One of the most common reviews directed at non-figurative painting of the twentieth century – the Vanguard, as is known – is to have not founded widespread languages between the endless mass of painters that represents productively the large base of the pyramid’s Art. It is not an unreasonable critique, because has also existed the claim to assert the opposite. If today the majority of the ordinary artists is still figurative, it means something has failed, and this is certainly not attributable to who should have been the first beneficiary of the expressive innovations. But there are also non-figurative artists who are just as those of twentieth century would have liked. Claudio Rossetti is one of these. He manages the informal abstractionism with the naturalness with which others paint still life or sunny seascapes, almost like if it is a language learned and practiced since the days of school. No one should be surprised. If we think about it, it’s more natural to express oneself without any accurate reference, except the pure creativity, than to portray the world in all its complexity. Rossetti knows very well the children, with whom he undertook learning projects of extreme interest, also targeted to help the most problematic. Well, as children, when we started to make our first scribbles, we were all informal abstractionists. Then someone told us that we had to do in a certain way, and so we have started to represent the appearance of the world. In art history, however, the path seems reversed: first, when the man aspired to live according to nature, he tried to reproduce it as mimesis, imitation; then, when the culture has prevailed causing in art a strong process of intellectualization, man has tried to forget the mimesis, that in the meantime, with the discovery of scientific perspective, reached levels of extreme sophistication. On the contrary, he wanted to recover expressively the childish virginity, so much so that the best-known and representative teacher of the twentieth century, Picasso, declared that his greatest aim was to be able to paint like a child. That’s why we use to consider a “childlike” painting (such as those of Rossetti) as the result of an intellectual acquisition, in opposition to those who paint fruit and seascapes more or less as it was before Picasso. But Rossetti clarifies the ideas once and for all: if in him there is intellectualism, everything is reduced to the knowledge of the others, that is the abstract informal developed in the last century. From this “Abstract” are born own techniques and methods: from “tachisme” to abstract expressionism, in the sacred combination of gesture and sign; from the taste for the pattern (composition based on a regular scheme), to that for the texture (the warp obtained through the repetition of a single module). To all this grammar, applied with diligence in supporting the lyrical analogy between painting and musical score, but also with the pleasure of taking unexpected exceptions to the rule, Claudio Rossetti adds a content of particular thickness, not connected in an obvious way to informal abstraction and often considered lay, if not agnostic: religion. Every work of Rossetti is a biblical canticle, a Franciscan laude in which “sister light” and “brother colour” better contribute to honor the glory of God. Here it is another discovery of Rossetti, the abstract as a representation of the unrepresentable, direct emanation of the spirit in his longing for the absolute divine. If the priest too had understood this, the modern churches would be full of informal, instead of so much mediocre figuration, by favoring decisively the affirmation of this artistic language.

Vittorio Sgarbi