retroverso

Since it appeared on the scenes, in the Sixties, it was clear that Pop Art, with its communicative potential, would become something more than a simple artistic movement. Its immediate code, its ability to take images from the mass culture and offer them to the collective conscience would become a lesson.

While traditional Pop Art, that of Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselmann, James Rosenquist and Roy Lichtenstein, has been recorded as an artistic expression of the years of the economic boom and of the ascent of a new consumeristic culture, its attitude to mix cultured images and popular ones would become, on the contrary, a common denominator for many later artists, from Jean Michel Basquiat to Keith Haring, from Ronni Cutrone to the graffitists of the Eighties.

Without Pop Art, I wonder if we would have known the artistic expressions of Street Culture, if we would have assisted to the birth of the Underground and the Lowbrow Art, influenced by comics, by the Skate and the Surf subcultures.

Pop has ripped the veil of silence off the “fine arts”, it has undermined the ideological predominance of minimalisms and conceptualisms, opening the way for every expression of the popular culture.

Thanks to Pop Art, consumer goods, Hollywood stars, rock idols, cartoon characters, comics superheroes, pin-ups, playmates, cars and cigarettes brands, politicians and heads of states, appeared on canvas. In sum, thanks to Pop Art, the entire universe began to flow within the borders of art, starting a liberating change of codes that’s still going on.

Pop Art made the artists realize that, from that moment on, everything they had in their mind could be put in their works: their passions, their myths, their muses and even their favourite singers.

Pop had all these merits, but the Punk explosion gave the final thrust to the snobbery of the art system, allowing a lot of young artists to freely express their creativity thanks to the combinatorial magic of the “Do It Yourself”, that introduced a new kind of art on fanzines, on flyers, on posters and on disc covers. A new kind of art based on the collage of photocopied images and of peremptory manifestos, in an absolutely unique mesh up of Dadaism, Situationism, Existentialism, Futurism, Constructivism and Bauhaus. Punk Art, if we can call it art, extremized the Pop Art message, setting free the destructive energies coming from a low level, from the young people belonging to the English working class who attended the Institutes of Arts (The Clash) and met each other at the Micheal McLaren and the Vivienne Westwood shops (The Sex Pistols).

The seeds of the Punk graphics of Jamie Raid and those of the Combat Style of Strummer and his mates, permanently marked later generations, laying the foundation for what was yet to come in the Californian hardcore scene, the companionship between Raymond Pettibon and The Black Flags, for example. Nevertheless, as the critic Simon Reynolds has stated, the Punk revolution was an incomplete one.

It was instead the Post-Punk movement, and profoundly the so-called New Wave, that emerged as a real modernist vanguard, with its imagery “linked to modern figurative art, to the architecture of the Twentieth Century and to the future writings of Ballard, Burroghs and Dick.”

La Pop des mès rêves

In the Eighties, exchanges between contemporary art and pop music were the consequence of an eclectic (and deeply pop) attitude to mix suggestions and styles coming from different walks of life.

During the first years of that wonderful decade, maybe the last really creative one, the most vanguardistic rock fringe was noticeable because of its ability to combine a new electric sound with equally original visual installations.

Disc covers and concert posters were overflowing with art. This had already happened in the previous decades, with Andy Warhol’s artworks for the Velvet Underground, the Rolling Stones, Paul Anka, with the Beatles’ “White Album” by Richard Hamilton and “Stg. Pepper” by Peter Blake, but this time the phenomenon was not isolated. Collaborations between artists and musicians had been pre-annouced in the second half of the Seventies by Robert Mapplethorpe’s portraits for Patti Smith’s disc covers, by Robert Frank’s artworks for the Kraftwerk or Bruce Weber’s ones for Marianne Faithfull. This sort of collaborations became very frequent in the Eighties.

So we have Don van Vliet’s paintings for Captain Beefheart, Raymond Pettibon’s drawings for the Black Flags, Anton Corbijn’s pictures for U2 and Morrisey, Richard Kern’s shootings for the Sonic Youth and Keith Haring’s graffiti for Micheal McLaren. And then, again, Robert Rauschenberg for “Speaking in Tongues” by Talking Heads (1983), Kenny Sharf for “Bouncing Off the Satellite” by B-52’s (1986), H. R. Giger for Debbie Harry’s “Koo Koo” (1981), Gerhard Richter for Daydream Nation by Sonic Youth (1988), Pierre et Gilles for “Disco Rough” by Matematique Modernes (1980), but also Herb Ritts for Madonna’s “True Blue” (1986), Irving Penn for “Tutu” by Miles Davis (1986) and Annie Leibowitz for Bruce Spingsteen’s “Born in the USA” (1984).

In the same period fruitful collaborations were increasing in Italy too, like the one between Occhiomagico (alias Giancarlo Maiocchi) and the Matia Bazar; the artist realized the covers for “Parigi, Berlino, Londra” (“Paris, Berlin, London”, 1981) and “Aristocratica” (1984), the videoclip of “Aristocratica” and the set designs for their concerts. With the post-modern scenography for the “Parigi, Berlino, Londra Tour” began the collaboration between the Matia Bazar and Alessandro Mendini, that would lead to the curios episode “Architettura sussurrante” (“Whispering architecture”, 1983), a compilation published by Ariston with the lyrics of this famous architect. The theatre ensamble Krypton from Florence, made Alfredo Pirri and Litfiba meet for the show called “Eneide” (1983-84), while in 1986 Occhiomagico created the cover for “Il Fiume” (“The River”) by Garbo.

So, this is the cultural background from which Andy’s pop art, at least ideally, arises. It proceeds together with his being a musician and a composer, both as the keyboard player of the band called Bluvertigo and as a soloist.

If we want to find the origin of Andy’s fluorescent and smooth pop, without insisting too much on the evident Warholian influences (what neo-pop artist hasn’t been influenced by him?) we need to go back right to those fabulous years.

The years in which, as written by Pier Vittorio Tondelli in his “Un weekend postmoderno” (“A postmodern weekend”, 1990), “the young and eclectic fauna of Middle Post-modernism mixes and puzzles images, attitudes and tones with the purpose not to cyclically disclaim themselves in passing from a look to another but to find a new expressive vitality exactly in this floating of combinations and in their going through different dress codes.”

Yes, because, I was forgetting to say that in the Eighties art wasn’t just on covers and posters, but it contaminated even clothing styles and make-up, the whole “look”. An awful English word, today fortunately out of fashion, that identified the way people dressed and their make-up, but it mostly identified the way people used to feel and the way people used to live their time.

The worthiness of that decade is that art became part of the daily life of many young people.  Thereby, by means of the visual suggestions of the New Wave and Pop bands, art won new spaces of daily life, like clothing style, maquillage and even behaviours. Andy’s sensitivity originates here, all of this formed his musical and artistic tastes. Andy’s Pop, actually, has nothing to do with the contemporary tendencies of New Pop. It’s far from the Pop Surrealism of Mark Ryden and Marion Peck, and far from the intellectual snobbery of Marcel Dzama and Jules De Balincourt’s New Folk. It has nothing to do even with the Superflat imagery of Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara, in the balance between the Japanese figurative tradition and the manga culture.

Andy borrowed from Warhol his taste for painting musicians and “star system” personalities, sacred icons and cartoon heroes, fashion designers and top models, but his style is rather the direct result of the influences of the glamorous graphics of the Eighties.

Andy obtained his diploma in Commercial Graphics and Illustration at the Monza School of Art, he certainly does not ignore the wonderful paintings of Patrick Nagel, who’s also the author of the unforgettable cover of Duran Duran’s “Rio” (1982). His flat, almost illustrative, tones, the poses of his subjects, some close-ups of models and TV characters directly come from this artistic sphere, while his shocking colours, the fluorescent acrylics that seem to lighten the canvas as if it was a light box, are an unmistakable sign of his stylistic expression, born from a perfect cross between Keith Haring’s colours and Fiorucci’s pastel nuances.

The electrical brightness of Andy’s paintings, that plays on the contrast between the primary colours, is maybe the base of the elected relationship, that has led to many collaborations, with the ex neo-futurist Marco Lodola, who founded his artistic fortune right on light.

Andy puts in his works his entire world, his imagery, a pure distillation of art, music and entertainment. As Red Ronnie wrote, his paintings are “stories summarized in a snapshot”. But his “snapshots” are miles away from reality, immersed in a universe of theatrality and transformism, in which lumps of future fairy tales thicken, melancholic flashes and decadent reverie in acid sauce.

Here are then the saturated portraits of the New Wave and the Avantpop, from the Joy Division to the Kraftwerk, from Robert Smith to the Devo, and then Nico without the Velvet Underground, Sid Vicious without the Sex Pistols, the Kiss, Madonna, Diamanda Galas, Kurt Cobain, Micheal Jackson and David Bowie, this last has been painted in every version, from the glam one of Aladdin Sane to the Berliner one of Low.

But there’s not only mythology in Andy’s paintings. There’s the nostalgia for the cartoons of his childhood, those “made in Japan” like Captain Harlok and Goldrake and the French ones like Asterix and the Barbapapà: there are art celebrities like Dalì and Warhol, and cinema stars like Marilyn and Brigitte Bardot, there are top models like Kate Moss and Linda Evangelista and vips like Lady D and Condoleeza Rice. And the, among the psychedelic Jesuses and the pop Madonnas, appear tributes to the Japanese femininity, to Geishas who seem to have come out from the pages of Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata.

Anyway, actually, I have the suspect that these Madames Butterfly could descend from a mannerist Japonisme, from a cultural fascination that right in the Eighties was contaminating not just the music (the Japan first with the complicity of Ryuichi Sakamoto) but also the movies. It’s enough to think about the ambiguous lyricism of “Furyo. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence” (actually shooted by the Japanese Nagisa Oshima, but with an Anglo-Jap-Newzealandese production) or about the beautiful thriller by Ridley Scott, “Black Rain”.  In sum, Andy’s pictorial universe is crowded with suggestions and pretty precise citations, as if they were the details of his document, or rather a DNA map, that reveals the genetic features of the artist.

For this reason, everything Andy does, a painting or a piece of furniture, an ornament or a mannequin, a piano or an advertising panel, his work will always have the ability to reveal nothing but his personality. A personality, we can say, which is a little bit theatrical, too sophisticated, almost unnatural, “artefact” in one word, that is to say “made at art”. However, as Oscar Wilde wrote, “being natural is just a pose, and the most irritating pose I know”.