Giovanni Muro (k)-Ferruccio Bortoluzzi (06.12.1920- 25.05.2007; Venetian minimalist artist)

Giovanni Muro (1948-2009), was an Italian expressionist artist, operating on the fringes of the last glimmers of the Povera Arte and Minimalist movements . Observing Giovanni Muro with Ferruccio Bortoluzzi at a reception marking the opening of the latter’s exhibition of mixed media works at Ca’ Pessaro , Venice, on a cool evening in early Spring 1982, one would not have guessed that these, superficially so different people , meeting then for the first time, would develop into close companions or that they would die, some 25 years or so later, within months and metres of each other. Giovanni was 34, dark-suited but with brown shoes , neat hair, a white shirt open at the neck and tieless; his recently acquired plastic framed , “tortoise-shell” glasses tending to slide down from the bridge of his nose whenever he sipped his glass of red wine. Despite a coin-sized bald patch on the crown of his head , that had only recently become apparent, Giovanni had not as yet started to wear a hat, something that would only become something of a “signature” two or three years later. Ferruccio was at 62 almost twice Giovanni’s age ,somewhat taller than the younger man and dressed as if the focus of his retrospective was more sartorial than artistic. Up close it was apparent that due to years of pipe smoking and sharing time with fellow habitués in cafes and bars, the smell of tobacco had seeped into every fibre of Bortoluzzi’s clothing and, it seemed to some ,his skin. While generally languid of movement, when Bortoluzzi was ,as now, in full magus mode before a new acolyte , his arms , possibly independent of his will, would intermittently open out ,elbows slightly bent and fingers noticeably splayed, their nicotine-stained tips tremulous , like Toscanini drawing his orchestra into a sinuous , collusive thrum, before completing their circuit by pressing his hands together , palm on palm, in front of his chest , either miming a percussionist with cymbals effecting the subtlest of “piano piatti” or in a simulacrum of prayerful focus .Throughout this seemingly automatic performance , Ferruccio’s soft voice would intone without pause (although volume and pitch tended to vary as he leaned in or fell back on his heels) words that , to the more far-off or hard of hearing, could well have been an ululating threnody for a disquieting but profound loss, and for those close-by invariably set out for their benefit ( and at least in part, his ) an impassioned disquisition on the central significance of form and spirituality in art , his decisive commitment to mixed-media in the late ‘50’s and the subsequent inter-leaving in his work of the attributes of sacred practices with a minimalist aesthetic , including , ultimately, the use of historicised forms ,such as the triptych , to foreground the connection with old, deeper traditions well known to Venice, such as those from the Byzantine and Cypriot East. At that moment Giovanni was in the latter camp . Behind the low dias set up to one side of the room, with a microphone and some chairs in preparation for the required speeches, was a large photograph of Bortoluzzi in his younger days, left shoulder toward the camera , head turned sideways while his eyes looked backward at something out of the picture, sporting a beret from which his curls escaped over his collar. The overall effect was of compact energy and a curiosity that had not been sated by immediate circumstances ,much like Carpaccio’s distracted listener painted fourth from the right in his canvas, now in the Milan Brera (“the Academia’s reserve collection” as has been acidly said ),of Saint Stephen disputing with the Doctors of the Sanhedrin . It occurred to Giovanni , as he looked at that photograph while listening to Ferruccio, standing so close before him and recognisably the same person , that although in the time since the photograph was taken (15 or 20 years?) it was theoretically possible that Bortoluzzi may have adopted many other more or less radical styles of both dress and demeanour , somehow the photograph and the man standing before him argued against it. Indeed, mulling over the presence of that photograph as he accompanied Bortoluzzi through the exhibits ,watching him touch and even adjust the position of certain works as he went, as if he was not quite done with them, Giovanni concluded to himself that the art-historical establishment’s need for an overarching ,consistent narrative , as with Bortoluzzi’s apparent need for an inclusive and compelling account of his artistic development, indeed their common requirement for a sense of self-determined progress as a signifier of value, was a romantic notion that served little good. Certainly ,having surveyed the exhibits , Giovanni’s immediate impression was that the larger sculptural pieces of a decade or more before seemed to make a greater claim on his attention and offered a more persuasive account of Bortoluzzi’s vision and sensibility , as he had expressed it to Giovanni, than the more recent, more tentative works , that the curator of the show had placed at the heart of the exhibition and the evening’s attendees were now being asked to accept as the latest expressions of this singular journey. This in turn brought to mind for Giovanni the radical work and career of the American artist Lee Bontecou, an artist whose work he had only seen in illustrated articles, but who he deeply admired. To Muro it was something of wonder that as far as he could tell Lee had just walked out of the light some 10 years ago ,refusing to let the Art scene, with all its gallerists, journalists, curators, competitive jealousies and over-thought responses follow her any more. It was odd to think of Lee, who , contemporaneous with Ferruccio , but ultimately to such different effect, had gained so much from the Italian “ moment” of the mid ‘50’s, single-mindedly working out her responses and radical techniques and ideas in her student factory in Rome , that would then erupt with her work and fame in the early ‘60’s back in New York ( while Ferruccio in his own way was also enjoying a degree of recognition and status back in Italy) ,taking that degree of control , while Bortoluzzi was left, negotiating and contextualising his relevance to an evermore indifferent market. What might have happened if Bortoluzzi had followed a similar course to that chosen by Lee? But then it dawned on Giovanni that maybe the curator knew all that and more and had chosen to place the photograph in such a prominent place ,not to claim continuity and imbue the latest works with the benefit of the aggregate , cumulative heft of a lifetime of endeavour, but exactly the opposite, to say “Look, here is our man in the early ‘60’s, alive and vital, THAT is the work that you should attend to tonight, not the later and near contemporary works , which are here just as an excuse so that all of this can happen within the rules of the game.” In time the speeches, delayed in the hope that a certain critic from Milan would arrive as had been promised, were announced as being about to start , so Giovanni and Ferruccio quickly exchanged phone numbers and addresses and Bortoluzzi made his way to the stage , being warmly greeted on the way by his many assembled admirers. Giovanni , who in those circles was a virtual unknown and who the organisers had assumed must have been either an important friend or collector of the artist (as otherwise why would Bortoluzzi have chosen to have spent so much time with him rather than working the room ?), was left alone amongst the exhibits . Then, as the mic was tapped before the introductory remarks, Giovanni , having first secured a canapé and another glass of wine , found a discreet perch to follow proceedings ,let time pass and consider his own practice and output. Why was he even here ? The simple answer to that question was that Bortoluzzi was undoubtedly a “name” and this had been an unexpected invite that carried with it some credibility in Contemporary Venetian circles. Furthermore, Francesco Ceretti, the mutual friend who had got him the invite and had introduced them, had piqued his interest by noting the coincidence that Bortoluzzi in some of his more sculptural works had used the triptych form in a similar way to Giovanni in the latter’s well-received installation at San Gallo (see Giovanni Muro (i)) and that both he and Bortoluzzi had a commitment to minimalism rather than abstraction (“ In that regard you are both more Philip Glass than Luigi Nono, don’t you think?” as Cerutti had said , with a smirk that had undermined the effect he had been seeking to achieve). But beyond that , now he was here, was there truly common ground? There was no immediate answer to this question . Instead Giovanni came to accept, as the evening wore on, that what mattered more was the difference between them , for while the springs of their respective creative energies rose in similar uplands, the watershed that separated them was that for Bortoluzzi what he did he had to do and that being the case he made sure it was done to the best of his ability, whereas in Giovanni’s case his “art” was in danger of being more easy to talk about rather than actually do. Giovanni next met Ferruccio some weeks later at a modest Bacaro behind Chiesa San Toma. Giovanni showed Ferruccio some of his photographs from his “il Choido Di Ferro” series together with a number of as yet un-exhibited photographic images and texts that he was then working on , to which the older man responded with impeccable tact, insight and kindness. Inevitably they also reprised their earlier meeting , the exhibition and the reviews, acknowledging that while the local articles were generally positive , if not wholly persuasive , outside of Venice the show had had little impact. Ultimately it appeared that for all his commitment and creative enquiry Ferruccio and his work were out of fashion : his religion-tinged minimalism was seen by the metropolitan critics as an affront to the wellhead of Neitzchean godlessness (and consequent neo-humanism),that their sanctioned forms of abstraction took strength from , an error that in their eyes was compounded by Bortoluzzi’s evident preference for a scandalously subjective and non-ironic engagement with his subject . Some ten years on from his death there is no “school of Bortoluzzi” , but no doubt in time certain pieces by this kind, gentle ,spiritual and ,in an almost archaic way , proudly Venetian man, will be valorised and seen as being eidetic , as many of Bontecou’s works from the ‘60’s already are. In the meantime on this board are some images of Ferruccio Bortoluzzi and his work that Giovanni most empathised with , along with some images of works by Lee Bontecou from her imperial phase of the late 1950’s and first half of the 1960’s.