ANDY E I SUOI CORTOCIRCUITI

^{While thinking about the contents of this brief essay, ten years later my last critical text for Andy, I realized that 2009 is, for our long friendship and collaboration, a little but important anniversary. Exactly ten years have passed since our first collaboration, the artistic section of Palazzo Bonoris, during the BresciaMusicArt Festival. I don’t think I’m wrong if I say that that event has been, for Andy and for me, the first step towards a long list of experiences, sometimes together, many times not. So a decade passed between big successes, many satisfactions and many moments of reflection, necessary to come this far. And now we meet again, we never lost touch actually, but we now artistically meet again. Many things have been said and written about Andy: I read some texts written by some colleagues of mine rightly speaking about a typically Pop analytical attitude. They obviously refer to the typical visual voracity of the Movement of the Sixties that used and revitalized every step of our common imagination. Pop Art, without speaking about historical-artistic obviousness, comes from the birth of a huge universe of popular consumes: a grande bouffe towards an industrial-productive attitude that fixed an immanent critical conscience in the attempt of an aesthetic revenge and saving the value of everything it was not considered art before that time. Starting from the Pop Art is correct but Andy’s artistic/aesthetic process has gone much further. Rightly, I would say, because Andy doesn’t belong to that generation, to that group of cultural operators born around the Thirties or into the Forties. Andy, just like the woman who’s writing this text, deeply belongs to the generation of people born around the Seventies. We are the real “parasitics” of an imaginary universe full of a single big referent: the television image. That same television that, in black and white first and then colour, used to decorate every little corner in our visual memory feeding fantasies, narrative condensations and considerable upsets between what really happened and what was built by our minds. I refer to a kind of parallel history of the image made of cartoons, commercials, movies, video clips, tv serials which in time have turned into perfect icons of a precise period: the Eighties and first Nineties. We are all those stories, all those drawings, all those songs, all those colours that are now carefully sifted through in order to find a new cultural stimulus. As in the Sixties Pop artists freely mixed mediatic opposite elements, creating an unexpected union between material and cultural contexts, we are those who, differently repeating and normalizing that practice of quantification, have regurgitated the history of image, saturating reality and fiction in a single big short-circuit. You only have to look at the visual referents  of Andy’s paintings, of his pieces of furniture, of his clothes and everything that can be literally invaded by this kind of imaginary catapult: it could be Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Matisse, Boccion, just like Actarus, The Rose of Versailles (Lady Oscar), Candy Candy, Cat’s Eye, The Aristocats  or also a chair, a bedside table, a frame, a pair of shoes, a jacket. The short-circuit begins in the instant in which two material or cultural elements stand together; it goes further the simple combination, strongly transfiguring it into an “electric” suspension. In simpler words the short-circuit, as written on the dictionary, is “a low-resistance connection, usually unintentional, between two nodes of an electrical circuit that generally results in an excessive electric current.” If we look at Andy’s artistic production we’re in front of something similar, right in the moment in which that suspension happens to generate new visual power. And as when we switch out the old tv cathode ray tube and the last image remains for a few seconds impressed on the screen, the same happens with Andy’s hungry and analytic glance which restrains every short-term memory and recontextualize them, saturating them with hazardous but extremely powerful combinations. Andy’s painting moments are the recognizable transposition of a whole generation that recognizes and recognizes itself in such formal and chromatic hazards. His use of subjects belonging to opposite contexts, and their transposition on different materials with fluorescent and openly artificial colours, are nothing but a typical pouring from an area of the visible into another, given by the revitalization of a precise reclaim. We could add that those “sparati e tamarri” (shocking and hick) colours, as Andy himself says, are the electric discharge that hits everything the private memory of the artist turns into collective memory. They are true cacophonic spots of colour, applied with the à plàt technique, that certainly reminds us of the Symbolist style of the end of the Nineteenth century but which is openly equal to the visual structure of comics, television, computer. It’s a sort of conceptual plung into the world of secondarity, made tangible by the primary intervention of the painting gesture and literally fused through synthesis and condensation of opposite elements. We do agree then, in repeating ourselves talking about Pop Art but it’s equally correct to recall another great moment of the Twentieth century, Italian this time, that invaded the environment with a lifestyle that was never betrayed. I refer to Futurism and, in specific, to the Second Futurism that stated from the publication of the manifesto La ricostruzione futurista dell’universo (The futuristic reconstruction of the universe) in 1915 by Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero. Balla himself, during the first two decades of the century in Rome, opened his Case d’Arte (Art Houses) demonstrating that the futuristic intention was not limited to classical art expressions but was related to every aspect of daily life. And so it was: fashion, interior design, paintings, life had to be futurist in each setting and manifestation. Giacomo Balla represented for the following generations of artists much more than other colleagues of him right for this cultural environment that did not leave anything out. Andy has in himself also a little futurballa gene, obviously contextualized in his historical period.}