Enrico Crispolti - Almost a diary (1958-2005)

2005: On maturity and development

I first met Gianni Dova – born in Rome, but settled in Milan – in the spring of 1958, at his solo exhibition at Claudio Bruni’s Galleria La Medusa in Rome, which had just moved from its original premises in Via Sistina to Via del Babuino. It was my second presentation of an exhibition, after the one devoted to the master Willy Baumeister. The very young Valerio Adami, dose to Dova at the time, took the opportunity to show me some of his dramatic Baconstyle paintings. I had already been impressed by several of Dova’s paintings in 1955 at an international award exhibition devoted to “Giovani pittori”, held at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome. They were Informel in style, though mysteriously expressing an embryonic image, after his typically Nuclear fluidity.

Since then I have constancy followed his work and have written about it on several occasions. Two years after the one-man show in Rome, I also wrote about Dova with reference to the major exhibition Possibilità di relazione held in the spring of 1960 at the Galleria L’Attico in Rome, which I organized together with Roberto Sanesi and Emilio Tadini. The exhibition was aimed at opening – both in artistic practice and in critical consideration – a debate on the then embryonic possibilities of dialectically going beyond Art Informel (and I wrote about this again in the catalogue of Possibilità di relazione Una mostra dieci anni dopo, held at the Centro Attività Visive di Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, in 1970). Dova’s name recurs in the pages of Ricerche dopo l’Informale, published in 1968 by Officina Edizioni, Rome, which is a collection of texts on the ideas developed during that decade, from the standpoint of dialectically going beyond Art Informel (from within, not merely in the form of an external counteraction, as occurred in Programmed Art, Kinetic Art and Op Art). Other texts included a reference to Dova, such as the somewhat committed Alternative attuali dell’esperienza pittorica in Italia, published in Édouard Jaguer’s magazine “Phases” (Paris, April 1969, no. 9). Among other things: “For his part Gianni Dova seems to wish to describe in his repertoire of monsters those hostile forces that seek to reduce the man of today both socially and ontologically.”¹

Three years later, in 1971, in the first part of the first volume of L’Informale. Storia e poetica, devoted to “In Europa 1940-1951”, I re-examined in retrospect Dova’s experiments in Nuclear Art and Spatialism at the beginning of the 1950s, another page in my “diary” about Dova over the years. Then, in 1975, there was that particular case of a text on a game of contamination used in two of his engravings, promoted by Santiago Palet in Milan, and in which masters of the generation before Dova’s (such as Cassinari, Migneco and Treccani), his contemporaries (such as Cavaliere, Scanavino and Peverelli), and the younger generation (such as Sarri and Spadari) took part.

This dialogue was taken up once more in 1987, in along text on a new stage in Dova’s research, where in choosing to make a Surrealist statement he passes through a phase of almost natural organic immersion. The dialogue is then further developed in the brief commentary on a vivid drawing dating from 1977 in the volume with Mauro Pratesi, L’arte del disegno nel Novecento italiano, published by Laterza in 1990. A concise reference to the development of Dova’s pictorial research between the 1980s and the 1990s is found in the chapter devoted to Continuità (e molteplicità) di figurazioni in La pittura in Italia. Il Novecento/3. Le ultime ricerche, published by Electa in 1994. There I underline how: if not a visionary certainly a Surrealist trend was considerably widespread in Italy also in the 1970s, from the work of Cagli “to that of Dova, who in Milan, during those self-same years, was developing his own fantastical, surreal imagery, with its magical chromatic effects, accentuating a certain reduction so that his statements become almost totemic and impressionistic; later he abandoned himself to a kind of imaginative impressionism with aquatic and sylvan overtones, at the beginning of the 1980s.”² Precisely what the 1987 text had sought to describe broadly as a new departure.
This was the height of Dova’s pictorial maturity, the out-come of a course of development schematically consisting of the following stages. He first began in a post-Cubist, Picassian style linked to his academic formation (the paintings that Antonio Boschi began to collect), in the second half of the 1940s. Then at the end of that decade and the beginning of the 1950s, he went through a Concretist stage, with a geometric basis, but considerable imaginative elements. This was immediately followed, still at the beginning of the 1950s, by the Nuclear effusion that marked Dova’s participation in Spatialism, still within the Informel style. Then, around the mid-1950s, his painting began to acquire a more concrete aspect with the appearance of mysterious embryonic images. Between the end of the 1950s and throughout the 1960s this evolved into an iconic metamorphism that was highly organic, taking the form of an articulate Surrealist figuration (establishing a dialogue with Ernst and Lam). However, in the 1970s, the appearance of the image became rarefied, almost totemic, though still very surreal, while at the beginning of the 1980s he moved dose to, and explored in depth, a fascinating, magical nature.

The artist had now definitively achieved the height of his imaginative maturity, having introjected the influences of an explicit Surrealist iconism he immersed himself in a fascinating, primarily natural dimension.
This exhibition, focusing mainly on the painter’s most mature work that is actually much less well-known and familiar than that with more explicit surreal characteristics, offers the opportunity for a further, conclusive consideration of Dova’s long career. A career that evince an inner evolutionary continuity, not so much as regards the development of further perspectives of the image, but as regards increasing its motility each time in specific situations, among gardens, flowers, rocks and waves, birds (cormorants and others) and leafy fronds, in the Parco dell’Uccellina, Samos and the Aegean Sea, Maremma, Capri and Brittany.

The result is a metamorphic modulation of the image that becomes increasingly rich and flexible, far removed from the rigid bodies and other surreal elements in the paintings of the 1960s and 1970s. There is a great desire to become immersed in nature and a capacity to respond imaginatively and innovatively, in a constant never-ending battle of images; focusing completely on the possibility of the fantastical exaggeration of an immersion in nature that is circumstantial and episodic. A sequence of fascinating paintings, where similar themes recur, but different every time, being always increasingly detailed. This is Dova taken to the extreme, now desperately Neo-Romantic rather than Surrealist, in the torment of the desperate desire to participate, of imaginative and sensitive amazement. Thus tangles of images, recognizable presences surfaced, which Dova explicitly named in the titles of his paintings.

Taking this last phase of his imagery as a starting point, I have put together – perhaps not entirely in vain and at least as a testimony – the pages of a Dova “diary” from 1958 to the present.

1958: Dova at the Galleria La Medusa, in Rome³

Dova’s most recent painting is far removed in its cultural autonomy from the ambit of the Italian debate already established by the leading artists of the `fourth’ generation. It also diverges even more from the automatist works of Dova himself in the years between 1950-1951 and 1953-1954, and from which the more recent works derive and are a conscious development.

But such autonomy, apart from the important Italian rendering of texts and combinations of figuration that would otherwise be very distant from us, such as those of Ernst and Lam, today intrinsically poses a disturbing question that must nevertheless be dealt with. What is the role that a pictorial “figuration” can still play, not only generically, painting that is so lucidly opposed to any attempt to transfer it this side of the limits of the image, to undermine its absolute quality and spatial otherness by forcing it, through absolute materic extroversion, to assume all the modes and all the needs of an entirely existential empirical space?
Today a painting by Dova always features an image, it has a meaning in a precisely figurative sense, it is not in opposition as mere materic imminence to the figurative exclusivity of the image.

And is all this not connected with a figurative revival that emerged in Italy in the work of the leading young artists of the “fourth” generation (I am referring to Scanavino, who has become today, together with Dova, a pole of attraction in Milan for very young artists working around a new composition of the image with vague influences from Wols, Bacon, Giacometti and Ernst) and has the problematic consensus of a European and North American Art Autre generation that Michel Tapié has thoroughly examined?

The critics are now being faced with these questions regardless of the immediate consensus on the evident pictorial appeal of Dova’s canvases.
Dova’s citation of Ernst from 1954-1955 until today is common knowledge by now, and this cannot be denied, in fact, as I have said, it is particularly important and significant. But is Dova’s painting only based on aspects of the composition, features and inventive elements of Ernst’s work? Actually, a dose comparison immediately shows a particular symbolism in Ernst, while Dova is straightforward figuration. Namely, Ernst aimed at depicting symbols of the irrepressible unconscious, countering their positive vitality with the traditionally dominant conventional conscious. Dova has naturally gone beyond this dichotomy and, no longer depicting “dreams”, he transfers his Breton-like faith into the higher reality of some associative forms that have been neglected till now, into the omnipotence of the dream, into the free play of fantasy’, into the very dimensions of a figuration implying man in his entirety, in his quotidian, contradictory, physical, psychological and ideological aspects. Namely, Dova suppresses the privacy and superiority of the unconscious (seen as truth in opposition to the apparent reality of rational everyday conventions), and revives the meaning of those contradictions no longer in an abstract and transcendental consideration of humanity, but in a phenomenology that is almost socially, or rather sociologically distinguishable: “my work corresponds to an idea of man himself and his world in all its contradictory and dialectical aspects in the centre, in the full light of day,” the painter said in a recent interview.⁴ Thus the inconnu does not become the symbolic figuration of a determining principle of man, but the explicit representation of conflicts and agonizing emotions that occur daily within the sphere of an unresolved social condition, within the frame of a society that even enjoys – and Dova is aware of this too – expressing these emotions, these stimuli in a cultural drama, implicating Kafka and even Freud himself in its own “bourgeois” anxieties. Dova believes in a dialogue, and this takes place in his painting, in the dialectical interweaving, intermingling, corrosion and compression of the forms, of those larval in ages, where occasionally, in all the naked truth of the most obvious “veristic” figurative symbolism, there appears a decisive and destructive element (blades, fangs etc.). But, with equal violence, a dialogue is also established with the viewer, who is stunned by the aggressiveness intrinsic in those forms, in that tangled mass of images, and by that extremely terse and arcane pictorial matter, whose imaginative and materic aspect is not entirely expressed, and thus it becomes charged with an indefinable almost magical quantity of impressions, ambiguities and multiple meanings. Hence the viewer becomes psychologically involved in the urgency of the tangle, of the action of the images that represent arcane episodes of struggle and are directly active and compellingly meaningful evidence: “historically speaking it seems to me that a figuration binding subject and object is certainly possible.” Dova’s former automatist experimentation during his Tachiste period (a style still to be found frequently in some areas of European avant-garde from Duncan to Georges, from Bertini to Visieux and Loubchansky), has enriched this “figurativeness” with all the new suggestive and significant possibilities of Art Informel, accentuating the aforesaid ambiguity, finally giving it a precise meaning and a distinction that is critically recognizable within the ambit of the current problems of the new `figuration’, from Arnal to Jorn, Appel, Sallés, Dubuffet, Matta and Brauner.

1970: For “Possibilità di relazione” ten years later, in Ferrara

A LETTER (R., 20/VIII/1970)

Dear Dova,
I don’t know if you remember an exhibition-cum-debate entitled Possibilità di relazione, organized by Tadini, Sanesi and myself at the Galleria L’Attico in Rome in May-June 1960, and including works by Adami, Aricò, Bendini, Ceretti, Dova, Peverelli, Pozzati, Romagnoni, Ruggeri, Scanavino, Strazza, Vacchi and Vaglieri.
The aim was to underline, through the various lines of research, the existence of new figurative researches in Italy. Since then the different directions have become accentuated, but that exhibition has remained important as evidence of a pivotal period.
Ten years later the Museo di Ferrara has asked me to organize a retrospective of that same exhibition (a kind of reconstruction), in the light of all the subsequent work. Therefore, this is what it involves in practice: every exhibitor presents four works, one from 1960 or a little earlier, two intermediate works and one from 1970.
The catalogue will include a reprint of the 1960 catalogue (reporting many statements by the exhibitors) plus new contributions from the three critics and possible new statements as well as reproductions of the other works.
The exhibition is scheduled for October.
Please confirm whether you agree to participate, which is what I need to know for now, and tell me where I can find the four works (which will be insured etc. as usual).
Hoping to hear from you soon, with best wishes,
Enrico Crispolti

FROM THE CATALOGUE⁵
[…] Possibilità di relazione virtually covered the researches of nearly two generations of artists. The first who carne to the fore at the beginning or, in any event, in the first half of the 1950s, and became firmly established during the course of that decade (Dova, Peverelli, Scanavino, Vacchi) and the second who emerged at the end of the decade but who already appeared to be new forces, the exponents of ideas though not yet of new proposals (from Romagnoni to Ceretti, from Aricò to Adami, Pozzati and Strazza, who was not so young).
On the one hand, there were problematic situations that already existed, in some cases representing cultural precedents (Dova and Scanavino in particular), which stimulated in the following years and up to today, very personal lines of research, not mutually influencing each other. This was the case with Dova and Scanavino, Peverelli and Vacchi, and the younger Ruggeri, whose figural mode was already then precociously mature regarding the choices that were to remain typical of his painting. On the other hand, there were hypotheses still in gestation and artists actually influencing each other, precisely because the experiments, though not conducted as a group, were certainly carried out in dose collaboration. While the existent problematic situations offered the broadest coordinates of the area covered by the 1960 exhibition, definitely of a superior quality and more decisively conceived, the more malleable core of the hypotheses in gestation was actually its raison d’étre, in other words its unitary problematic platform, more specifically the new trends, and above all the potentialities that were to be fully realized in the future. These would be extremely varied and nearly always highly original, as can be seen from this retrospective held in Ferrara in 1970: an exhibition that has been almost entirely reconstructed ten years later, but in the perspective of the work carried out by the participants during the intermediate decade. The results in terms of novelty of this ten-year period of work concern above all, as is only natural, the younger artists, in other words those who supported in the 1960s the new hypotheses, then still in gestation, and which have achieved over the decade though with differences as to precocity, importance of results and actual form – a real presence, I would say at the same level of personalization and also of diversity, which the not so young artists in 1960 had already or almost achieved. Clearly Scanavino and Peverelli (I am not referring to Vacchi here, whose career has actually been very varied, yet consistent in its development), though not the least conservative, throughout the 1960s were constantly conducting in-depth analyses and broadening their imaginative scope, however, within their already established, extremely personal problematic horizons. And this is also true, and perhaps even more so, of Dova (and the younger Ruggeri).

While a considerable gap exists between Adami’s proposals in 1960 and what he was doing in the mid-1960s, it was still a work in progress. More or less the same is true of Aricò, Pozzati and Strazza to give some examples of works that are very differently motivated and determined. All this meant that the main significance of the 1960 exhibition turned out to be incomprehensible, and hence it did not truly represent researches that were to act as forces within the cultural structure in the following decade, as far as the artists were concerned, without paying particular attention to that very core of new hypotheses. Besides, also because critics of high standing, especially Tadini were present (this Milanese critic was a writer as well as a painter on the side and hence could identify through his own creative pictorial experience. But also Sanesi could actually identify on a problematic creative level, as well as on the level of literary criticism), these new hypotheses were supported also by a great verbal clarity regarding their poetic aims, as was particularly evident in the texts by Romagnoni, Adami and Vaglieri.

[…] On the one hand therefore there was the contestation of Neorealism, in search of a new realism in the relationship with the object and the environment, and their dynamics (which became an increasingly sociological dynamics: the new factor that Romagnoni and Adami were particularly aware of); on the other, there was an instrumental utilization of language elements deriving from the recent Informel tradition, namely they were adopted as a starting point, exactly like the linguistic results of an existential discourse, yet without making a fetish of this or those as such. The intention was to utilize them for a further purpose, in a perspective that dialectically went beyond the horizon of Informel itself (that “wall of anxiety”, as Vaglieri said at the time). And there was still the appeal to Abstract Surrealism – which was Informel: Gorky and Matta – but via this also to the very tradition of Surrealism, obviously not in order to revive it, not even certain aspects of it, but to see it as a possibility of analytic figuration, penetrating the surface of reality, capable of capturing not only individual inner depths, but also collective totemism. And in this regard, through Adami in particular (and on the critical plane through Tadini), there was a reason behind this link with the past but also with Dova’s and Peverelli’s experiments. However, Vacchi’s approach to Surrealism still remained to be clarified. Adami in particular was aware of the meaning of Dova’s and Peverelli’s research, which was different yet concordant within the perspective of similar formal structures with a narrative function. The establishment of new linguistic features therefore occurred over a broad range of cultural experiments, and in a great many variations. This meant precisely a critical awareness of a given multiple situation, at a time when – historically speaking – Informel was drawing to a dose as a new experiment. On the other hand, while the structurally dialectic linguistic approach is very evident in the 1960s’ works by Romagnoni (who died tragically in 1964) as well as by Adami, Pozzati, Vaglieri and Ceretti, though in terms that continued to differ increasingly (but based on the common denominator of a dynamic urban context, which Romagnoni even connected conceptually with the Boccionian matrix), I would not like the presence and the profitable consequences of this approach to be ignored, even in cases that are apparently very far removed, because they are first and foremost not figurative and not narrative, such as the work of Aricò and Strazza.

And yet Aricò’s way of establishing a dialogue involving the subtle, ironical, imaginative refinement of the object, and then immediately afterwards constructing it increasingly autonomously and abstractly, but not merely formally, seems to me to respect a stopping line before pure formalistic institutionalism (which is the aim – with the salvation in an elementary symbolic way – of the most authentic “primaries”). This is done precisely to compensate for having distanced himself from the game that possesses a sub-de intellectual (not intellectualistic) lyricism, where irony intervenes as the very means of imaginative refinement, and of the establishment of his own terrain, I would say almost equidistant both from the influences of pure formalism (which even tempted Richard Smith at certain times), and from the eventuality of the object, with which the dialogue is obviously not face to face, but like a prolonged refraction in a cerebral game of mirrors. Then Strazza’s way of making abstract structures vibrate, by introducing a wealth of subtle variations, is certainly a clear statement of a conscious dialectic, inherent in the essential nature of his research, whose distant, coherent and elementary premises are to be found in that conducted in 1960.

Therefore, the conscious dialectic that the 1960 exhibition intended to highlight has remained alive in a different, yet still profitable form, to establish the meaning of that red line I referred to earlier. Nor can it be said that an inner dialectic movement is not at work in the modes of research of the others, of those artists who were not so young in 1960. They include Scanavino who has reintroduced symbolic dialogues, involving the sign from the first tremors and traces to its resolution and becoming a clear symbol, and similarly involving space, not only the surface, but also symbolic space; Dova, who has not become fixated with heraldic forms but has always pushed his structural analogism in a narrative direction; Peverelli who produces many variations within the context of a very precise oneiric space, and yet tends more to a collective totemism rather than to the evocation of individual ghosts; Vacchi, whose course of development during the decade after the 1960 exhibition has been an intense and sporadic work in progress of a very personal, elaborate and assertive figuration, that is one of the indisputable pivots of a true “new figuration” movement in Italy (and in Europe). I should also like to mention once again that the dialogue that Ruggeri continues to engage in with the palpable, organic aspect of things and images, and which reveals his persistence in Informel that has few comparisons (perhaps only Moreni in Italy), has not been and is not so much a kind of formal fetishist transformation, as his spontaneous way of relating dialectically, of participating […].

1971: Dova, Nuclear and Spatial⁶

We can agree with Tristan Sauvage [Arturo Schwarz’s pseudonym] that: “The first exhibitions of ‘nuclear’ painting (in the new meaning that this word was to take on) took place between October and November 1951;”⁷ and between Milan and Florence, namely with the solo exhibitions of Gianni Dova at the Galleria del Milione in Milan in October, of Gianni Bertini at the Galleria Numero in Florence, the same month and in November of Enrico Baj and Sergio Dangelo at the Galleria San Fedele once more in Milan (the latter sponsored by Giorgio Kaisserlian).

The term pittura nucleare (Nuclear painting) was used for the first time to refer to these experiments in the catalogue containing texts by Dino Fabbri and Pierre Jorre de St. Jorre, and edited by Enrico Brenna, of the exhibition of Baj and Dangelo, who launched the manifesto of Nuclearism in Brussels in 1952. Nuclearism is to be instrumentally included in the more typically gestural area of Art Informel, and it is characterized on the plane of vague justifying allusiveness to this instrumentation, in referring to the new nuclear ideas, rather than formally. Nuclearism takes gestural automatism as a research hypothesis to the extreme, freeing it from the condition-cry of Wols’s poetics, and taking it back to the event and in certain cases epiphanic matrices of its origin deriving from Surrealist automatism (I am thinking of Trost’s experiments). Dova and Bertini, and also the younger Dangelo, have non-figurative research of a neo-plastic and concrete kind behind them, which they have made a clean break with.

Sergio Dangelo recalls: “One night in 1950, in a cellar in Via Strambio, which must have been the first Italian cave I did the interior decoration for and where artists and viveurs used to meet – Dova and Peverelli often turned up – and I first met Enrico Baj. […] he gave me a studio to work in, plus canvases, colours, brushes and his legal advice. Baj had graduated in law and was a lawyer by profession, and between one court case and the next he painted Naif pictures that echoed the various avant-garde experiments. He had also attended the Accademia di Brera […]. When Baj visited my studio he was very perplexed: my pictures were abstract-geometric and therefore different in concept from what he thought the painting of those years ought to be. One afternoon at the Caffé Giamaica, I met Peverelli and Dova who swore exclusively by Pollock and Wols. I don’t remember the date, but I think it must have been the first week in October 1950. Dova said he wanted to buy some cans of enamel paint and, being curious, we followed him first to the stationer’s Crespi, and then, with his cans in his pocket, to the room where he was living in Via Solferino and that also served as his studio. There, with great enthusiasm, Dova tipped the paints onto the canvases, and a burst of colour never seen before knocked us flat with emotion. Later Peverelli (I worked in his studio for a few days) showed me some paintings of a rare beauty with large signs that I describe as ‘in the manner of Peverelli’ going against the crass opinions of the day, which called them ‘in the manner of Hartung’. One afternoon I went back to Baj’s place and I found that he had started painting with enamel: his new pictures were lying on the floor. […] I was still attached to my lines and triangles, but at the same time I was ready to throw everything out of the window if experimentalism so demanded.”⁸ So here we have the idea of Nuclear painting. “There were several reasons at the beginning for the term ‘nuclear’. [Baj has written recently] First and foremost we felt we were artists at a time when atomic and nuclear research was opening up new infinite horizons for man: rather than nuclear artists, therefore, we were artists of a nuclear era. Then there was the basic consideration that our struggle, our stance, as regards the existing art world and the theories circulating in that world, was above all anti-abstract. Anti-abstract was the basis: in other words, we did not only reject geometric abstraction, but abstraction in itself. For this reason we were always against Tapié’s Informel and his Art Autre, which merely proposes an Informel abstract academicism to replace the previous geometric abstract academicism.”

This was taking up a clear position against the tradition of Concretism as in French gesturalism and proposing a new desire for figuration, rather than a mere semantic use of the purer gesturalism. The polemic against Informel, that was a posteriori and did not occur during the creative experience, can be explained within this particular perspective, and not on the instrumental plane. It therefore has a limited significance, and moreover it is indicative that Tapíé himself was interested in Baj, in the entire Autre panorama, not to mention Dova.

Dova (born in Rome in 1925) trained in Milan, studying at the Accademia di Brera. In 1947 he exhibited at the Gal- leria del Cavallino in Venice, in 1948 at the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan, in 1949 again at the Naviglio and at the Cavallino, in 1950 once more at the Naviglio and in 1951 at the Galleria del Milione in Milan and at the Cavallino in Venice. As a strictly geometric abstractionist he also took part in the 1949-1950 Mostra d’Arte Concreta in Milan, in the Arte Astratta e Concreta in Italia exhibition in Rome, at the end of February 1951, and in other minor events. Though a Concretist, Dova had, however, signed Il Manifesto dello Spazialismo in March 1948. And on 26 November 1951, exactly a month after his solo show closed at the Milione, he signed the IV Manifesto dello Spazialismo.

In presenting Dova’s solo exhibition with a certain diffidence at the Milione (Dova’s new positions were confirmed in his solo show at the Cavallino in November), Gillo Dorfles writes: “Underwater depths, where abyssal creatures wander cloaked in liquescent veils; incandescent lumps of organic matter that are reduced to pulp around volcanic rocks; spirals opening out onto shadowy worlds that have not yet been plumbed. Dova’s latest work explores these arcane atmospheres, having abandoned the lozenges and grids of the somewhat cold abstraction that he had adopted until yesterday, he now listens to the call of a freer and more romantic fantasy. But perhaps this is really the true nature of the young artist, closer to the shadowy and ambiguous mirages of a barely hinted at Surrealism than to the rigorous and methodical researches of a too meticulous Constructivism. And, in fact, already in his first exhibition at the Naviglio (1948) his abstraction was undermined by a subtle vein of caprice and Surrealism. The danger – in this series of enamel paint works now on show at the Milione, and which are reminiscent of certain works by Max Ernst – lies precisely in the possibility of crossing the dividing line between reality and unreality, of going beyond the limits of horizons that bear the too evident mark of a sensual and epidermal materiality or that reveal the too obvious calls of an unconscious from which the larva of dreams and nightmares float to the surface. […] Today the chromatic chaos from which constantly changing, slightly pulsating forms have emerged – almost unbeknown to the artist – has led to new tonal researches, new precious blends of colour, which tomorrow will form the basis of more constructive works. From these enamelled sometimes rough and sometimes shiny surfaces, from these congealed lumps that then spread out in subtle fringes, in thin veils, other creations can take shape that will still have the same magical overtones, while preserving the more carefully weighed and expert moderation of the earlier works.”⁹

While in Dova the gestural instrumentation always tends to constitute a precise iconography, an iconography of nuclei and microbiological fluctuations as can be very clearly seen in the canvases exhibited in the 1952 Venice Biennale (and that are to be found in Un art autre by Tapié), by contrast in Bertini the gestural instrumentation remains predominant, almost as though the painter wishes to deliberately insist on drawing the potentiality of a new image from the tangled mass of signs and patches of colour. While Dova rebelled against geometricism because of an iconological dissatisfaction (and the whole of Dova’s subsequent career up to the recent attempts at renewal is a sometimes desperate pursuit of iconography), in Bertini this occurred on the plane of a liberation strictly in terms of language (and Bertini’s subsequent research, right up to the recent positive results, has, in fact, involved seizing, in his hypothetical instrumental practice, the possibility of new contents and images). Bertini creates patterns that tend to take up the whole canvas almost as though fixing the gesture in an intricate mass of signs […].

1975: On the game of contamination (variations by others on two engravings)¹⁰

The exercise carried out on two of Dova’s engravings, La Notte (Night) and L’alba (Dawn), clearly pertains to the phenomenology of contamination, and is clearly a game of contamination. Contamination is not a d’après (a work in the manner of a particular artist), it is not the utilization of another artist’s images or stylistic elements in a more or less modified way (usually ironical); although the d’après, when it is not a copy, is undoubtedly an instance of contamination. Contamination in ancient, classical and medieval art in particular, was mainly iconographical, and lay in the transformation of typologies that were reutilized in new forms of expression, while in modem art contamination is far more often formal and stylistic. The period of Eclecticism, especially where architecture was concerned, was marked by contamination on a vast scale from the eighteenth to the end of the nineteenth century.

Then contamination played on the capriccio, on inventive composition, created through an extravagant blend of diverse historical styles. Contemporary art has pushed contamination beyond the very hypothesis of an `eclectic’ style, towards a surprising conflict achieved by playing on radical contrast.
Controlled contamination has become irreverent modification: an imaginative game of art played on art, but also against art itself.

At this point, however, it has rediscovered the iconographical plane; moreover, this marries well with the extremely new capacity that exists for transmitting the image thanks to the mass media that daily form our context, even invading our homes. Modification, therefore, and renewed iconographical contamination.
Modification is primarily a technique that belongs to the Dadaist and, later, Surrealist traditions, even though a form of “modification” already existed in the Cubist “collage”, at times (and in various works by Gris, for example) as the assimilation in another context of the element to be modified, rather than modification through external, contaminative intervention in a given context, as is the case with the interventions by Duchamp or Miró. While photomontage, be it Dadaist or Surrealist, is another form of modification through the reciprocal) contamination of various elements that are in fact photographic. Obviously, the most famous Dadaist modification is Duchamp’s Mona Lisa with a moustache: his L.H.O.O.Q., dating back to 1919, which respects the most typical principal of modification, namely intervention within a finished artwork, within a kind of “ready-made” artistic object. Duchamp works on a reproduction, and Miró on actual canvases, partially repainted in his own style to create a singular contaminative effect between the preserved portion of the original work (a face in an antique portrait) and the extremely different new sign, which has a bewildering effect. Real modification cycles – not very long ones – characterize the recent researches by Jorn and Baj. Modification plays on a conflict between style and image, and the greater the gap between the date of origin and the intervention, the greater the effect. Iconographical contamination, renewed in fact through the new conception of the image also captured by the mass media (not only the Coca-Cola bottle, but also the Mona Lisa), represents itself, and today plays a crucial debunking and demystifying role regarding the most recent ways of using the image. Besides, Duchamp put the moustache on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, namely he utilized a mass media image, rather than carrying out an actual modification. This brings us back to aspects of the phenomenology of contamination in ancient times, which was essentially iconographical and typological. For example, a London gallery recently presented The Mona Lisa Show featuring works by contemporary painters, inspired by the Mona Lisa, who was transposed in the most diverse ways from the reality of Leonardo’s celebrated work, which has come down to us with its visual concept wholly intact, to the Mona Lisa figure incorporated as she is in the present reality, for instance, having a picnic with Belmondo or transformed into an odalisque, Marilyn Monroe, a movie star and Lolita, among others.

This is a typical case of renewed iconographical contamination.
The game two artists played with Dova’s two engravings is, instead, a modifying contamination, in a certain sense an actual modification, rather than a contamination through an iconographical, typological transformation, as in the game with the Mona Lisa.
The vaguely surreal iconographical narrative of Dova’s two engravings forms the basis for a dialogue conducted in rather formal and stylistic, if not actually iconographical, terms. Besides, the element offered to Dova’s friends was in fact a fantastical image expressed through formal analogy, and not a thoroughly familiar notional image (like the Mona Lisa, Coca-Cola etc.).
Thus the game does not question the image, but contaminates and modifies its style and form.
And this happens in two ways.
The first is contamination as a subtly modifying element. The iconology of Dova’s engraving is not substantially altered, but subtle modifying stylistic and foreign elements are introduced. As in Bonalumi, Cassinari, Nigro, Grignani, Keizo, Cagnone…
The second is contamination as substantial modification, transformation in other words, by partially or almost completely reinventing the iconology in Dova’s engravings. As in Luca Crippa, Fabbri, Neiman, Brindisi…
In both cases, however, though with a different proportion of elements, the game played by the two artists aims to stimulate fantasy, and has the imaginative freedom of the capriccio. It is unique, as are those rare works by artist duos (Fontana-Baj, Baj-Copley and other duos, to mention some similar episodes).
A game of art on art, not art from art, as in the case of the d’après, which therefore has nothing to do even with the revivalist mentality of different identity.

1987: A new Dova: “landscapes” and “gardens”; another solo exhibition in Rome¹¹

The ‘landscapes’ and ‘gardens’ that Gianni Dova painted around 1980 can certainly be said to constitute a new stage in his precociously started, forty-year long career as a painter.
His typically synthetic way of presenting an almost totemic image, as if its wholly fantastical analogical) form had been cut out, against a backdrop of sky and landscape, in what one might call a topographical synthesis also taken to the extreme; his way of working from the late 1960s to the end of the 1970s, that focused on the completely metaphorical construction of an image whose formation was to some extent oneiric, gave way to a kind of full immersion in an ambiguous and flowing spatiality, both multifocal and fascinatingly unexpected. This is the spatiality, which is even picturesque in its tortuousness and its concentrations of brilliant colours, of plant life viewed almost in close-up, and seen through the filter of a vivid metamorphic imagination.

This was the turning point of a greater maturity for the artist who was just over fifty, and who had made a name for himself while still very young (as everyone in fact knows) through his avant-garde researches into language, between “Picassism” and Arte Concreta, to find himself immediately afterwards experiencing the epiphany of the sign of his Spatialist gesturalism.

Perhaps this is the stage in which the determining constructional element of an image in Dova’s painting, which is never described but almost synthesized in a structural ideograph, was swept aside. That constructional element that runs through the diverse expressions of a hypothetical figure that are so essentially characteristic of Dova’s painting, from his earliest experiments (Picassian in fact), to the kind of figurative totemism that characterized his work in the 1970s, which he later went beyond. What I mean is that this iconically constructional element was swept away by the other complementary element active in Dova’s pictorial imagery, but with a completely different purpose, since it was not used to construct structures but to distinguish surfacing, emulsions, fluctuations, immersion, confusions almost, and the rising of hidden strata.

In fact, the element that we can call structural to some degree has been used, through the years, in various types of figuration with a Surrealist and oneiric accent, at times with a nocturnal and mysterious quality, and at others a joyous singing feeling, which was in any event expressed almost through identifying imaginary “figures” acting against the backdrop, and then weaving actual narrative plots (as is evident in Dova’s painting between the end of the 1950s and the early 1960s. These were indications of a new figuration that went beyond Informel materism, which were quite important for the newest young artists from Adami to Del Pezzo – and which I myself helped to record in an historically significant exhibition that some readers will perhaps remember, entitled Possibilità di relazione held in Rome in 1960). On the other hand, the opposite element produced in time, as Dova’s pictorial research progressed, moments of effusion and organic exaltation, submergences or emergences of contaminations in an almost physiological spatiality, displaced to the extent of imaginative stellar involvement (these were in fact the Spatialist years, the very early 1950s); and other moments characterized by a materism that became stratified and expansive through rich, mysterious concretions, imbued with image possibilities.

This proved to be a constant, although Dova adopted different variations in his painting. The point I wish to make is that although one or the other of the two elements mentioned above prevailed at length, the actual end result was always manifest through aggregation around a nucleus or an image structure, “that is, in the existence of a precise figurative meaning”, to quote, and not without good reason, an observation I made when presenting one of Dova’s extremely rare one-man shows in Rome, at the Galleria Medusa, way back in May 1958, which was wholly representative of a moment in which the painter definitely went beyond his previous Informel period by attempting to create a new figurative structure on a dialectical basis.

And also today, in his approach to nature, he lets himself be swept away by the thrill of living imaginatively through the fascinating intensity of the almost organic efflorescence of the colours and of the landscape (something akin to the elderly Monet’s abandoning himself and trusting in an organicity that was wholly intuitive, at Giverny; but which in Dova’s work is transformed, through luminous and chromatic vibration as a vital flow, into metamorphosis as an almost cosmic vitality captured through his dose, intimate relationship with nature). Also today, in his plunging into an almost enveloping totality, certain points of reference do not escape Dova, which are manifest, it seems to me, in the constitution of ganglions, knots, splinters, tangles and massive chromatic volumes within the organic flow of the coloured material, which innervate the incandescent matter in the presence of an animistic image.
It is not that Dova departed from a somewhat Surrealist orientation, which he could be rather simplistically credited with between the second half of the 1950s and the end of the 1970s, and adopted a somewhat naturalistic orientation. His relationship with nature, either experienced at a distance or at dose quarters (the sea, its mass and its transparency, or flowers and gardens), and so emotionally intense, is never in fact that of a naturalist, namely of someone directly involved in deliberate, sensitive participation, and of immediate, perceptual emotions. Instead, his relationship is filtered through a screen of emotive memory, which is nevertheless thrilling. This is the transformation of the original perceptual impulse into a pure image that can only possess the quality of pictorial emotion, which is evoked and recreated in a pictorial image understood as psychological and introspective reality.

Thus, also in his “landscapes” and “gardens” of the 1980s, Dova renews the particular dimension of his indirect, essentially symbolic, figuration by creating a kind of spectacularity, which is in a certain way symbolic and magically introverted, in the image itself. The luminosity, and often also the sulphurous spark, in these “landscapes” and “gardens”, is not atmospheric so much as psychological. A delight to the eye, yes, but viewed through the filter of memory dense even with literary moods, and unexpected, cultured figurative manifestations.

It was actually in that essay written way back for Dova’s exceptionally rare one-man show in Rome that I pointed out a basic distinction regarding the path he had followed, with respect to a possible historical Surrealist matrix, a conviction that was virtually unanimous at the time (I remember, for instance, how, when I discussed the matter with Francesco Arcangeli, he reminded me of Dova’s presumed dependence in those years on Max Ernst models). Apropos of “an obvious figurativeness” in Dova, I noticed how the painter, who was then just over thirty, did not aspire to “depicting symbols of the irrepressible unconscious, countering their positive vitality with the traditionally dominant conventional conscious”, but rather found himself having “naturally gone beyond this dichotomy and, no longer depicting ‘dreams’, he was transferring”, I pointed out, “his Breton-like faith into ‘the higher reality of some associative forms that have been neglected till now, into the omnipotence of the dream, into the free play of fantasy’, into the very dimensions of a figuration implying man in his entirety, in his quotidian, contradictory, physical, psychological and ideological aspects.” Nearly thirty years later, one could also say he transfers this to the emotions experienced daily in his relationship with nature. A relationship that is always experienced through a filter with a marked psychological aspect, which enriches it with a particularly acute prehensility of memory and subtle ambiguities of mood.

Hence, Dova is not a Surrealist painter, especially in his “landscapes” and “gardens” of the 1980s, since he is intensely psychic in his projection of vivid fantasy; therefore, he is not naturalistic, not atmospheric, but introspective, psychological, profoundly metamorphic and therefore ambiguous. An ambiguity that once again in Dova’s painting, as has been the case for more than forty years, is expressed through that highly individual stratification of his typical pictorial material, with its wealth of transparencies, inner glimmers, vibrations beneath the surface and hidden moods.

A pictorial matter that is therefore intimately evocative, psychologically prehensile I would say, as are, and above all were, the very shapes of the images represented by Dova in such a materic context: “that extremely terse and arcane pictorial matter, whose imaginative and materic aspect is not entirely expressed, and thus it becomes charged with an indefinable almost magical quantity of impressions, ambiguities and multiple meanings,” as I noted in 1958, and which basically still holds good.

It also seems evident to me that in the last few years (perhaps in a kind of imaginative counterpoint between a Mediterranean effusiveness and the more harsh and alarming northern reserve of the Breton nature), the total movement, almost organic in fact, of the pictorial space, has become more dramatic and perhaps introspective in Dova’s paintings, while at the same time manifesting itself in the most luxuriant vivid colours.

I mean that he ultimately focuses more on the volumetries of the image, almost as if wanting every time to add more details to the narrative, while simultaneously ordering through more synthetic broad configurations, the field of a type of painting that is richer than ever in complex, stratified chromatic qualities whose inner gleams are magically stimulating; and every time drawing out a different narrative expression, a different sequence of suggestive fragments of the image that construct, as always in Dova, the meaning of the painting.

In historical retrospect, Dova’s pictorial profile seems to me substantially Mediterranean, characterized as it is by an imaginative affability as regards his sensitive relationship with material (to the point of rendering it alchemically important); with natural emotions (to the point of making them an object of fantasy and the conscious dream); with projections of psychic imagery that, however, is not unrelated to the record of a quotidian inner dialectic, which is expressed through transforming everyday emotional situations into cultured and refined memory (with echoes of Klimtian sumptuousness, and I can also often detect Matissian chromatic splendour).

Thus, this becomes the raison d’être of his pictorial research that is continually renewed through his narrative developments. Naturally Dova’s present work once again embodies a complete faith in the emotive and imaginative, and psychologically fascinating quality of the pictorial image, of rich painting as a magical exercise in creating a vision that is profoundly stimulating and emotionally invigorating.

Hence his painting is so intense and exuberant, so vividly evocative, even possessing an investigative tension that requires the viewer to question himself, through the richest and most sensuously magical exercise of fantasy, on the intimate relationship between himself and the world; while seeking to narrate synthetically (as always) possible situations and emotional experiences.

1990: For a drawing from 1971¹²

Gianni Dova’s imaginative approach to drawing differs from his approach to painting, and is certainly more experimental.
His painting, in certain respects, crystallizes the images in a scintillating, metamorphic, materic dimension, which he entered during the period of his unique totemic Neo-Surrealism, in the second half of the 1950s and in the early 1960s, and remained in until he began to draw inspiration from nature in the 1980s.

This Nudo (Nude) from 1971 realistically captures a presence that is not so immediate in his painting. A contracted body depicted with the pictorial force of an essential sign, both in the outlining and shaping of the corporeal mass. Dova’s drawing activity, therefore, runs parallel to his painting while also possessing a certain autonomy, representing perhaps a greater imaginative flexibility in the figurative dialogue, of which Dova was, moreover, a leading exponent but with the particular Neo-Surrealist perspective of Nuova Figurazione.

2005: A possible profile through time

This “diary” may be brought to a dose with a consideration on the characteristics of Dova’s personality and his standing on the Italian art scene in the second half of the twentieth century, in a possible profile through time. It certainly seems evident that it is a question, in his case, of a forceful personality, distinguished, on the one hand, by a particularly youthful desire to take heuristic risks and to indulge in experimentation, which perhaps emerges again in that grappling with the image (of nature) that marks his full maturity, and which he explored in depth at that time; and, on the other hand, by a skill in constructing the image that almost derives from an ancient classical matrix, which is mainly evident in the period of Surrealist iconic organicity and his works making a totemic statement.

What is certain is that Dova had a clear, instinctive desire to construct evinced by the formal dignity of the image, both in his most fluid and uninhibited, or sensitively involved moments, and those where painstaking iconic construction was more evident.
Being acutely sensitive to the quality of painting he was therefore always strongly committed, in his reckless yet shrewd handling of the material. To such a degree that he expresses, through this, a powerful magical quality both in the chromatic structure and the formal design; a quality that in some instances is overshadowed by an iconic precision that is, at times, totemic.

Hence, Dova’s imaginative development generally reveals, as a characteristic feature of his painterly personality, a profound faith in the evocative possibilities of the construction of the image, which inevitably possesses a magical intensity. It is perhaps here that his brush with the historic Surrealist culture is most evident. With respect to the glut of investigations into the unconscious undertaken within that culture, Dova’s projects seem more dominated by a tendency towards fantastical transposition, the stunning magic of the image, and even considerable luminosity. And it is this, perhaps, the most typical gift his painting offers.

Enrico Crispolti, Ricerche dopo l’Informale, Officina Edizioni, Rome 1968, p. 182.
Enrico Crispolti, La pittura in Italia. Il Novecento/3. Le ultime ricerche, Electa, Milan 1994, p. 28.
Una mostra di Gianni Dova, in “Notiziario”, La Medusa Studio d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome, no. 7, June 1958.
In “Preuves”, no. 68, October 1956.
Possibilità di relazione. Una mostra dieci anni dopo, exhibition catalogue (Ferrara, Centro Attività Visive, Palazzo dei Diamanti, 8 November – 8 December), Siaca, Cento 1970.
Enrico Crispolti, L’Informale. Storia e poetica, vol. I, part 1, In Europa 1940-1951, Beniamino Carucci Editore, Assisi-Rome 1971, pp. 366-367.
Tristan Sauvage, Pittura italiana del dopoguerra (1945-1957), Schwarz Editore, Milan 1957, p. 150.
Tristan Sauvage, Arte Nucleare, exhibition catalogue, Galleria Schwarz, Milan 1962, pp. 19-21.
Gillo Dorfles, Dova, exhibition catalogue (October), Galleria del Milione, Milan 1951.
Enrico Crispolti, Sul gioco della contaminazione, in Santiago Palet, Dova e quanti, Edizioni Boccioni, Milan 1975.
For the catalogue of a one-man show at the Galleria Parametro, in Rome, 1987.
Enrico Crispolti, Mauro Pratesi, L’arte del disegno nel Novecento italiano, Laterza, Rome-Bari 1990.