From Biumo to Etna

Considerations on the relationship between collector and painter: Panza di Biumo and Fratteggiani Bianchi

by Mauro Abba

Bound with love in a volume

That which through the universe is revealed

(Dante, Paradise XXXIII)

I

This exhibition and this short paper provide an opportunity to exhibit the works of Alfonso Fratteggiani Bianchi (AFB), but also to investigate the relationship between collector and artist. In particular on the collector Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, who was the first to perceive the potential of AFB’s work and the first to understand its absolute value not only for his own collection, but for the history of art in general.

This is therefore a great opportunity to explain and tell a model of vision and achievement, of the eyes of the mind through the evolution of art, of its infinite potential and the infinite potential  and impact that this vision has on the art itself.

We will begin by briefly recounting the collector, then we will deal with the artist and his work, the intrinsic motives behind his creation, and conclude with a survey of the works, as a demonstration of what has been written, in this exhibition in Catania.

II (Da Biumo)

The collector we are writing about is not just any collector. Giuseppe Panza di Biumo (1923 – 2010) is widely regarded as one of the greatest visionary collectors of contemporary art in Italy and the world. Suffice it to say that from 1955 to 2010 he created a collection of over two thousand five hundred works of informal art, abstract expressionism, pop art, minimalism, conceptual art, environmental art, organic art and monochrome art, which has been exhibited in some of the world’s leading contemporary art museums.

Villa Menafoglio Litta Panza in Varese, the house in which he lived for most of his life and created his collection, now donated to the FAI, which is admirably looking after it, is one of the most coherent examples of his aesthetic and museographic vision as a balance between architecture and antique furnishings and contemporary works of art.

But what perhaps matters most here, beyond numbers and statistics, is the way of “being a collector” of this character illuminated by an almost romantic strength, balanced by a strong moral sense and a supersensible intuition.

One only has to open one of his writings – indeed, many – at random to find his aesthetic vision of collecting. For example, his Ricordi di un collezionista (Memories of a collector), the work of a lifetime, in which he collected all the protagonists of his collection, narrating the background, curiosities and the foundations behind his different choices.

However, a direct, open aesthetic sense is what can be read in these moving words, for example:

“My destiny has been very benign with me, it has filled me with gifts, it has rewarded my fidelity to the beauty that I have always sought with untiring tenacity, overcoming my doubts, through a rigorous selection of works. I have been fortunate to have a wife who has always followed me, understood me, helped me, who has shared with me every choice for a common vision of life’s purpose. (…)

Beauty is a powerful force, but discreet, generous with those who seek it without ulterior motives, it does not manifest itself to those who want other things. It is the direct expression of a good that is superior to everything, it does not die, it is immortal because it is not made of matter, even if it uses matter to manifest itself. There is no instrument to measure it, but it is within all things (…). It cannot be measured, which is why it eludes scientists who only believe in what can be measured. It is the invisible engine of the universe and of life”.

In the text Ricordi di un Collezionista (Memories of a Collector), Panza di Biumo divides the span of his collection into three major periods.

The first: from European Informal to Pop Art (1955-1965), the second: Minimal, Conceptual and Environmental Art (1966-1976) and the third: mainly devoted to the art of small objects and the art of colour, monochrome (1987-2010).

And this third period, in particular the art of monochrome, is what we are dealing with here. Let us read Panza’s words again in describing his approach to this new way of understanding contemporary art, always with his romantic vein, but nevertheless analytical and precise in defining the quantum leaps that took place in art before his very eyes as a protagonist:

“It is a pleasure to look at a sunset for a long time to see the red, yellow and pink that fill the large clouds. The emotions that colours suggest are innumerable, impossible to list. (…)

(Colours) have been of great importance in painting, but always subordinate to form. It was necessary to tell or describe something. (…)

(…) “The first 70 years of 20th century artistic history were a gradual approach to the freedom of colour representation. Only after 1950 did it have new possibilities. Rothko’s works express their content through colour, the composition having a secondary function. This reversal of relationships marks the beginning of a different possibility; Rothko shows that everything can be expressed through colour.”

(…)

(…) “This strong change occurs in the second half of the century with the work of Mark Rothko, Barnett Newmann and Ellisworth Kelly. The form has a secondary function, the colours contain the meaning of the work.

It is a revolution in the relationship between form and colour, but not yet the final condition. The revolution will be completed towards the end of the 1980s: form disappears”

III

In the 1980s AFB directed the Quaderni Perugini di Musica Contemporanea as a promoter of important events, which thanks to his commitment made Perugia (in particular Pieve Caina, a small hamlet of the Umbrian city dating back to the year 1000) a pulsating centre for culture and music in Europe. Thanks to the Quaderni Perugini, important personalities (from John Cage to Hainz-Klaus Metzger, Ulrike Brand and Siegfried Palm to name but a few) bring their interpretations of the world and new visions of being to an open and cosmopolitan exchange.

It was in 1995 that AFB, again with its Quaderni Perugini, organised an exhibition at the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria with works by Adrian Schiess, Phil Sims, Mark Rothko, Gunter Umberg and Ulrich Wellmann. The intention is to place the works of the Masters of the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries in a close relationship of continuity with the works of the five contemporary Masters, all centred on the art of colour without form. Phil Sims made a painting expressly for this exhibition, which, due to bureaucratic problems, was delayed for a year on the original schedule. During this time, Giuseppe Panza bought Sims’ painting for his collection. It was at this point that AFB contacted the collector and asked him to lend Sims’ work to him, and the two met and have remained in close contact ever since.

In the years that followed AFB worked to bring part of the Panza Collection to the Palazzo Ducale in Gubbio. And on one occasion when Panza was a guest at AFB’s home with his wife Giovanna Rosa, his eye fell on a work that surprised him in a major way.

It is the artist himself who in a (rare) interview recalls:

“Not wanting to molest the guests with my work, I said that the painting belonged to an acquaintance of mine. Panza, not satisfied, insisted, and after a few panegyrics wanted to visit my studio. (From that moment on) Panza’s attention towards my work grew and he began to collect my paintings which he arranged both in the private and public areas of Villa Panza in Varese”.

But what did Panza see on that (historic) occasion in the home of an artist who (as he himself declares) had started painting about two years earlier (this was in 1998/99)?

IV

It is Panza himself who reveals (his) surprise….

“in a room of his old house there were many small paintings hanging on the walls. Abstract paintings that were striking for the intensity of their colour (…) The best ones were painted on a heavy stone support. The colour was applied without the addition of a binder. The impalpable powder of the pigment penetrated the microscopic cavities of the stone. This is a property that no other stone possesses; it is only a stone from Tuscany and Umbria, pietra serena, used by Brunelleschi in the 15th century for the churches of Florence. It was the only existing means of seeing colour on a surface, in a condition of absolute purity.

Fratteggiani’s discovery is very simple, anyone could take a piece of pietra serena and try. Piero Della Francesca, Perugino, many other great artists had pietra serena before their eyes but did not do it. It took 2000 years of art history to be able to see colour in its purity.”

The passage deserves to be re-read. According to Panza it is therefore a decidedly important discovery. And he mentions (not by chance) the greatest masters of the 15th century (Piero and Perugino) as if to associate them in a spiritual and evolutionary chain with the young artist Fratteggiani who, with a stubborn mind and a taste for observation, seeks to do what has never been done before: to make the representation of colour pure after 2000 years of the history of painting.

To free matter and the qualities of colour, study and research from the “inflexibility of the adhesive”. To amplify the purity of colour by simply showing it for what it is, without filters and without the accidents of binding.

To find a new kind of perspective given by the matter and the density of the matter, a sort of fifth parameter that the observer defines according to his ability to see inside and beyond the pure matter of the pigment on the stone.

V

The “discovery” of AFB has, according to Panza, something extraordinary about it.

“I have visited almost every important museum in the world, but I have not found anything in my memory that gave me the same surprise. The Impressionists, Van Gogh, Gaugin, Matisse and in the more distant past Vermeer, Velasquez, Giovanni Bellini, Jan Van Eyck and many others were great colourists: this was the reason for their success. However, they were all forced to use a glue to hold the pigment together on a surface: tempera, oil, encaustic, acrylic, which, although a neutral colour, inevitably altered the purity of the original pigment. Certainly Piero Della Francesca was a great colourist, but Fratteggiani’s colours are superior in intensity, purity, luminosity”.

The passage deserves to be re-read. The collector who owns one of the most important collections in the world not only understands the power of AFB’s art, but is amazed by it with the same open-mindedness as a young art history scholar. No preclusion for the new, on the contrary, a lucid and synthetic ability to understand the work in front of him.

Underlying this discovery is that aforementioned desire to taste beauty: a beauty that always changes form, even when it has no form, or indeed produces a new form. Where the new perspective opens up through the artist’s ability to modulate the vibrations of the chromatic matter and of the shapes and structures that, like all matter, it contains, with a simple gesture, a simple pressure of the finger that spreads it.

We are therefore faced with an apparition, a new representation of the field of pictorial space that dilates and clusters without solution of continuity. With AFB’s works, perspective has changed, “perhaps evolved”. after Cimabue, then with Paolo Uccello, Picasso’s Les Damoiselle d’Avignon and Rauschenberg’s White Paintings.

With the works of AFB we approach a quantum representation of colour: the intensity given by the purity of colour is able to modify the space that contains it, not only from a qualitative but also from a quantitative point of view. The new perspective opens up as a representation in a movement of extraordinary density and bursting violence.

VI (To Etna)

Each wall tells a different story, a different approach to the material colour in an exchange of visions that is always “open” (see R.M. Rilke, Elegie Duinesi).

The observer can recognise in these works the discovery of Panza, who was among the very first to understand the field of openness and its extensions for the History of Art.

In the exhibition space there is the manifestation of a multitude of ideas, of unexpected perspectives, of unusual looks at matter within a new perspective (of which we have mentioned above).

It is enough to observe and penetrate one of the Triptychs on display, for example the one dedicated to Duccio Di Buoninsegna. This AFB Triptych makes an ideal and perspective reference to the Maestà del Tempio (1308-1311) in Siena Cathedral. The ideal perspective is rendered by the dense central painting and the intrinsic relationship with the two lateral works that form an endiad of meaning and concept. The chromatic concentration is very high and one perceives the fluctuation of waves that let the colour itself vibrate.

The space-time “game” (Duccio’s quotation) positions and suspends the work as if in a relaxed and tranquil dialogue, but full and loaded with significant subtexts.

Worthy of note is also the elliptical work, in the front part of the space, collected in its lilac delicacy.

Lastly, I would like to dwell on the second triptych, Trittico Nero, where the relationship established by the three works reveals the full potential of the creative deferment of these panels. Sculpted first and adorned with living, vibrant matter. The chromatic perspective is characterised by the proximity of the parts, which at the end perform a single joint part in an inseparable triad, like the notes of a part of a musical composition: when a section is tilted, the pictorial discourse changes irreversibly.

It is an explosion of “density”: the dense and less dense areas allow the material to vibrate and multiply with their intensity the perspective perception of the surrounding space.

Returning to Biumo, I would like to conclude this short article with the words of Panza di Biumo, which best seal the sense of this journey:

“The discovery of Fratteggiani is an event in the history of art. The first time in thousands of years. Sensitive people are dazzled by his paintings. The future will recognise his merits. I am sure of it’.

Written in Avigliana and Valgioie (To), August-September 2021