Archeologia Contemporanea

Sottrazione di presenza

By Stefano Raimondi

Eugenio Tibaldi, hailing from Alba, moved to Naples where he got inspired by the liveliness and excitement typical of the city, he is an artist who likes to confront himself with new places and with the historical, architectural and material elements they contain.

The exhibition that took place at the State Archaeological Museum of Ascoli Piceno offers some interesting insights which let you read in an original way the "hundred towers city". Tibaldi has in fact realized for the occasion artworks capable of dialoguing both with the archaeological finds in the Museum, both with the city in all its plots and branches, bringing to the surface issues that represent situations and criticalities of contemporary society. The research developed by the artist can be read as a movement that proceeds from bottom upwards, from absence to presence, from remembrance to memory, from matter to form.

Tibaldi has faced the city of Ascoli Piceno with an archaeological approach, studying and digging carefully in history, memory and in the contingency of the city, to bring to the surface a submerged but alive side. If all the artistic manifestations were contemporaneous then we can also say that all contemporary has been and will be archeology. Industrial archeology of a modernist dream is the work developed starting from two abandoned factories in the region: the famous paper mill Mondadori and carbon and graphite processing industry Carbon. These companies, which have closed for various reasons, have left an indelible mark in the territory, not only for their physical presence, but also for the social implications their closure caused. The two companies have for years embodied the modern ideal of wealth in a city that has always been torn between opposing forces that govern a sort of stalemate and static nature.

The survey developed by the artist is not only meticulous but also obsessive. Only obsession can justify a stealthy and abusive access in these two abandoned reality, handing over projects and documents that have become an integral part of the artworks. The large paintings depict fantastic machines, the result of combining, only apparently random, technical designs of ultra specialized machines in performing their function. The juxtaposition of reality produces utopian scenarios. Subtract the object of its own function, as Duchamp has widely taught, means at the same time enrich it with one other value that art can use immediately. In this case, propose a reality dissociated from its history is both the most effective strategy to bring up that memory weakened by the time that has become over time a silent trauma for the inhabitants of the city.

Those of Eugenio Tibaldi, however, cannot be defined as ready-made works: although the designs are used as they are, through their assembling and combinatorial action, the intrinsic value is transformed, adding a fantastic vision that eliminates the illusory emptiness of real.

From the idea to the machine, from the machine to the material, reversing the processes of the industrial chain that at the same time the artist describes. The magnets that allow the coexistence and the union of these two poles - a fantastic one telling us about the real and a real one that is a collective trauma - are travertine and coal, paper and pitch. Minerals of industrial processing and at the same time the glue and the base of artworks that in a historical vision are meant to muddle up and indissolubly bind each other. This takes place in one of the artworks where a residue of pitch and coal, detached from one of the Carbon ovens, is camouflaged in to the form of travertine, and, vice versa, a piece of travertine, stone used to build all edifices of the city, and that dominates the old town, is disguised in coal. This metamorphosis 'attempt occurs faithfully copying the grain and color of the materials. It might be wondered wheter reality is not enoughfor the artist to achieve his objectives.

Probably because the reality is deceiving and misleading, is confused and disguises, showing a face that is other than itself. This fake perceptions game has to be unmasked, the same perveptions that have gagged the real, to show it as it is, that is as it seems to be, that is just as it isn't. This laceration, which reopens the wound but at the same time allows it better care, reveals itself in these two stones playing confused, in attempt to look like something else. But both stones do not hold up - neither want to hold - deception. They are imperfect reproductions: in several places, under the surface, you can see the nature that was kept hidden and reveals the deception of reality.

A real that in another artwork emerges by subtraction: cutting from the original projects the walls of Mondadori industry, the result is not to eliminate the presence of the factory, but to increase their strength and bring out the left blank inside of the social and urban fabric.