ExhibitionsEx Fabrica – Gianni Cacciarini, Emiliano Baldi

16th of May 2016.

On Thursday 5 May, the exhibition of works by Gianni Cacciarini and Emiliano Baldi opens at the gallery of the Il Bisonte Foundation.
20 engravings and 5 large paintings. The exhibition will remain open until June 1, 2016.

Il Bisonte Gallery, Via san Niccolò 24red,
old.ilbisonte.it
gallery@ilbisonte.it
0552342585

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Two artists (two generations) confronted on the theme of the factory

It was in February 1978, that is almost forty years ago, that Gianni Cacciarini decided to show (I seem to remember in the historic Gallery of the Gonnelli bookshop) a part of his work as an engraver, a work that was already quite conspicuous and very complex at that time. also due to the fact that until that moment he had devoted himself almost exclusively to the art of engraving. Since then, as they say, a lot of water has passed under the bridges and therefore a long way has come in the career of this artist by now established among the very first (and not only as an engraver, and not only in this city of his never ‘betrayed’ and however, as is almost a must, especially for artists, stubbornly ‘hated’). Among the tables (and the thematic series or cycles) of that youthful exhibition it was possible to distinguish, due to a particular excellence of execution and expressive rendering, two series in particular, one dedicated to the motif of the branches and vines (in the land of Tuscany ) and another to the representation-evocation of disused and abandoned factories, industrial plants that Gianni had identified from time to time during some of his wanderings and inspections between Florence and Pisa. These were images of great impact that referred on the one hand (and more positively) to the concept of industrial archeology (then, as we know, changed into a cultural topos) and on the other (thinking instead of the emotional stimuli of those artifacts) to fascination for everything that is residual and a mere relic of a legendary time but still with the signs, albeit burnt, of an ancient and fervent functionality. In addition, the hand of Cacciarini, the engraver, gave the subjects, so acutely selected among the many that could be encountered in the perimeter of a certain productive Tuscany, that contrastive dynamic that is typical of the chiaroscuro of etching but treated with such a radical search for ideas and ‘pictorial’ effects, suggesting that the laborious and dense ‘grid’ typical of that technique could have as its aim, not necessarily a restitution in black and white of the subject, but as if it wanted to reach a certain degree of chromatism, even if with fatally virtual coloristic allusions.

Well, more recently, it then happened that a young Tuscan artist, Emiliano Baldi, naturally well versed in the art of engraving (but not only), began attending the Florentine studio of Gianni Cacciarini since his Academy years, finding not few attunements with the teacher. Similarities and sympathetic tangents not only with its rich figurative production, but then also dictated by a common background of cultural afferences which ultimately assisted the creation, if not really of a real cycle, at least of a series of tables that precisely they represent the resumption of the theme of the factory, even if in the case of Baldi not in the obligatory mode of disuse and abandonment. It is not difficult to guess from his compositions that the youngest artist comes (also for personal reasons) from a strongly industrialized reality and environment such as that of Piombino, and in this he stands out quite clearly from the more ‘citizen’ and agé Cacciarini for who those constructions by now decrepit and attacked by an avenging nature revived mainly by virtue of their metaphysics and therefore finely timeless emblematicity. Differently therefore from the representation of the chimneys and the industrial landscape by Emiliano Baldi. His representation is distant from any slightest aura of nostalgic poetry, also because not even the call of the figure remains extraneous to him, often integrated (and not by chance) precisely in the most emotionally involving context of a certain worker reality. In Baldi’s tables, in fact, it is not difficult to perceive an urgency and a tension that we could undoubtedly define social, even if by now he forgets those ideological instances so marked that had distinguished a whole vein of figurative research of the late twentieth century. Baldi, on the other hand, thanks to his considerable familiarity with etching techniques, moves with a certain ease within the table, alternating subjects and figures and using the same space to break it down with appropriate internal compartments in order to offer our attention a series of variations of the theme, rather than a one-dimensional subject and moreover centered in its immovable uniqueness. Even the image of the factory can then undergo this sort of perspective multiplication, that is, this seriation or juxtaposition of always different representations. The result obtained does not disappoint at all, on the contrary it is all the more suggestive as the structure of the phalanstery itself, instead of imposing itself due to the encumbrance of its mass, seems in this way to stand out for its singular ‘lightness’ which derives from the ‘modernist’ gesture that imprints that original movement.

Giuseppe Nicoletti