Franco Assetto: anthology [antikvár]

i ; ' ' ^ i';." i il i riiiWiiliiáiriliMiÉliíilihl I; M' : ' : I M / I; i ^ ; i'!':^!/.'".'/i' T 1 he journey is the one offered by the long road Assetto has followed in his work from the forties, that dim and distant yet by no means rudimentary age of Surrealist painting, to the eighties, in which Assetto is still very much on artistic duty, his study full of sketches, projects and drawings, a model for a monument at present under construction, and so on. As readers of this substantial monograph will easily see, the notion of a journey in time such as this means, in fact, an incredible amount of labour, an invasion of works, objects, ideas and projects to be crammed both quantitatively and qualitatively into the long road of the journey to be made. What of the map, then? Surrealism; bread as an object; a study of painting going back to first principles through the use of materials and a related study that transforms the "reinvented" material into a sculpturistic gesture; Baroque playfulness in the arrangement of compositional masses; studies with wood and other materials; mirrors; three-dimensional constructions; sculptures; fountains and water-sculptures; hyper-Realist paintings and candies, etc. It is always better to add etc., etc. Or else, we could say sculpture, plastic, furniture, jewelry, lamps, mirrors, monuments, scenography, followed again by etc., etc. of course. Neither of the two lists can hope to cover everything properly. A whiff of eclecticism, all the stronger in a culture such as ours in which any suspicion of less than perfect orthodoxy, of the lack of a clear thread of development linking various stages along the artistic or poetic way is marked down in red as a capital sin, devilment itself, the consignment of the soul into the hands of its deadly enemy. And yet, if we glance through any bibliography of Assetto exhibition by exhibition we realise that since the very beginning the Palazzeschian motto «e lasciatemi divertiré» (leave me to enjoy myself) has been evoked on his behalf (not much, admittedly, but something at least). It was a good start: leaving the artist to enjoy himself means placing him beyond the objects he fills his stage with, within the ambit of a "game" which is more subtle and difficult than what he himself says would lead us to believe. It is no accident that Michel Tapié, the critic who has followed and understood him better than anyone else, invented the equation Assetto = un illuminé de vitalité. The map reveals, first of all, an artist who is not tied to his "products" as things, but who works through things in a functional way, who wishes to function by capturing, making use of and then offering to his public all his various "opportunities" and references. Someone who manages to play at being a monk without having to wear the habit, then. Assetto should be seen, perhaps, as an initiate in a creative pleasure, and given the nature of the art that has been produced from the fifties to the eighties, to