“The awakening of the angel”
MARCO BAZZINI
The assertion with which Verter Turroni introduces his art is as clear as it is immediately contrary to what appears before our eyes: “I am interested in the ugly side of matter.”
Undoubtedly, Turroni follows in the footsteps of those artists in the past century who did not abandon the corporality of art, highlighting the taste and feel of discarded materials; artists of the caliber of, to name just one and the most immediate, Alberto Burri. But alongside this giant of our distinctly Italian art, as with all the others we could have listed, Turroni adds the preponderance of “mental construction” more typical of the culture of design, another distinctly Italian hallmark. Thus, that matter, only mo- mentarily inert and raw, changes orientation and begins a pendulum motion oscillating between the extremes of destruction and construction. It conquers time and space. It is precisely in tending to and delving into this oscillation that our artist has established himself over the years, marked by over thirty years of work, as one of the undisputed protagonists of that adventure that traverses the thin ridge between the free creation of art and the rigorous design of projects. This operational field, starting from the mid-eighties, has increasingly marked one of the many streams through which the ever-expanding contemporary landscape takes shape. The great physicality transmitted by his painting and also sculpture, both tied to an impeccable and irreplaceable large scale, of the early post-war years, resumes the opening of form to new possibilities of the form itself (this was succinctly the definition Umberto Eco gave to the Informal of the fifties), leaving behind that inconclusive controversy between figurative and abstract (is there anyone who still wants to waste time on this debate?) which today would no longer allow any alliance except, at least for our artist, the ability to continue working masterfully with his materials of choice: fiberglass, cement, me- tal, and felt.
And precisely on this front between action and vision, the words Giorgio Vasari used in his “The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects” (1555), a book that begins the history of art (always stated very succinctly), for that extraordinary and eccentric painter Piero di Cosimo, who lived at the end of the fifteenth century, become useful: “He would sometimes stop to consider a wall where sick people had long been spitting, and from it he would draw battles of knights and the most fantastic cities and largest countries ever seen; similarly, he did the same with clouds in the sky.”
For those who might not be satisfied with the Arezzo-born historian, there are also the words of the great Leonardo, recoverable in his A Treatise on Painting: “I have already seen stains on clouds and walls that have sparked beautiful inventions in various things.” We can have a similar experience today with the stains, streaks, blotches, smudges, and oxidations, etc., that on Turroni’s “worked” surface are no longer to be con- sidered an affront to the purity of matter but images in-potency, that is, an act of resistance to the act of power. The verb “to work” is placed in quotation marks precisely to highlight more strongly the industriousness of this artist, his indispensable manual skill, his full adherence to the act of creation that does not find inertia in the potential of the material but a life that emerges between acting and not acting. This is a primitive movement, which is also a struggle for control of the process, be it oxidation or an imprint—it doesn’t matter, because his way of proceeding is a phe- nomenological machine that does not entirely rely on the vision of the one who operates. The images and forms that arise from his work are industriousness guardians of the apparition, allowing that double distance between nature and painting (but also sculpture) to be maintained, leading to impermanence.
As a homo faber, Turroni, therefore, requires a continuous pronouncement in the matter that he, as a contemporary alchemist, knows how to transform into the most harmonious sound for the eyes. Already, the threshold, in its being a place of passage, marks a pre- carious limit, just as impermanence is nothing but transitoriness. By coupling these two terms, which are voiced in the title of this exhibition, it is as if Turroni is re-proposing in a contemporary key that “fecit fecit” that can be read in a famous painting by Titian, the Annunciation of the Church of San Salvador in Venice. If, in the Venetian painter, the act of making and remaking leads to a disintegration of painting (it is Titian of the late period), the passage of pas- sage in our artist shifts everything towards contemplation, which is a state of grace, of man in action.
In Turroni’s art, therefore, we experience a backlash effect where the thresholds of the image are crossable and at the same time crossed. An operation that deactivates the communicative functions but activates the inevitable angel that always awakens from ugliness.
