Art and reality: a time that comes back!

There was a time when art was chasing the future, when it made immense efforts to detach itself from the surface of the painted canvas, in which it longed to become true, more and more like the reality.

From medieval art, full of splendor and mysteries, it takes shape, over the centuries, what will be modernity.

During the Renaissance (which begins in the 15th century), art gradually detaches itself from purely religious areas, the figures begin to put on weight, thickness, the landscape becomes more and more true, with the shadows in their place.

The pictorial and sculptural figures literally become flesh. It's all about running in and behind an art that responds to the motto of the stunned user: "it seems true"! The years 1600 and 1700 is a virtuous crowd of artists that illustrates everything that can be illustrated: wars, famines, shipwrecks, kings and queens, peoples and landscapes, wealth and poverty, love, and death.

Art is becoming more and more alive, artists crave the perfection of a similarity that can never be total between representation and represented.

At a certain point, in the 19th century, the artists decided to enter the material that makes up the real. They take a magnifying glass and dive into the light, the drops of water, the lumps of color, it is the moment of the poetic and much-loved impressionism. Impressive!

Even today the public is divided between the fans of Monet, Manet, Renoir, Degas, those who wanted to enter the light looking for the perfect effect. And without perhaps wanting to unravel that reality that they so much wanted to illustrate.

At the collective level, unconsciously, a reverse path has been activated, a road that looks to the past, not only as a place not to return to ... but on the contrary. In fact, the tension towards art as a mirror of reality at the level of external surrender is interrupted.

Expressionism arrives (at the beginning of the 20th century) and the form literally breaks apart, this time voluntarily.

The brushstrokes are angry lashed and the gaze is above all on the interiority, often dark and violent. In the same period, the Futurism explicitly praises the race of progress at maximum speed. You know, speed is the enemy of form.

We are out of the desire for an art that tells what the eyes see. Everything has already been told, now we must focus elsewhere, to the unsaid, to the invisible, to what is inside.

The form and the way to pay homage to it has already been conquered, the artists no longer feel the need to attend it. And paradoxically, the love for the surface, for the two-dimensional, in the medieval way, is reborn!

Who would have thought that, after centuries of artistic evolution, we arrived at the "advertising posters" of Roy Lichtenstein? His works, among the most famous of Pop Art (50s and 60s) have no thickness, nor shadows. Everything is flat and colored, as under the neon light of a cartoon modernity.

The expressionist impetus of the 20s is calmed down and in the art of the second post-war period the artistic becomes critical of the present, winking at the past. How can we forget the "Venus of the rags" by Michelangelo Pistoletto (1967) in which he combines a classic-style statue with a pile of rags? Harmony of the past versus chaos of the present.

Decade after decade, swallowing up everything from conceptual art to body and land-art, from street-art to digital art, today it is still not possible to say that form and matter are gone. They still exist in the thousands of artistic expressions that are experienced every day. They are elements of a vocabulary that has been enriched, as if it were the result of a frantic search for the key to understand the meaning of everything.

No matter from what point of time a certain artistic element comes, it is used depending on the purpose, the intention of the artist at that time.

The time of art is a time that returns. It moves along a line, but simultaneously it is as if it opens within itself a chasm in which the chronological elements are mixed

Art cites the past, it criticizes it, it desecrates it, it thanks it, it forgets it, it remembers it. Art looks to the future, it craves it, it fears it, it compares it with the present, it is always with one eye on the past.

Time is not a line; it is a galaxy whose constellations are always information.

Miriam Fusconi