Art as the imitation of nature is a concept that over time has been interpreted in various ways, first as the sublime definition of classical art, then, starting with the idealistic theories of the mid-nineteenth century, as the heavy inheritance of a tradition to destroy, and finally – in the midst of twentieth-century modernity – as a thought entrusted to history, and therefore to the past, of little use to a present so very refined and linguistically autonomous as to be able to do without a direct relationship with things. Instead, today the great melting pot of postmodernism indiscriminately – and with a little indifference – accepts any ideal declaration, to then check its effectiveness in the field of the media. Therefore, one must not be afraid to claim that art can also be the imitation of nature (a more open and thus rather different claim than the initial assertion which excluded every other possibility), and that the problem is not so much the truthfulness of the theory but its effect in practice.
So, today, when one claims that Giuseppe Scaiola is an artist who imitates nature, all those conceptual hindrances that would have regulated him just a few years ago to the bed of tradition, excluding him without a thought from the avant-garde scene, have disappeared: nature has finally once again taken its rightful place among the “authorised” subjects, for the simple reason that all topics are valid to some extent. So, the question moves from the general theoretical sphere to that of the individual’s work: what nature? And how?…
From the start, Scaiola’s work appears an intelligent compromise between a vision of nature and the language of decoration, whereby what is meant by decoration is that ancient tendency of art – perhaps the very first – to restore the symbol or the object through the abstract sign: a purposefully limited range of colours – white, black and two or three different shades of green – fills the canvas and the eye not so much with an image as a feeling. The feeling is of something “organic”, an untangleable magma from which all the nature in the world derives: life is green and Scaiola makes it explode in a lush manner (an adjective matched from as early as primary school with tropical forests…), or with a slight touch of crimson what was inevitably the mark of foliage becomes the mark of a flower. It is always amazing to note how a minimum linguistic change – in our case a change of colour, the marks and composition remaining the same – can generate completely different images in the mind of the observer, and above all it is amazing to think how a theoretically independent expressive tool like colour on a canvas generally forces the mind to work on analogies, that is, it forces it to “anchor” the thought on something known. Therefore, “green” usually becomes “leaf green” or “black” used as the background to some marks becomes “the black of night”.
Scaiola is perfectly aware of this mechanism, so much so as to exploit it and accentuate it in his paintings, which precisely because of this become “naturalistic” and anything but abstract.
And yet, if his aim and his method were these alone, we would be faced with a mere excellent renewer of the landscape tradition, a painter who has found an interesting variation to the codified representation of nature: the testimony that “everything can work”, that everything is accepted would of course be enough for a written work, for an analysis and for a “postmodern” look at the recovery and rediscovery of topics neglected during modernity, but at the same time it would be nothing but a substantially inattentive observation, tending towards a statistic, and in the end quite far off the real reason for interest in Scaiola’s works. Indeed, though it may be true that even if we limited ourselves to what has just been said, his work would nevertheless belong to the great artistic concept of “imitation”, it is equally as true that Scaiola elaborates this concept by inserting it in his way of working, and not just in the superficial, that is, the visual result.
In other words, the artist “imitates nature” in creating his works, rather than in their appearance, or, rather, his pictures are born, grow, unwind like a natural organism, the direct consequence of which is that they look organic. It is no coincidence, for example, that his works develop in a series of canvases and not one alone, often in a sort of “zoom shot” from the outside in; that the sequence goes from small to large or vice-versa; that the artist accompanies us inside the fragments of nature, hinting that all the space around is potentially occupied by the same untangleable organic mass…but above all, it is no coincidence that Scaiola creates his works with a method that imitates, camouflages nature. Indeed, not only does he make them with his bare hands, without the auxiliary of a paintbrush, he also proceeds making additions at a great speed, laying out the canvases in sequence and working on them with the speed with which a cell multiples in an accelerated film and with the consequence with which – in the same hypothetical film – liquids would crystallise (I am thinking, for example, of works like “Sciame” (“Swarm” of 2000, formed by thirteen canvases side by side…).
All of Scaiola’s pictures have an origin, a point of departure, its own personal “big bang”, generated by the first touch
of the artist, but then everything moves (is created) in an almost automatic manner: his hands are quicker than his mind, the single mark “calls upon” the next one, and again and again until it is complete, until the “end of space” which, in our case, corresponds to the “controllable” limit of the canvas.
Some titles, as has already been noted in other texts, are emblematic – “La natura nasce a destra o a sinistra” (Nature is Born to the Right or Left), “La natura si svolge e si avvolge” (Nature Winds and Unwinds), “Lo spazio diminuisce col crescere della natura” (Space Diminishes while Nature Grows)…-, but they also reveal this method, which knows how to lightly mix together the representative and mimetic intention of nature with some of the most characteristic artistic practices of the 20th century, starting from the attention directed solely towards the space of the canvas that can be held between his extended arms, to arrive at an updated version of dripping.
In fact, like a demiurge to respect, Scaiola defines the limits of his work beforehand, spatial limits, operating limits, which is the only possible way in which to govern casual nature, the automatic movement of the hands, the speed of work.
So, also when in the last pictures – the “Nebbia” (Fog) series, where the colours have changed: white-blue, azure, like the infinite little drops that make up fog – the practice of dripping is very much more evident than elsewhere, the casual nature of the dripping fits perfectly into the confines that the artist has placed on “his” nature, that is, on his picture. The awareness of the limit and its clear, prior indication, is paradoxically the trick that allows the mind to be freed and for it to imagine the infinity beyond that limit. So, when Scaiola defines formats, shapes, colours (all quite basic, simply functional for the main subject), he in fact transmits a sort of genetic code of his imagination, and the more simple this is, the deeper the gaze that will centre on the global project. In his case, this leaves behind an easy representation of nature to try to come close to, to “imitate” the process of nature. Art as the imitation of nature.