Change is hard at the beginning,
messy in the middle and glorious at the end.
Robin Sharma

I would like to follow a hunch and launch a column devoted to those artists who, in my very humble opinion, though they have long worked within the Umbrian context, nonetheless part ways with it in some measure.

I have now spent twenty years working as an art historian and curator in the Umbrian context. I have also taught for some time at the Academy of Fine Arts in Perugia, and I know most of the artists active in our region well enough to sense connections, affiliations, lineages and cross-pollinations.

Immersion in the local reality has, of course, often led me to wonder what this land “of saints and wolves”, of hermitages and green landscapes, of borders drawn on land – with no sea view – deposits in the mind and heart of the “Umbrian artist”, whether by birth or by choice. Although the attempt to reduce the artistic question to a regional logic is certainly rather specious, this reflection strikes me as quite pertinent within the pages of the journal “Studi Umbri”. Let me therefore set out briefly a few personal considerations on local contemporary art, forcing my hand a little to emphasise the potential areas of differentiation among its various practitioners.

An [(in)exact] portrait of the Umbrian artist
Thinking in the abstract of contemporary “Umbrian” artists, or of a never-formalised “Umbrian school”, I find myself listing, as a widespread and shared trait, a great complexity of execution. A complexity born, at times, of formal refinement; at others, of sophisticated intellectual scaffolding.
Formal precision – sometimes disguised, but in truth almost always present – is often paired with the pursuit of timeless, absolute formulas, ones better able to speak of universals and metahistorical archetypes than of the tensions of the present.
On an anthropological level – and I include myself entirely in this bracket, as a true dyed-in-the-wool Umbrian – the Umbrian artist and thinker, whether out of necessity (given the morphology of the land) or by choice (because at a certain point the light of the sunsets turns you mystical), is often solitary, inward-looking, little given to the research group or to sharing.
And only very rarely does the work take on irony, still less self-irony.

Reversals
So here it is: I have decided to catch you off guard and devote this column to those who, though Umbrian by birth or by adoption, are strangers at home and – whether integrated or isolated – produce a body of work that cannot be described in full along the lines set out above.

Why? Because the journal “Studi Umbri” already offers, from its very cover onward, a wealth of fine contributions on Umbrian artists, and I – for all that I love and support them in my work – would take pleasure in offering a different point of view. A kind of beneficial virus, one that stirs the antibodies of our artistic system and opens it up to reflection on the manifold artistic potentials currently present in Umbria.

The first name: Mario Consiglio

MARIO CONSIGLIO

Biographical note
Mario is not strictly Umbrian, yet he has lived here and moved through the art system for years. Born in Maglie, in Puglia, he first moved to Cortona (Arezzo), then to Brufa (Perugia). He studied in Urbino and had an important Berlin interlude that led him, in 2007, to change his artistic language completely. He is an academician of merit of the Academy of Fine Arts in Perugia, and he can certainly be counted among the best-known “Umbrian” artists.

Well known not only because his work is of high quality and has circulated widely (in Italy and abroad), but because he stands out precisely for his open, dialogic spirit, which draws him into artistic circles. A lover of art and – something truly rare – not only of his own, he collects the work of fellow artists and always operates through the exchange of works. You see him at private views and in artists’ studios. He acts as a motivator to others. And he works tirelessly for himself.

Dispositions
Mario is curious, full of life, always alert to what surrounds him. He does not have the brooding air of the born-and-bred Umbrian, but rather the vivid gaze of someone who can seize things on the fly, shrewdly, and takes pleasure in finding the snags and contradictions in whatever he comes across.
In short, in contrast to the peculiar trait of the Umbrian artist, Mario – in his way of life as in his art – lets himself be invaded by contingencies. He does not pursue absolutes or pure formal research (at least, not any longer); rather, he immerses himself in his present, in the context in which he happens to work, reads its contradictions, works them over with irony and punk sarcasm, and hands them back to us with an abrasive intelligence and, at times, with a kind of disillusioned poetry.
But let us look closely at Mario’s recent output, above all the work that runs from roughly 2007 to today.

An almost classical punk Dadaist
With a Dadaist temperament, Mario reworks and recontextualises icons, words, characters and symbols, stirring together anarchic, irreverent ideas and attitudes into works that blur high and low culture. The learned quotation is thus kneaded back together with turns of phrase and allusions to contemporary culture, destabilising the sense of tradition and of the values it would hand down to us, in an active nihilism that recalls the sheer potency of Nietzsche’s Superman.
In his works the categories of Time are cancelled out. In the great existential hotchpotch, rigorous logic no longer holds. All that remains is the sardonic intuition of our slightly ridiculous finitude. But without resignation. Mario builds, and he enjoys doing so. A Sisyphus who uses his labour as a gym in which to train and to hold life dear.

If before 2007 his work stood closer to Pop idioms and drew on the most advanced technology to build pieces of a limpid, hyper-controlled aesthetic…

…now Mario is less interested in the nature of the materials. He uses the rectified objet trouvé, a term denoting a natural object or an everyday manufactured item, found by the artist, altered in some part and exhibited as a work of art. So he buys ready-made animals from some retailer, breaks them, inserts elements inside them. He catches us off guard, creating a kind of fantasy-world in which an ancestral, primitive animality seems to disclose itself in its innermost make. But which one? Natural or artificial frameworks? Micro- or macro-worlds? Do we hold it all in our grasp, or does it all slip away from us?
As in punk culture, he mixes idioms using cheap means and “improvised” techniques. Sticky tape, dribbles of paint, collages of paper, pieces of wood and more become elements of assembly and alteration.
Everything is forever in the balance: one never really knows whether Consiglio is destroying or in fact building something new. And it is in this tension – a taut thread stretched between the potential nothing and the potential otherwise – that, to my mind, the power of these works resides; works that, for all their apparent brutalism, preserve a balance I would dare to call almost classical.

Artists of their own time
Mario Consiglio’s current work, behind that antagonistic allure, is to my mind in fact a cultured and self-aware Dadaist operation, the child of a time of crisis. Mario knows the art world, in cultural terms as in existential ones. He is osmotic with it. He used a Pop language – lacquered, industrialised – at the moment of the economic boom and the rise of the new technologies. He deployed poor means in an abrasive register in a time of crisis. Mario is a child of his time. His work becomes a witness, and something more. His life turns into art by living off art in his own time – and that, too, is no small thing.

Salvation is not made of beauty alone
Consiglio’s work – even though I formally grant it a classical balance in the way it freezes contradiction into centred, exact images – cannot properly be called beautiful. But must art necessarily be beautiful?
I won’t hide from you that the (over)used phrase “beauty will save the world” is, to my mind, far too often wielded in a simplifying way by those who speak of art without knowing it in its most intimate historical and social contradictions. Beauty is not necessarily the province of art. On the contrary. Throughout history, and above all from the twentieth century onward, art has inoculated doubt, ugliness and precariousness in order to decipher a present made of world wars, cold wars and other distortions. Art is everything we call art when we do not know what other name to give to what stands before us, declares Dino Formaggio. Often it is precisely outside the obvious, reassuring definition of the beautiful that the art of today is to be found.

I know. With statements like these, I am not remotely “Umbrian” either. But perhaps it is because I live within beauty and, though I feel fortunate in that, I do not think myself any closer to salvation than others. Like Consiglio, I feel immersed in contradictions. I don’t know where to begin when I explain the present, and art, to the students at the academy. I have no certainties – neither in beauty nor in any other form of the absolute. As for salvation, assuming it exists somewhere, frankly I think it takes a leap beyond the horizon, beyond the placid, reassuring hills that cradle us, beyond ecstatic solipsism. One must have the courage to stand in the world, in its antinomies, to stand like a two-faced Janus and look at the past in order to understand the present. We may not earn eternity, we probably won’t make money, and we will go on somatising our crises. But if you ask Mario: what did you gain by changing your style and your course? He, with a grin from ear to ear, says: “I’m free and I’m having fun!”.

Well, so am I.

Mara Predicatori, curator and pedagogue, following studies in art and in psychology/pedagogy, took up work both in the promotion and curating of exhibitions and in education for a broad spectrum of audiences. From 2003 to the present she has held curatorial roles at the Trevi Flash Art Museum of International Contemporary Art (today called the Palazzo Lucarini Contemporary Art Center), also serving as head of educational activities. A primary-school teacher, she is also a lecturer in the Pedagogy and Teaching of Art and in the Teaching of Artistic Languages at the Academy of Fine Arts in Perugia. At the same time she has worked, and continues to work, as a consultant for institutions, public and private, on questions of the teaching of artistic languages and of museum education. She has designed and led advanced-training courses and master’s programmes for experts in the teaching of art and of the territory for the Region of Umbria, and has been and remains a coordinator of community projects for educational exchange and artistic promotion (LLP Grundtvig and Erasmus+). She pursues a close reflection on artistic and educational practices of a more markedly social commitment, and on ways of enhancing the territory through unconventional practices tied to contemporary artistic languages (#Chiaveumbra, contemporary-art narratives from the olive-grove landscapes of Umbria).