itself was evident on a macroscopic scale, among other things with attention to the sign as well, as in the work of people like Dorfles and Dangelo, also represented in that first issue of Azimuth.
The few texts with which the succession ofimages was interspersed were in harmony with this. These included a piece by Guido Ballo on Fontana and spatialism, programmatically entitled "Beyond Painting," and another by Dorfles on "Communication and Consumption in Today's Art," in which-in clear connection with the esthetics of Max Bense, highly relevant in these circumstances - the accent was placed on the "communicative function" ("that which may permit the survival of an art that has burned every bridge with representativeness and figurativeness as they are traditionally understood"), on the need "for the work of art to regain its semantic nature, to become language and discourse,"as well as on the recognition ofthe now established "rapidity of consumption of the work of art."(2) Reading between the lines, one can see a rejection of the hermetic sealing of the non-representational within a non-communicating, or at least scarcely communicating, subjectivity, resulting precisely from its circumscription within the cryptic self-reflection of the artist's emotivity in the picture, outside of any real relationship with the public. This latter, instead, is regarded as indispensable, a constituent part of "The new conception of art" to which the second, and last, issue of Azimuth, published in 1960, was entirely dedicated.
In this issue Udo Kultermann (who in the same year staged the exhibition "Monochrome Malerei" in Leverkusen, exemplificative of such issues), after having acknowledged that tachisme and informel had "restored vital force to painting" and had been "a dynamic means of expression," observed that "while tachisme views as dynamic formation active emotional, but at the same time physical forces emerging in the course ofthe activity of painting, which, even ifmerely hinted at, has a projection in the work," "the new artists," on the other hand, "seek to render mechanical the material, the elements that is of the formation itself, to give them a concrete intensity of effect, that which makes the picture in itself a dynamic structure. " While "in tachisme color and line stilI had importance as means of expression, as bearers of subjective feelings, as points of attachment of an immediate psycho-physical act, the new painting wants to objectify the instruments of action, so that the constellation and the true nature of the forming material itself become starting point and canon of effect, and the objective and real structure takes the pIace of the vague outline of personalistic forms of expression."
Hence too the importance ofthe role ofthe public, stressed besides by those tendencies that sought in parallel an objectivity of procedures, in relation with the science of vision and with to some extent analogous motivations of communication, as in Milan in Miriorama and therefore in the Gruppo T, in Padua in the Gruppo N, in France in the G.R.A. V. (Groupe de Recherche d' Art Visuel)(3) and earlier in Motus. Members of the latter group exhibited their work in Milan in April 1960 at the Galleria Azimut, linked to the magazine Azimuth, claiming in the catalogue to "pursue purely formal, visual concerns, in accordance with an almost scientific and not 'artistic' approach, from which all subjective lyricism is banned."(4) "Man is decisively part of this new form of painting, given that his active collaboration in looking at the pictures is the premise for their effect," noted Kultermann, continuing with his argument: "the new painting is in fact based on the reciprocal action of the picture and the human organism and this reciprocal action has as its theme the relation between movable material in the sense of made forms, and the movable human being in the sense of an emotional and at the same time physical movement. The dynamics that could become the subject of a picture, but only at a few fundamental points, have now become the actual form ofthe picture."
The "new painting" aimed at values and meanings that in fact went "beyond" painting, even when the terrain might appear to be stilI that of painting. In the pages of Azimuth 2 Castellani spoke "of the possibility of a form of art reduced to the semantic nature of its language," and after returning to the arguments relating to the informative function of art and to its appreciation, (5) stated: "The need for the absolute that inspires us, by proposing new themes to us, denies us the means considered proper to the pictorial language," so that the "only possible criterion of composition" will be the one that "through the possession of an elementary entity, line, indefinitely repeatable pattern, [or] monochrome area is alone necessary to give to the works themselves the concreteness of infinity, and can undergo the conjugation of time, the only conceivable dimension, measure, and justification of our spiritual need. "
And in a similar fashion Manzoni wrote of a "unique, unlimited, and absolutely dynamic surface," emphasizing that "the 'infinibility' is strictly monochrome, or better still of no color" and that "in total space form, color, and dimensions have no meaning; the artist has won his total freedom: the pure material becomes energy; the obstacles of space, the bondages of the vice of subjectivity are broken: the whole problem of art is overcome." "Why then worry about how to place a line in space?" the artist asks himself, "why fix a space, why these limitations? Composition of form, forms in space, spatial depth, all these problems are irrelevant to us: a line can only be traced, of great length, to infinity, separate from any problem of composition or dimension: in total space dimensions do not exist." And furthermore: "pointless here too are all the problems of color, any question of chromatic relationship (even if it is merely a question of modulations of tone): we can only cover with a single color, or rather spread out a single unbroken and continuous surface. " "The question," in fact, "is one of providing a wholly white surface (indeed wholly colorless, neutral) unconnected with any pictorial phenomenon, with any intervention extraneous to the value of surface." Therefore "a white surface that is just a white surface"; "better still that just is: being (and being total is pure becoming)"; "there is nothing to say: there is only being, there is only living."
Expressions, these last, which are related to the developments in Manzoni's work, increasingly mental and as such existentially innervated and yet with the character of objects: in the sense that the intervention of the human being-artist "legitimates as art" any object, delegitimating at the same time the exclusive conception of art as formativeness and therefore art as the production of objects, which however continued to be practised by Castellani in his "object painting" as Dorfles was later to define it. Still, in any case, radically questioning the nature of painting, even when "objective." As happened too, once again in Milan, in the design-analytical area of the Gruppo T, which was also formed in 1959, and whose members exhibited their work, along with that of Castellani and Manzoni, at the Galleria Azimut in December of the same year, under the banner, in spite of their different approaches, of interaction and contact, again with a view to going beyond painting.
Their Miriorama (6) set out "to express reality in its terms of becoming" (7) through objects, in fact, that best seemed to lend themselves, in part for their tridimensionality, and for the possibility of obtaining effects of movement under way, to an experimental formativeness, attentive to methodology (on the plane of information theory, but also that of science, in particular in the spheres of physics and the psychology of form) and progressively programmed. With relations, here too, with the non-representational: in the character of process, in the dynamic temporality, in the common interest in materials, especially at the beginning. As in Anceschi's Tables of Liquid Possibilities, consisting of viscous colored liquids enclosed between sheets of plastic; the work can be turned upside down so that the liquids flow to produce new images. As in Boriani's Magnetic Surfaces in which it is iron filings that produce constantly changing images as a result of the variation, through movement, of the intensity of magnetic fields; in De Vecchi's Sculptures to Be Kicked, made out of synthetic sponge, or in his Surfaces in Vibration, made out of para rubber into which pins are driven; or in Colombo's Surfaces in Variation and Pulsating Structures. (8) In such a situation Ferrari took independent positions, although ones that interacted, soon, with the need to find a new foundation for painting, with the aims of "new painting" championed by his friends Manzoni and, above all, Castellani: but in painting, away from the radical character of its annihilation practised in different ways by both Manzoni and Castellani. With the vindication, that is, of a possible new topicality of that ancient medium that the particular context helps to make relevant, both problematically and with the same concrete results. This, as will be seen, set in completely new terms both the operation on the support with brushes and pigments and the need for a significance that was indeed resolved in the exactitude of the factuality (and was the legacy of the non-representational matrix) and directly linked with the corporeity (here, instead, in accord with the other proposals just referred to), as well as with the intentionality of thought, but with the unusual insertion, in the sign, of emotional and commemorative values, on the lines of an allusive, reticent, and yet dense tendency to relate everything to the artist's own life and thoughts. This would be the mark of his originality for a long time to come. And it would mark the emergence, too, of a formation carried out through premises rooted in a complex and multidirectional culture, in its presuppositions, objectives, and references - although substantially different from that of not just Manzoni, Castellani, or Gianni Colombo, but also, for instance, of Sordini or Verga, who were to be his fellow travelers. Analogous, on the other hand, to that of artists like Arturo Vermi and Costantino Guenzi, with whom he soon became friends, and with whom he shared, in spite of their belonging to different generations (Guenzi was born in 1926 and Vermi in 1928, so that their emergence as painters occurred immediately after the war, in a situation totally different from the one in which the young Ferrari found himself), an interest in a painting of image that was not descriptive but not merely resolved in itself either.
With fertile points of contact with the non-representational art structured into close-packed bands of color of Chigine in the late fifties, and with influences from the work of autre artists from the other side of the Alps and, I believe, even certain experiences from across the Atlantic. And I am thinking, especially, of the artists who in that final phase of the non-representational, of crisis in the gestural or material urgency that had animated the decade between 1945 and 1955, put forward the example of a structural organization and of a spatiality dominated within the coloring matter, as well as through the sign and the gesture itself. From Fautrier or Tápies, or even Hartung, in Europe, to Americans like Rothko, Kline, Gottlieb, or Barnett Newman, whose work Agostino would have been able to see in Milan in 1958, along with that of other painters from the United States, in the traveling exhibition "The New American Painting-La Nuova Pittura Americana." (9) An exhibition that Ferrari, like Vermi and Guenzi, or even Enrico Della Torre and Valentino Vago, to cite two artists somewhat older than our subject but who had taken similar positions at the time, must have viewed in a very different way than the author of the preface to the Italian catalogue, Franco Russoli. The latter - pertinently in his own way - saw it as a stimulus for the "new blood of the old continent" who had engaged "in very lively controversy with intellectual and formal positions of the post-cubist and neo-plastic tradition," within an "immediate perception, or revelation, of existence." (10) He was referring to artists such as Morlotti, obviously, or to Chigine himself, who had found in non-representational art a means of evading neo-cubist and concrete formalistic encumbrances. Yet not only did these not represent a risk for Ferrari, but they were completely irrelevant to him: they lay outside his interests, even in chronological terms.
Rather - as not coincidentally I have found it necessary to affirm for that "Milanese History," which in many ways interfered with the initial direction taken by Ferrari, centered around the above-mentioned names of Vago and Della Torre, and those of Gianni Madella and Mario Raciti, to which one could add that of Claudio Olivieri (11) - it would not be unfounded to point to Cézanne's "painting the material that gives itself form, the order emerging out of a spontaneous organization," according to Merleau-Ponty's celebrated definition. (12) And certainly some role must have been played here by the influence of Fautrier's work, which Ferrari must have seen at first hand in Milan as far back as 1958, at Guido Le Noci's Galleria Apollinaire, where paintings by Wols, Hartung, Mathieu, Brien, and other leading European figures of art autre had also been on show. This maturation of the intent to break out of the hermetic sealing into incommunicability typical of extreme non-representational art, and of the determination to find a new foundation from within the image, and to reconstruct it, beyond the magma and the uncontrolled use of gesture - shared, in an objective-object direction, by Manzoni, Castellani, or the Gruppo T artists, and among those who like Ferrari wanted to stay with in painting - , also affected the artists of different orientation whose work was brought together in 1960 by Enrico Crispolti, Roberto Sanesi, and Emilio Tadini in an exhibition entitled "Possibilità di relazione" (Possibilities of Relation) at the Galleria L'Attico in Rome. Artists like Adami, Aricò, Bendini, Ceretti, Dova, Peverelli, Pozzati, Romagnoni, Ruggeri, Scanavino, Strazza, Vacchi, and Vaglieri. (13)

2. The reasons of image and those of sign.
By the artist's own account, Ferrari's works from the period of formation, from 1959 onward, "are influenced by the naturalistic climate of a certain Lombard painting." (14) In the sense that they retained the attachment to the tonal values of the local tradition (although fortified by European influences, even, as has been seen, of a non-representational character) and yet did not renounce objectives of representation. However it was not the naturalism of a Morlotti, nor, more broadly, that theorized by Arcangeli in his essays in Paragone. (15) "I was trying," Ferrari in fact points out in the notes published in this volume, "to capture the atmosphere of the industrial outskirts of Milan, reproducing on the canvas highly simplified volumes with dark tones and gray backgrounds." Thus the connection with Sironi made years ago by Aldo Passoni should come as no surprise. (16) His "nature" was the industrial city, in fact, the suburbs, as it was for that modern master, with a similar preference for heavy structural patterns and for a dense and dark chromatism, produced moreover with techniques and a material sensibility that were far from new. As was recognized moreover by Passoni, who wrote of "large volumes thickened with brown, greens, and the odd splash of yellow on uniform earth-colored or gray backgrounds," within a painting that "spoke a European language." (17)
The reasons of the image, in this initial phase, took priority. But not in the sense of the urgency of the reference - semantic, illustrative - to the objective referent, to the account of things and settings. Rather in that of the quest for a meaningful figurative expression of forms and colors, that would resolve in the internal terms of the picture that other that still appeared to Ferrari to be a determinant factor in the expressive operation. "My fundamental problem," stated the artist in the aforementioned text, "was that of managing to establish tonal relationships between volumes in the foreground and backgrounds that were generally simplifications of landscapes." (18) And the accent on the language is so marked that the thickness of image is extremely reticent, even hermetic, as can easily be seen by looking at the fruits of that early season.
The titles refer to definite subjects: Landscape, Memory of a Suburb, Industrial Agglomeration, and the like. The form resolves the suggestions of the contents in an extremely concise manner. Broad brush strokes (soon to be joined by the spatula) running vertically and horizontally, assembled in homogeneous sheaves that stand out from the generally uniform surface of the canvas, only disturbed by variations of luminous intensity. Out of this comes, as Giorgio Kaisserlian pointed out in his presentation of Ferrari's first one-man show at the Galleria Pater in Milan in 1961, "the sense of an arcane mysterious presence in the forms that emerge from a tense and vibrant background," with the artist setting "in counterpoint to the dark backgrounds a sequence of light structures, resembling great columns, and one seems to hear the fullness of the musical chord that is born out of his visual framework." (19)
In reality, the dialectical relationship between figure and ground is also based on the opposite alternation of dark forms against light backgrounds, as well as on the confrontation in the foreground of more or less light or light and dark structures.
Once again in the register of a tendency toward essentiality that calls to mind (as with other Milanese painters of that time) the great example set by Rothko and even, in one case, by Malevich.
The latter seems to have provided the inspiration for the 1959 painting Invasion, dominated by a single form that extends toward the right-hand side of the picture, in a progressive accentuation of chromatic saturation, while the left-hand part gradually grows lighter until it blends with the background, a device to be found in some of the Russian painter's works.
It was within such a register, without deviations, that Ferrari step by step discovered - at first as if unconsciously, and then in an increasingly deliberate manner - the value of the sign. At the time he did this by "cutting into the paint with the spatula, with the result of creating" on the "surfaces, sign-graffiti that produced a remarkable vibration," as he himself recalls in the notes he drew up for this monograph. He goes on to say that he now realizes, "on seeing them again, that the beginning of my interest in sign dates back to just those works"; an interest that was soon to play a dominant role in his paintings. Here, however, and right through 1961, still always within a context of image, as has already been said, and without the characters that were to transform it into script. There is a remarkable parallel with contemporary developments in the work of Hartung, who was at just that time experimenting with the possibility of working by means of removing layers of pigment previously applied to the support.
But this affinity should not be seen as a derivation from the work of the German painter, for Ferrari knew nothing of these new works of his, which had not yet been exhibited in Italy. At the 1960 Venice Biennale Hartung had put on show only works produced prior to 1957, taking the main prize for painting and certainly attracting the attention of Agostino, who found himself on the right wavelength to understand "his drawing," that "like a paraph, nervously scratches the canvas and produces signs that are at once considered and instinctive," as Raymond Cogniat put it in the catalogue. (20) Rather one is reminded again of Vermi - yet once again certainly not as the direct cause of developments that an examination of the paintings reveals to be wholly consistent with a logical process of maturation in the artist's work. Ferrari, in an unpublished comment on the events of those years, points out the coincidence, or rather affinity, of their interests and course of development. Vermi, wrote Ferrari, "went to live in Paris for a while, as a result losing his studio in Milan, and on his return I put him up for a few months. Out of this was born a working fellowship that lasted for over twenty years. We had come to the sign almost simultaneously: he, on his return from France, began to mark surfaces, made of impasti of clay that were still non-figurative, with vertical stripes of a dark color, and I was reducing my masses to black surfaces that I scratched with the spatula."
And along with Vermi should be mentioned Ettore Sordini and Angelo Verga. (21) After a long association with Manzoni - with whom they had been exhibiting since 1957, when, working together as a group, they had produced the documents cum manifestos "Per una pittura organica" and "Contro lo stile," concerned with a radical questioning of the methods and aims of art, the two artists moved away from the increasing minimalism of their friend, and from his de facto dissolution of painting into the "new painting." The very painting that now Ferrari as well, along with Vermi, Sordini, and Verga, and under the decisive influence, for Ferrari as for the others, of Fontana, was reproposing within the limits of a stringent significance, with a critical reexamination of the statutes under which, after all, Ferrari's experience had been conducted up until then.
The reasons of the image were not denied, but made part of an activity that was at once more elementary and more comprehensive, looking toward horizons that, while they did imply the renunciation of representational or figurative values, however free and emotionally motivated, were at the same time fraught with the desire to give new - less redundant in terms of expression and more concentrated in the expressive links between artist and work, through a refinement, and a deepening, of gesture and the refoundation of linguistic instruments - life to that field of self realization beyond the self hat is the picture. An object, certainly, but one that is, so to speak, privileged, and that by its nature resists the trivialization of an objectivization bound up with the scenes and the actual physical flagrance of the everyday; and that inevitably, in those results most closely involved in existential, psychological, and bodily drives, requires a detachment, a clarification, that is able to rely on a less contingent manner of speech.
This was the problematic area around which the Cenobio group - to which Ferrari as well as Sordini, Verga, and Vermi belonged - was formed in 1962, with the aim, as Agostino put it in the aforementioned text, "of carrying out through a minimal operation on the sign a research that would restore vitality to painting." Outside the conventionality of the traditional terms, which still characterized the commitment of the artists, again in Milan, drawn to the so-called "new figuration," but also outside the imitative schools of non-figurative painting, which continued to have their adherents, reducing to the level of cooking recipes the strong voice of the protagonists of the forties and fifties. The legacy of the latter, in terms of the underlying aims, was now to be found in the ramified and sensitive treatment of the sign by artists such as Ferrari, in direct conflict - as has already been pointed out - with the inventively and concretely creative vitalism of Fontana.
Another member of the Cenobio, whose premises consisted of two small rooms provided by the art gallery director Cesare Nova, was Ugo La Pietra. Although he had not yet completed his studies in architecture, he was already showing impatience with a professionalism limited to practical functions and interest in interdisciplinary relationships, something that had led him at that time to burn signs into panels. And La Pietra brought into the group - seasoned though short-lived (as was inevitable in a situation of transformation, of adjustment) - the poet Alberto Lùcia, who must have encountered considerable difficulties in giving a theoretical voice to ideas that were in essence much more closely bound up with the practice of painting than with conceptual elaboration: in part too, owing to the role that was still played, as a legacy of non-representational gestural art and distantly of surrealistic automatism, by the roots in experience, even though in its innermost and deepest levels. With analogies, evidently, with what was being proposed, in different spheres that were not always comparable, by people like Twombly, Tancredi, and Novelli, as well as by Tápies and by Dubuffet of course (as Angela Vettese has justly pointed out, drawing a parallel between the two artists) - along with Capogrossi, Perilli, Accardi, and Sanfilippo. However these have to be regarded as operating in an essentially different situation, with the same chronological coordinates as "the destructuring and linguistic contamination of Gadda, Robbe-Grillet, and the group gathered around the review L'Esperienza Moderna, which was shortly to give birth to the Gruppo 63." (22) This last, moreover, is a pertinent reference, if only for the preeminence of an intentionality of "writing" in the pictorial work of the group, and in that of Ferrari himself in particular, who between 1963 and 1964 was trying "to describe environmental situations, states of mind, and memories." (23)
The goal, it is clear, remained the same as the one pursued in the earlier pictures. But the pictorial means attained a completely new level of concentration. With results of great significance, in which, as the artist points out, "the central masses and the backgrounds grow indistinct, losing the plastic corporeality of the preceding years to make way for atmospheric colors." (24) The artist defined the painting as a page, whose margins he outlined with regularity. Inside them, his hand used the brush to leave swift polychrome traces, sometimes broad but more frequently tiny ones, following a course typical of script.
The signs turn into individual "words" fixed in an elementary iterative writing, that falls into patterns conditioned more by the layout (i.e. by factors that are in the end pictorial) than by an intent to convey meaning. In the sense of conventionally coded meaning, since a depth of significance based on emotional impulses is far from lacking. The very titles of the works from this period, as Passoni has already had occasion to observe, "with their character of a page from a diary and taken from a report, are indicative and already shift the discourse syrnbolically onto the simplicity of the structures of language." (25) One finds in fact, more than once, Story, or Short Story, or again Meeting, Sunday Afternoon, The Two Friends, Diary of a Journey , Dramatic Episode, and the like, leading up to Manifesto, repeatedly in 1963, at the conclusion of these experiments. Experiments that are, at least on a national level, among the more significant products of the art of the first half of that decade, in part owing to their prefiguration of the subsequent developments of "written art" and "visual poetry."

3. From "Total Form" to "Theater of Sign"
Writing about the Manifestos, Passoni, after observing that in them "the diary finds expression in message-program," points out their affinity "to the most lively American experiments in abstract expressionism and in particular to certain recent paintings by Adolph Gottlieb." (26) The parallel is undoubtedly a persuasive one, and could be extended to embrace some of the works of Motherwell, which Ferrari had seen in Milan, along with those of Gottlieb, in the aforementioned exhibition of American painting held in 1958. And it may have been with such works in mind that Agostino went to New York in 1964, where however it was the "intellectualized realism" (27) of Pop Art that made the greatest impression on him. With its quest for perceptual objectivization, its grandiloquent gigantism, and its metropolitan extroversion, it stood on a completely different plane from anything else. As again, also in the notes relating to that journey (and the next, made the following year) reproduced here, the painter recalls, taking his distance from a direction of whose relevance he was still well aware, even on the literal plane of language: "I understood the importance that Pop Art was assuming for America; I saw artists who through that experience were succeeding in their aim of undermining the whole of an academicism of European derivation and at the same time carrying out a highly effective criticism of their own conduct, mocking and attacking in a variety of ways their urban landscape and, in some cases, their social institutions." "However, as it was not my landscape, I could not, even though I understood their work, sometimes on a deep level, find in it a poetics of my own." (28) "My esthetic landscape could not relate to what I saw pass before my eyes everyday at the exhibitions that I went to, too deeply rooted in me were the experiences of Malevich, Brancusi, Kandinsky, and Fontana."
All this, certainly, is not only symptomatic of an autonomy and an independence of judgement far from common in a young man, especially in those circumstances, but also of a remarkable clarity of intentions. Yet this did not prevent Ferrari from benefiting from his knowledge of artistic developments in the United States between 1964 and 1965: beyond Pop Art, it should be made clear, in the direction of a minimalist coolness that had its repercussions on Agostino. He acknowledges this himself, confessing that on his return home his "paintings had changed: the sign now took on more plastic values, set itself in equilibrium with the form and color." (29)
This can be seen in works like In Space, Coming In, Mechanical Moon, Labyrinth, Steeped in the Blue, and Through the Blue, painted for the most part in 1965 (but some oft hem in the previous year) in which the sign, while free and loose, is no longer vibrant. The same is true of the backgrounds, motionless and even luministically stable. The narrative emphasis, still detectable, is combined with analytical intentions. These were to have a rich future in Ferrari's subsequent paintings, yet they did not clash with his earlier work, in which the preeminent emotional freedom, with its aforementioned tendency to allude to situations and encounters, with the private cadence of memory, of notes from a diary, is linked to an at least reflective inclination.
In the evolution of his forms, in short, Ferrari respected a continuity of inspiration and methods, and therefore of results as well, which was to remain a component of his work, giving it an overall unity, above and beyond the individual developments of an often strikingly innovative character . This may explain the apparent contrast between the interpretation of the works of this phase made by as subtle an observer as Passoni and the artist's own statements, which Passoni himself made public in a passage that is worth reexamination. "In this period," wrote the critic, in relation to the pictures painted at the time of his visits to New York, Ferrari "painted the 'labyrinths,' in which - by his own admission - the sign is used as an exceptional means of expressing plastic concepts and not as a means of narration. And I am quoting his words faithfully, since as a critic I was about to say the opposite, that is that the plastic concept is overwhelmed by the narrative, that the semantics of the sign are so lively that it invents itself continually in the process of overcoming any disposition for a rigor of abstract derivation." The fact is, the sign had been objectified to some extent, had lost the cursive character of writing, marginalizing and dominating, but not canceling out, the lyrically effusive intonation that had marked the earlier images. What remained intact, however, was the pre-eminence of the relational character that stands out in the whole body of Ferrari's work, constituting the primary common denominator of its aforementioned continuity, as is plain to anyone who attempts, as we are doing in this book, a retrospective assessment. The relational character between figure and ground, in the early paintings dating from around 1960, and already between sign and chromatic backgrounds; then between writing and page in the "diaries" from the Cenobio period; and now between broad linear rhythms that run across the surface and the surface itself, in dialogue with irregular elliptical shapes that expand from a central nucleus. This is the line that the artist's research would continue to take in the second half of the decade, with a greater complexity of relationships, as well as with an increased emphasis on analysis, which became systematic and programmed.
By 1966 this was explicit, in the series based on what he referred to as Total Form, the result, in his own words, of an investigation designed to "establish a relationship between a fragrnent considered as idea or initial germination and a white plastic form": "starting out that is from an area painted with a tonal color and traversed by signs," which he regarded as the "theme," in order to set "it in relation to the white form," so that this "gradually assumed different aspects" until the work was completed "when the dimension and the appearance of this form was in plastic equilibrium with the (pictorial) fragment." (30) With the return to and evolution in design terms of what was present in germ in the "labyrinths," and therefore with particular attention to the spatial connections. This explains his interest in Lucio Fontana, a constant point of reference for Ferrari, as for the whole range of avant-garde experimentation carried out in Milan in the fifties and sixties.
It was in fact the master of spatialism who took stock of these achievements in 1967, making a number of pertinent observations, (31) that were taken up by Ferrari in the text we have just quoted. Fontana placed the accent on the relational intentionality of these works, emphasizing how the artist, having fixed "the pictorial content of the work through an embryonic idea," began "the work of evolution of form through continual variations that are interdependent." (32) As, immediately afterward, in Theater of Sign, to which Ferrari devoted his attention from the same year of 1967 on, when the "research of a fundamentally plastic character" pointed out by Fontana in the above text and conducted, as we have seen, ever since the visits to the United States, once again gave way to the dominance of the sign. However with the development of the innovations - in the objectives and therefore in the linguistic instruments - tried out in Total Form: of the surpassing, in the first place, of the exclusive abutment of the image on the surface, as in Total Form, tried out by means of forms in negative or defined as objects, obtained by cutting out the support and superimposing shape on shape, producing the effect of a three-dimensional projection (Total Form-Birth of a Form) or at least of interruption of the homogeneity of the plane (Total Form-Maternity), and at times with invasion-intrusion into the surrounding space, and with its incorporation, by means of cuts and fissures, into the image (Total Form-Three, Total Form-Island, and Total Form-Flower), an original, and in reality incomparable, use of the example set by Fontana.
In the Theater of Sign too Ferrari resorts to the assembly of several parts to create a single work. And he also makes use of differentiated instruments, once again coming out from the surface or extending into and beyond it, by means of incisions and hollows. Yet with an implosive attitude, enclosing his "theater" within the canonical definition of the rectangle, obtaining, so to speak, a composite picture by setting four panels at right angles. And the implosive character of the object matches that of the method, in a way that had never been so strictly consequential. In harmony, undoubtedly, with the conceptualizing climate of the time, Ferrari was proposing an articulate phenomenology of the sign. "The signs," he says in the notes he significantly wrote in the margin, and in explanation (although they are true theoretical presuppositions, and not just a posteriori arguments) of his work, "can be expressed in different ways. The relationship that can emerge between signs of different physical nature and symbolic signs is interesting. Regarding the written sign as symbolic, it can be set in relation to the physical-negative and physical-positive sign. This in the context of the internal space, that is the one that exists between sign and sign, and of the external space that stretches as far as the observer." (33)
At that time the "signs of different physical nature" were: "the 'symbol sign,' represented by 'painting it on a transparent surface'; the 'pictorial sign,' drawn 'on a white surface'; the 'positive physical sign,' made 'out of steel wire placed in relief on the surface'; and finally the 'negative physical sign, represented by a fissure created by cutting through the wooden panel." (34) Ferrari joined them together and confronted them, seeking not only to give form to a sort of semeiology of the object, but also to trigger the observer's response, intensifying the dialectical relationship that has always existed between work and spectator, but that was essential here to get away from the deceptive priority of "plastic events" that is imposed on the artist's work.
From this derived, among other things, a new interest in factors of perception, something that is reflected even in the title chosen for this group of works: that "theater of sign" that was then combined with indications that were sometimes of a semeiological-linguistic tone (Theater of Sign Semantic Stasis, for instance), or that recalled the pure rhythms of music (Theater of Sign, Homage to Bach; Theater of Sign, Fugue), reminding us, once again, of the dual character of his work, including analysis, as has been pointed out, but also expression, even though at a minimal level. With the result that the different categories of signs, or rather their different qualities, even in a physical sense, are not limited to proposing tautological controls joined onto the characteristics, which are also physical (three-dimensionality, transparency, hollowness, the relationship with the opaque and colored support), that distinguish them, but present themselves in tangled patterns, in dynamic, static, or linearly peremptory states, or even with iterations of restless vivacity, that are accentuated by the shadows obtained with the "positive signs." To the point of legitimizing their interpretation in terms of assertion, "in the semeiological contamination," "of the peremptory vitality of the negative" put forward (although with dated ideological trappings) by Giorgio Brizio, who precociously turned his attention to precisely such "mental disturbances" that, "from a systematic starting point," would come to contaminate the "established order." (35)

4. Meanings and symbols
The relationism of the signs and of their objectivization in space and the implicit psychological involvement of the observer not only averted the possible danger of a formalistic plasticity, withdrawn within itself and incompatible with Ferrari's problematic tension, but opened the way for the dynamics of meanings and symbols. In point of fact these progressively obtained a hearing, and significance, in the artist's work, although not through procedures involving the superimposition of one value on another, but within the signifiers themselves: that is in the sign, always, and in the form and color. As is already evident in Theater of Sign, which sets the stage for a crowded field of interrelationships, and not just grammatical and syntactic ones, free of any static impermeability to what is other than itself.
"While my research was directed at setting colors in relation to signs and forms," Ferrari now observes, reexamining the aims of those years, "in my notes of the time," one could detect an interest "in seeking out the representative archetypes of the primary human emotions." In fact, "the ability to transform into symbols the accidental elements of a surrounding situation" continued the painter, "is not something that we have acquired over the long course of civilization, but is something that we can with good reason consider inherent in our nature. Man, as others have rightly said, is a symbolic animal: hence to investigate in this direction is to attempt the recovery of the primary human emotions in order to be able, starting out again from them, to attempt a cultural operation that would take account of humanity in its integrity and totality." And he concluded: "every color is charged with multivalent meanings closely bound up with the natural world and with the magical relationship that humanity has always had with it, a symbol imbued with emotional echoes." (36)
His position here, as Passoni observes, is noticeably close to that of "some British painting and sculpture, such as that of Philip King, in which the symbolic datum is an archetypal datum from which to commence and that seems to take a road totally free from the bondage of the laws of nature, probably to repeat, apart from the harmonious inner laws, their randomness of development and setting." (37) And it is an affinity to be sought in the coincident choice of plastic elements wholly devoid of naturalistic connotations, but that can be traced back, on just this archetypal level, to matrices that innervate everything, that is nature in the first place, rather than in predilections of style. These may be recognizable with hindsight, but I think that they did not play an active role at the time, and were certainly not intentionally pursued. Such an entry into the world of meanings and symbols was the logical outcome, as must be plain, of the course of Ferrari's artistic development (in the speculative and experimental sense as well as the expressive one). Further evidence of this is provided by everything that the artist did along these lines subsequently.
First he investigated in the uniqueness of the individual picture (and therefore no longer with the almost didactic combination of different situations to be found in Theater of Sign), the mutual connections, of interdependence and of independence of the range of signs already identified, between strictly "symbolic" signs (such as the word) and signs of a special symbolic nature, deriving from their physical tangibility. In the works painted around 1970 (from Blue Radar and Little Radar of 1971 to White Invasion and Island of 1972), it was the latter that predominated. Thus, in 1972, he began "to determine what were the psychological effects that colors had on 'him,' analyzing first the three primary colors, red, blue, and yellow, and then the complementary ones, violet, green, and orange." (38) Subsequently (and I am quoting the artist's own words at length not only because of their explanatory value, but also to drive home the analytical, mental, and theoretical breadth of his work, which goes hand in glove, too, with its originality, with the impossibility of reducing it to the experiences of other artists, whether in Italy or outside), "starting out from the presupposition that if white color-light crosses an empty space it becomes the only form existing in the space itself, by breaking this white form down with a prism 'he' obtains the whole spectrum of colors from red to violet." (39) With the consequence of recognizing "that every single color is a partial aspect of the form." (40) Out of this came the 1974 series Sign Form Color, the true goal of such inquiries. Not however - as is in fact always the case - on a solely conceptual level, nor with an anachronistic return to the terms of operation of Concrete Art, or even of the neo-Constructivism of the Nuova tendenza in the early sixties.
Undoubtedly, however, in the wake of a minimalization of painting, now reduced to extremes of monochrome, that sets these works apart from Ferrari's output from the beginning up until 1967, and then from that from the late seventies up until the present, once again committed to the wealth of possibilities offered by painting. The second part of the title of these assemblies (which the artist went on calling "pictures") (41) provides a confirmation of this process of reduction, adding to the aforementioned Sign Form Color the unequivocal Primary Structure.
But that "primariness," it is worth remembering, is not just formal. Indeed it is formal in so far as it is significant. And so the minimalism is an intentional choice of field to reinforce the elementariness - of the color as well as the form: each work is in fact based on a single, uniform color, chosen from among the primary ones - in relation to a more comprehensive definition of the objectives of art. And it is in accord with the desire not to lose the individuality - physical and of meaning - of the various factors in the plurality of the approach: "sign, form, and color remain distinct elements of a structure, in constant dialectical relationship between themselves and the surrounding world," as Ferrari put it in no uncertain terms.
He commenced from this specification, by way of separation, of particular identification, in the same way as in analysis, his investigation of the relationships existing among the individual components: relationships of "acceptance" or of a "dialectical" nature, understanding "as relationship of acceptance" of form-color "that situation in which the form visually occupies the most space in a determinate field of color," with the colors "tonal, so that they assume their proper function in relation to the plastic forms and to the symbolically represented signs." With the declared intention of attaining synthesis, by an inductive procedure, and with the inevitable friction with temporal factors: "If one isolates the 'dialectical space' that exists between forms and colors one obtains evidence that can be used to reconstruct the primary elements that have determined it.
For each fraction of time the real situation of the two elements changes in relation to a general space-time; thus to isolate the dialectical relationship means memorizing a situation that is just over. I am interested in this fact because it seems to me to be one of the possibilities through which I can rediscover man as made up of temporal coincidences in the context of an infinite 'Space-Time.' " Out of these presuppositions came a new mode of autobiographical participation as well: more detached than what was achieved in the "writings" of the early sixties, where the temporality was the direct and burning one of the realization of expression in writing, but equally tense, in the awareness of the unrepeatable nature of every moment of perception, notwithstanding the persistence of stable coordinates of object and color, as in these assemblies of solid forms and monochrome surfaces. Yet in the awareness of a phenomenal continuum that lends unity to diversity, in the flagrance of the contingent, but also beyond it, in the memory, which cannot be excluded, as science itself has taught us, from the human act of seeing and feeling, and therefore that of representing, or presenting, even when you are an artist (and in this connection, the observations that Merleau-Ponty makes in his aforementioned essay on Cézanne are once again illuminating).
It is obvious that what was wanted at this point in Ferrari's development was a work that would synthesize the entire span of his achievements over the course of a decade and combine them with the latest intensification of the examination of the psychological reactions to colors, in a meeting and interaction of two realities. It would be too much of an oversimplification to describe these realities as subject and object, receiver and transmitter, since color was revealing itself - by its very nature as a fact that is not predetermined but arises each time out of the particular encounter, in quality and in quantity, of light with material - to be something intimately and physiologically connected, through the eye, with the human psyche.
This requirement was to be met by the Self Portrait, a work that he started to think about in 1974 and completed the following year. Parallel with this, and contributing to the Self Portrait, were his studies of the emotions produced by the protracted observation of monochrome surfaces, which had led the painter to the synthesis: "violet-desire, blue-awareness/static energy , green-plan/germination, yellow-choice, orange-transformation, red-action." With the consequence - quite apart from the inevitable personalization of these parameters - that he came to see the desired color as "a sort of litmus paper that changes continually with alterations in our psychological state." So that, for example, "the need for action brings about the desire for red, while the need for planning makes us desire green, and so on."
These investigations were the immediate source of the Self Portrait, which was intended to contain, "at least on the symbolic plane, all the different phases." Three-dimensional and at the same time two-dimensional, consisting as it does of fourteen large wooden panels (each of them measures two meters in height and a meter and a half in width) that serve to create, both by their individual self-sufficiency and by the installation obtained by means of their arrangement in the setting, a route to be followed. In the most significant of these arrangements this follows a spiral course, a layout that has no conclusion and that is charged with meaning: a meaning that is not superimposed on the work, but coincident with it, as with each of its elements.
The first six of the panels are black and enclose an "antiform" in negative, which Ferrari proposes as a "matrix," to be compared dialectically with the remaining eight panels painted in different colors ("Just as white is the sum of all the colors, black excludes them all and I therefore regard it as the negation of color. Thus white is a positive space and black, for me, represents negative space. Everything that we know - matter, man, life, death - originates in black and is continually repulsed by black. All that remains in it are the matrices or memories of form. Antiform in my work is emptiness in a black space").
Anyone who wants to experience the work is obliged to do so in a dynamic fashion, so that the necessary temporal succession of the vision places it, according to Ferrari, "in the same condition as a white form that enters into relationship with the dialectical space of the color with which it is faced at each point." So that, at the end of the sequence the observer has absorbed, symbolically, emotions that derive from the properties of the various colors. He went on to investigate these properties further in Alphabet, a group of six pieces devoted to the colors of the rainbow.

5. The vindication of painting
Alphabet, given its radical character in conceptual and analytical terms, is the ultimate goal of the long phase that commenced after his visits to the United States. And it is curious that it was another trip across the Atlantic - to Dallas, at the end of 1978 - that marked the transition to a new situation: one in which the theoretical aims that were a fundamental element of his work on form and color and the objectivization of the elements of language to which these had led him were set aside. In their place came a return to a freedom of expression that in the painted sign, in the happily concrete way that he used his brushes to cover the surface with writing, sets up a dialogue with the period of the Cenobio's existence.
The change, of which the definitiveness of the results of Alphabet and of the Self Portrait itself offered a presentiment (at least in hindsight), was one that the artist underwent with critical awareness. Once again it was not a change in style, or an adaptation to emerging trends, although this is not a factor to be ignored, owing to the direct connection that has always existed between the originality of Ferrari's work, his own independent choices, and the spirit of the time, as well as the sources of nourishment that feed the emergence of the new, in art as in everything else. What was fading in the artist, who had now reached maturity, was his theoretical and experimental inclination, inescapably bound up with the project, the program, and the systematic nature of the processes and resulting, equally inevitably, in a detachment, a coolness that entailed the renunciation of any direct link, in the emotional as well as the physical sense, with the liberating and creative rhythms of painting.
This is admitted by the artist himself, who recalls having understood at the time that his "research had reached a conclusion," after having "undoubtedly enriched" but also limited it, by having him set "somewhat aside that emotional and playful dimension that had been fundamental" in his painting of the early sixties. Hence, and partly as a consequence of the attendant circumstances of his life, the "reemergence of the desire-need to begin expressing oneself again with the pure sign, the element that manages most precisely to match" his states of mind. The immediate result, in the same year of 1978, were the Gardens.
These works are a dense and joyful proliferation of minute polychrome squiggles, in very light homogeneous textures, devoid of compositional organization, or sometimes incorporating structural indications, or even internally modified by the concentration and chromatic intensification of signs. With the effect, in every case, of serene extroversion of an inventiveness that is as deeply felt as it is relaxed.
"I am conscious," wrote Ferrari in courageous conclusion to the monograph devoted to him by Politi in 1979, with a predominant and obvious emphasis on the analytical work that he was now bringing into question, the phase at which Passoni's introductory text had come to a stop, "of the need to give lyrical expression to all of the feelings of my real daily life that I am able to filter and therefore express poetically without for the moment giving consideration to any concept that might link this work to a future development." (42) And he concluded: "I do not know where this 'refoundation' will take me; whether it is the beginning of a new cycle and therefore of a new adventure in the space of expressive possibilities or a transitory phenomenon that is an end in itself and that will be exhausted as soon as the emotional impulses that underlie it fade away." The answer - one that sets the seal on the new direction, with the return to the expressive efficacy of the sign and the vindication of painting - is provided by all that has happened since, up to the present day. It has been a continual progression, final proof of the true congeniality of this looser, more lyrical, and more fancifully ramified dimension, one that is firmly meshed with an inspiration that ranges from the level of memory or of evocation, to that of effusion, passion, and fur , of a fast and incisive communication in writing. Beginning with the pictures of the late seventies and early eighties in which he returned to the iterative script of the diary pages of twenty years earlier, where the sign bereft of color and concentrated in its own significance is then interwoven, holds a dialogue with, or at least coexists with traces of something that surfaces from a not too distant past. This latter is the protagonist, notwithstanding its reticent appearance, in a number of paintings executed between 1980 and 1983, avowedly dedicated to time and memory. In connection with these Ferrari speaks of "palimpsests, salvaged pages, notes that tend to be erased by time," but that are reaffirmed in the present by the act of painting.
That present that, even on this side of the reproposition of memory, has imposed itself by degrees as the primary, or rather sole register in the artist's recent work, which is documented here extensively, and for the first time. Ferrari has now found a complete naturalness, throbbing with life and delivered with immediacy, in the concreteness of the event, a word that he makes repeated use of in his titles. In which, with a significantly inventive use of materials (and this is a factor that should not be underestimated, for it has an importance of its own, even in matters of expression, as well as in this dimension of direct factuality), we find script that is broad, peremptory, or quietly allusive, in stimulating patterns of interlacement that, without the burden of narrative intent and without straying from the expressionistic register (the artist's action, even in this rediscovered expressiveness, is always accompanied by thought, in a close harmony of hand and mind, of heart, feeling, and reflection), involves you without overwhelming you, respecting that otherness that is the true mark of the other.
Not however, it should be made clear, at the expense of real experience, which for Ferrari is now the most important thing, to the exclusion of any other factor, to be realized in his painting. In other words it is neither an a priori nor something to be recounted, but total realization in the determination of the image: in that "magical" moment in which takes place, as the painter puts it, "the fusion of two elements [...], elements that I had experienced as distinct, well-defined, and separate parts: my 'being' and my 'doing'." In fact, "before the picture was a surface on which I fixed previously conceived ideas: I perceived and filtered feelings and thoughts that were only put down on the canvas later. Now it is the work itself that, in the process of formation, gives me the ideas that allow it to be brought to a conclusion, or that suggests the next work to me. It is as if the thoughts emerged from the interior of an as yet unrealized work. Hence I am now no longer aware of the dichotomy between being and doing, as if my current work has led me to a higher degree of unity between the inside and the outside, between the subject and the object."
Out of this also comes, among other things, the forcefully cyclic character of the output of this recent, fertile period, binding the works together in a unity that is not merely one of form. Black or red ribbons on white backgrounds, or other colors, in the backgrounds and in the signs, broad or narrow, relaxed or nervously high strung, conduct, canvas after canvas, with a consequentiality that is never repetitive, a flowing symphony, dictated by fantasy as well as by - he has said it himself - an alert, but not overwhelming, mental lucidity, whose efficacy takes advantage of the same innovations in technique and material. These too, moreover, never ends in themselves, have gone beyond a definitively abandoned (and to tell the truth never fully embraced) self-reflection, to result in an absolute mastery of the means that is used to pursue multivalent and comprehensive aims.

Notes:

(1)
For a convenient consultation of the magazine cf. the anastatic reprinting in Azimuth & Azimut. 1959: Castellani, Manzoni e ..., edited by M. Meneguzzo and A. Mondadori, Milan 1984 (catalogue of the exhibition of the same name at the Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea, Milan 1984). The volume contains an essay by the curator, that sets the problems faced by the magazine against the background of the time, providing information that is of use in an analysis of the beginnings of Ferrari's career. On the situation of artistic culture in Milan in the years around 1960 cf. also A. Vettese, Milano et mitologia. I poli della ricerca visiva 1958-1964, Edizioni Centro Culturale d'Arte Bellora, Milan 1989.
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(2) With no page number, as in the second issue of the magazine.
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(3)
While no overall study of the Gruppo T has been carried out, for the Gruppo N and the G.R.A.V. respectively cf.: I. Mussa, Il gruppo enne. La situazione dei gruppi in Europa negli anni 60, Bulzoni, Rome 1976 (with a summary of the activity of all the other groups), and L. Caramel, Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel, 1960-1968. GRAV, Electa, Milan 1975 (published on occasion of the traveling retrospective exhibition of the group's work on the Lago di Corno, 1975).
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(4)
Catalogue of the exhibition, Galleria Azimut, Milan, April 1960. On show at the gallery , which was located at no. 12, Via Clerici, between December 1959 and July 1960, were works by many of the artists involved in these efforts to go beyond the non-representational toward objective-object-preconceptual-rninimalist solutions. Manzoni commenced the activity of the gallery with his Lines and closed it on 21 July with the exhibition "Consumazione dell'arte dinamica del pubblico, divorare l'arte" (The Public's Consumption of Dynamic Art, Devouring Art). Still in December 1959, after Manzoni, a joint exhibition of works by Anceschi, Boriani, Castellani, Gianni Colombo, De Vecchi, Manzoni, Mari, Massironi, Pisani, Zilocchi, and Dada Maino was staged; in January 1960 the Nuova concezione artistica (New Artistic Conception) was presented (and accompanied by publication of the second issue of Azimuth), including works by Manzoni, Mavigner, Mack, Klein, Holweck, Castellani, and Breier. Piene was absent owing to "circumstances beyond his control." Then February saw a one-man show by Castellani, March ajoint exhibition by Massironi, Moldow, Oehm, and Uecker, and March and April one-man shows by Mack and Mavigner. After the Motus exhibition (with works by Demarco, Garcia Rossi, François and Vera Molnar, Morellet, and Yvaral), Manzoni had another show in May, followed by an exhibition of works by Biasi, Breier, Castellani, Ganci, Landi, Mack, Maino, Manzoni, Massironi, Mavigner, Moldow, Motus, Pisani, and Santini, and from the end of June onward another joint exhibition of the same artists' work, with the exception of Ganci and Moldow.
Meneguzzo, in op. cit. , p. 18, note 36, claims to have in his possession a poster for an exhibition by Alberti, Sordini, and Verga (the last two of whom were, like Ferrari, among the founders of the Cenobio), perhaps programmed for May-June 1960, about which there is no reliable information.
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(5)
"An art continually in progress but potential to the extent that its consumption is rapid and constant and immediate and capable of setting up dialogues outside the intimist monologue, of establishing values beyond the limits of shortsighted subjectivity; an art in which the precise and essential work would be the germ of spiritual conquest and not indulge, having exhausted its function of informing, in vain aspirations of a perpetual decorative existence."
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(6)
This was the title adopted by the group for its first "event, " staged on 15-17 January at the Galleria Pater in Milan, and then used repeatedly. It was intended as a synthetic indication of the pre-eminent desire to offer a dynamic multiplicity of images.
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(7)
From the Declaration published in the manifesto-invitation printed for Miriorama 1. It went on to say: "Every aspect of reality, color, form, light, geometrical spaces, and astronomical time, is a different aspect of the presentation of SPACE-TIME or rather: different ways of perceiving the relations between SPACE-TIME. Thus we consider reality to be a continual becoming of phenomena that we perceive in variation."
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(8)
All the works cited were exhibited by the artists in their one-man shows at the Galleria Pater in Milan after Miriorama, between January of that year and February 1960.
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(9)
The exhibition, staged in June of that year by the Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna, had been organized by the International Program of the Museurn of Modern Art in New York.
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(10)
Cf. the catalogue of the exhibition referred to in the previous note, published by Silvana, Milan 1958, p. 8.
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(11)
Cf. L. Caramel, Una storia milanese: Della Torre, Madella, Raciti, Vago, catalogue of the exhibition, Galleria Comunale d'Arte Contemporanea, Sala di Sant'Ignazio, Arezzo, published by Editrice Grafica l'Etruria, Cortona 1988, no page numbers.
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(12)
Cf. M. Merleau-Ponty, "Il dubbio di Cézanne" in Senso e non senso, Il Saggiatore, Milan 1962, p.32.
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(13)
In the catalogue, critical writings by the curators and interesting comments by the artists on exhibition.
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(14)
A. Ferrari, in Agostino Ferrari, Giancarlo Politi Editore, Milan 1979, p. 13.
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(15)
Cf. F. Arcangeli, "Gli ultimi naturalisti," in Paragone, no.59, November 1954, pp. 29-43; "Una situazione non improbabile," in Paragone, no.85, January 1957, pp. 3-45.
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(16)
A. Passoni, "Agostino Ferrari, entrando in...," in Agostino Ferrari, op. cit., p. 5.
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(17)
Ibidem.
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(18)
In op, cit., p. 13.
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(19)
G. Kaisserlian, Agostino Ferrari, exhibition catalogue, Galleria Pater, Milan 1961.
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(20)
R. Cogniat, "Hans Hartung," in XXX Biennale Internazionale d'Arte, exhibition catalogue, Venice 1960, p. 221.
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(21)
Sordini and Verga were born in Milan in 1934 and 1933 respectively. On them, as on Vermi, born as has been said in 1928, in Bergamo, and who died in Paderno d'Adda (Como) in 1988, see the concise biographical sketches, with bibliographical references, in A. Vettese, op. cit., pp. 100-115.
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(22)
In op. cit., p. 1l.
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(23)
A. Ferrari, op. cit., p. 14.
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(24)
In op. cit., pp. 5 and 7.
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(25)
Ibidem.
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(26)
Ibidem.
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(27)
A. Ferrari, op. cit., p. 27.
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(28)
This part of the statement is published in A. Ferrari, op. cit., p.27.
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(29)
The comment is taken from the notes by the artist published in this volume, as are all the others quoted without any indication as to their source.
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(30)
A. Ferrari, op. cit., p. 30.
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(31)
L. Fontana, "Agostino Ferrari," in D'Ars Agency, no.34, 1967.
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(32)
Ibidem.
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(33)
A. Ferrari, op. cit., p. 56. These remarks, like the others written at different times, have been partially reproduced, with modifications, in the texts written by the artist for this monograph, as a direct commentary on the reproductions of his works.
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(34)
Ibid., p. 38.
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(35)
G. Brizio, "II Teatro del segno, ovvero le 'referenze del diverso' " in Agostino Ferrari, op. cit. , pp. 78-83.
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(36)
These notes, reproduced in this volume, were published by the artist in Agostino Ferrari, op. cit., p. 56.
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(37)
A. Passoni, op. cit., p. 9.
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(38)
Ibidem.
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(39)
Ibidem.
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(40)
Ibidem.
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(41)
Ibidem.
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(42)
A. Ferrari, op. cit., p. 94.