Introduction

Salvatore Emblema, Andrea Francolino and Alberto Scodro are brought together by the continuity of the way, all late modernist, they conceive their artistic language (it's the process and the thought of the process that trigger the shape), but also, and so much specifically, by a common existential glance. In fact, all three draw the originality of their philosophy from the fascination for the more terrestrial world.

With a younger attitude also the works of Francolino and Scodro deal with land. In their installations and in their in-transparency sculptures some of the themes of our contemporaneity come to light: ecology, the need of a deeper awareness of our presence as a species. These themes are used more and more evident in Francolino – an artist who is free from behavioural influences – while they are more consubstantial to the genesis of matter and sculpture in Scodro.

Salvatore Emblema, Andrea Francolino e Alberto Scodro sono apparentati da evidenti continuità tra i modi, tutti tardo-modernisti, di intendere il linguaggio artistico (per tutti e tre la forma è la conseguenza lineare di un processo), ma anche e altrettanto specificatamente, da un comune sguardo esistenziale. Tutti è tre infatti traggono dall’incanto per il mondo più terrestre l’originalità della loro poetica.

Con piglio più giovane anche le opere di Francolino e Scodro sono terraiole. Nelle loro installazioni e nelle sculture in trasparenza emergono alcuni temi della nostra contemporaneità: l’ecologia, la necessità di una coscienza più profonda della nostra presenza di specie. Si tratta di tematiche più agite e manifeste in Francolino – artista non scevro da influenze comportamentiste – più consustanziali alla genesi materica e scultorea in Scodro.

Works

Andrea Francolino

Dalla terra al cemento alla terra al cemento

2018, Cornici in legno con polvere di terra e polvere di cemento su carta Hahnemühle, 7 elementi
35.6 × 27.4 cm each

Interrupted Modernities

by Denis Isaia

The juxtaposition of chronologically distant visual intelligences is appealing, not only because it requires vast knowledge, but also because it suggests a different interpretation of history of art. In the comparison of biographically distant artists, the more incidental issues such as style, language and even market become, in the specific, nuanced and favour convergences on the motives that are the most deeply felt by the artists. The fortunate consequence of this is that a similar approach doesn't debase the narrative content of the story, as it may happen with in-depth analyses that are too philological, but it vivifies it by putting it in touch with our present time.

Salvatore Emblema, Andrea Francolino and Alberto Scodro are brought together by the continuity of the way, all late modernist, they conceive their artistic language (it's the process and the thought of the process that trigger the shape), but also, and so much specifically, by a common existential glance. In fact all three draw the originality of their philosophy from the fascination for the more terrestrial world. But let's take one step at a time. Emblema makes his debut in the 1950s, Francolino and Scodro in the years 2000. In this range of time, the world has changed radically (in brief let's just think of the demographic explosion and consumer and information society) and art, too, hasn't stood watching. Between 1945 and 1970 artists redefine the standards of their trade. Painters and sculptures free themselves from the abstract construction of space and, driven by a pioneering impulse, they find in the process of their own making – in the making of the work – the motivation to their actions. Art becomes aniconic, minimal, process-oriented, acted, tautological, conceptual. Reality takes the place of realism and the object questions the glance of those who stand opposite for what it is and not for what it represents: material, behaviour, gesture, thought. Salvatore Emblema takes part in the revision of the standard which today is shared by younger artists such as Alberto Scodro and Andrea Francolino. As for Scodro, a series of installations, which are osmotic to the space, testify this: Just for a Drop (2018) is a large coffee machine made with the heating system of a gallery in Brussels. But also the “herbs” on show here – apparently more distant from environmental goals - are based on the close dialogue among the material, its origin and forging. The work by Scodro, who transforms the inorganic life of a mineral in a figuratively organic life, isn't distant from the many reactivations of already existing elements made by artists since the 1960s. Here it suffices to quote the reactivation of the inner story by Giuseppe Penone, or, still in Emblema, the vitalization of the light filtering through canvas or furthermore, although with a weaker response from the object, the realization of the experience of landscape in the walks by Hamish Fulton. Nonetheless it isn't about imagining, but seeing something that generally passes unnoticed. In Francolino's case the evidence is even stronger. The pursuit of the natural cracks in a piece of glass, the tracing on paper of parts of the world, the insistence in describing the conflicting relationship between the human and natural sphere show perfectly the reduction to a minimum of the distance between reality, subject and work of art.

Let's go back to our founder. Salvatore Emblema's debut is marked by the informal era interpreted with a lively, but not feverish stroke of brush. Even when the painter's touch becomes more darting, as in some surprising paintings where blue and pink are dominant, the composition is, in a whole, calm and characterized by a clear contemplative streak. Still present in the 1950s, soon the object vanishes; it is replaced by colour, also under the influences of the atmospheres in Mark Rothko, from whom Emblema learns an ambitious lesson: the attempt to give voice to a universe of light in slow and continuous expansion (and in this cosmological slingshot he is supported by spatialist master Lucio Fontana). In the wake of the same contemplation, during the sixties and with greater insistence during the seventies, Emblema becomes all the more a painter. His attention focuses on the material relation among canvas, light and colour, between the rough and deep memory that surfaces from the weft and the luminous annotation of the Mediterranean palette. While he satisfies the most analytical itches, which are strongly demanded by critics and the market with more rigorous compositions, his work keeps opening to the world by staging a perceptive device which, although limited by the space on the canvas (his installations are impressive but rare), it resembles the wall drawings by Sol LeWitt, the cubes by Robert Morris or the transparencies by Dan Graham, ie. that extraordinary group of works insisting on the perceptive datum in the attempt to found subject, space and object, body, glance and reality. Emblema is focused on these issues during all the seventies. His gestures and his palette become drier and with his “deweaving” - rough canvases deprived of the web – his research reaches full ripeness. The canvas partly deprived of its resistance to the state of threshold, shows its materiality (the wood of the frame, the precarious physicality of the canvas that stretches on it, the warp of the weft) declaring itself tautological space. This is how Emblema takes part in the history of his century, but also how he frees himself from it. The transparency of “deweaving” opens up the eighties and nineties to a renewed interest for lyricism. Among the widened stitches of a precarious surface the insistent attention for what is created or creates itself arises. The large paintings of Mediterranean landscapes, the vibrations of light, the dazzling of the sun inspire with colour the canvases making them the protagonists of new complicities. The artist plunges into his anthropological landscape and frees himself from the more linguistic challenge. The canvas becomes lighter, it fills up with lyrical matter and, by coming back to the world, it inevitably opens up to the world's figurativeness. The paintings are flooded by the energy of the landscape, which the artist traps on the canvas. Now the activity of nature replaces the activism of language, everything becomes more mobile and bright and the conceptualisms that enabled Emblema to reach certain heights accompanies him silently, preventing useless mind vexations to ruin the composition. Land, experienced from a few meters of height, that of a window, or that of a shelf where a bunch of flowers is laid bursts into Emblema's effective modernity.

In other words it's the world showing itself as empirical absolute.

With a younger attitude also the works of Francolino and Scodro deal with land. In their installations and in their in-transparency sculptures some of the themes of our contemporaneity come to light: ecology, the need of a deeper awareness of our presence as a species. These themes are used more and more evident in Francolino – an artist who is free from behavioural influences – while they are more consubstantial to the genesis of matter and sculpture in Scodro.

Caso × Caos × Infinite variabili (Random × Chaos × Infinite variables) is a series of glass fragments by Andrea Francolino. The artist collects cracked sheets of glass to which he superimposes another piece of glass of the same size and follows with a cutter the random signs of the cracks. Francolino repeats this gesture three times, then superimposes the pieces of glass in specular directions horizontally and vertically, in order to obtain a possible, inevitably mutable, schematization of the case, the one that the current evolutionist sciences tell us is one of the factors determining the evolutionary directions of the ecosystem. In other terms the work is a portrait of the rules of nature. Transparency, which helps Emblema hover over nature, here, in glass, becomes a conceptual microscope. If in Fontana and then in Emblema the cuts in the canvas open a mental space overlooking the dark side of the universe or the light of the Mediterranean landscape, in Francolino, the superimposition of the cracks opens up to the contemplation of the secular genesis of the world.

The Mineral Grass by Alberto Scodro is a precipitate of landscape. As he was born near Bassano del Grappa, an area geographically specialized in ceramic fusion, Scodro experiments the aggregation of different minerals. With the attitude of an alchemist, the artist operates a transformation devoted to shake up the deaf nature of the mineral world. The Mineral Grass belong to the transformational spell of nature. Scodro reproduces in his kiln the emotion of the aesthetic vitality of quartz. The granular physicality of his sculptures and the luminist reflections they give rise to are the outcome of the visionary dream of a liberator of matter, determined to shape energies. Emblema was thinking of a similar transmutation when he made light pass through him and this is what also Francolino thinks when he figuratively connects himself to the very complex technicisms of nature.