Living one's own life

Alessandra Santin (2005)

Mario Alimede is an artist not only for what he does, for the works he creates by means of the truest poetic look, but mainly because he decided to be an artist sometime in his life. To him it has meant to live his own life. This is something really remarkable. Rilke recalls it with sublime words in The Notebooks of Malte: «…the rare desire to have a life of one's own. For Goodness' sake, that's all. You arrive, you find a ready-made life, you only have to put it on…».

Mario was offered this opportunity by his family. Being mindful of work requirements his parents directed him to his course of studies, to the rhythms of life, to life experiences... During his adolescence Mario Alimede followed his parents' directions complying with them only after a profound introspection. In the difficult pursuit of his own identity, typical of that age, the young man felt the urge to give a sense to his life through various communication modalities by experimenting techniques and languages. It did not matter whether Alimede was alone or in a group, with his friends or his brother, his actions were always joined to thinking, to punctual meditation which led him to express what he “was feeling”. Music, theatre, painting, drawing, sculpture respectively… gave him techniques and means of experimenting, of entering the labyrinth of communication. Quite soon he realized that he could read the reality of his times, the truth of his thoughts by means of creative intuition. Quite soon he realized that this privilege was turning into a duty, a task that was to follow him throughout his lifetime. From then onwards the artist's creative work would always be characterized by the search for technical and expressive perfection.

The consonance of instrument, technique, content and beauty is perceived before his recent works. Appropriate tempos, stress essentiality, emotional dryness, a sense of mystery rendered through allusions give these recent works the strength of a perfect narrative machine. Being the token of pursued artistic maturity, his paintings show what the artist holds inside himself and that he can express it completely, testing himself and at the same time involving us deeply. Interdisciplinary or transversal standpoints, contamination, the feeling of being lost, oscillations: whatever aesthetic position we arbitrarily take before Mario Alimede's recent works, it places us into total relativity. This is a concave and convex sensation, like being inside a space or looking at it from the outside… both routes of the ancient dual form of experience can be followed in order to seek the meaning, or to recognize and listen to History. The narrative dimension of Alimede's poetics is characterized by the expressive power of his continuously changing stroke which becomes colour and form, sometimes word. In the history of contemporary fine arts and in the present drift of values we are astonished by his pursuit of beauty and harmony at all costs, although his works show his consciousness of limit, his partaking of world grief, his certainty that time cannot take the rhythm of life. Yet in his pictures created with wise perception and use of space and detail, in the end there is always that light illuminating the instant, giving meaning to the whole span of life, voicing the pondering, pure and essential thought of tomorrow's mankind, even if with tight lips.

Foreword

To achieve the ability of representing the intricacy of things which happen is the point of arrival of a continuously evolving route which also in the past meandered in never straight paths. Chronology itself is often superfluous and quite inadequate to detect the searching modality in an aesthetic environment: all its variables are open to chance, to repetition, to the never reached certainty of intuition. It is, however, inevitable to detect some crucial events in Mario Alimede's life; some turning points characterizing his artistic route. I cannot think of any other ways of doing it. It is well known that written words are prone to linearity, to the one-way, one directional line western world writing has adopted. (Representation through conceptual maps would certainly be more congenial; the hypertext would offer profitable reading modalities...). In addition, a story develops on more intertwined levels in the course of time; they form a plot of at least two intercommunicating planes: on one hand there is the development of events, on the other the development of values related to these events. In my opinion, Mario Alimede's art at first aimed at representing events as they were, then the values related to them. Narrating how this happened means to bet on the power of seeing as interpretative capacity of reality. It leads to beauty which, in this field, is the expression of knowledge more than ever.

In 1968 Mario Alimede was nineteen years old. He was actively engaged in social life although he slowly and progressively experimented drawing techniques using colours for the first time. Dense oils were applied on paper surfaces with all the beginner's difficulties. He could buy only the indispensable with his poor means: basic paint-brushes and colours, soft pencils to create simple still lives and some hill landscape. He obtained his first canvases out of old sheets stretched on recycled boards from fruit packing cases. He experimented the technical stroke refining it quite quickly. Mario Alimede took part in some extempore shows, he experimented also the figurative by redoing the great artists' works. Since the beginning his figures have expressed keen interest for man. Shortly cut straight hair, elongation and deformation of some body parts, arms and chest, which will characterize one of the following periods indicate that the artist deemed important to show the things his own eyes caught in the world, far from mere imitation. There are very few works left of this period, though in his studio there is something stacked among his other works. Mario Alimede's careful hands know where to find these “tokens of the past”, so as to prove that the story of his life and its “documents” are not casually put aside, but carefully preserved and some time, even if rarely, looked at tenderly and with interrogative searching sense.

The decade from the Seventies to the Eighties was characterized by the experimentation of various techniques and the attendance at the courses of the International School of Graphics in Venice. In that period not only had he the possibility to attend specific courses, but also to come into contact with other artists, to watch different routes of search..

The works created at that time expressed a clear interest for composition preciseness, conscious use of space as a place capable of hosting the strength of event. Here the crowd moved compactly during square demonstrations. Flags waved at the uneven rhythm of people lifelike in their gestures, in their sounds and slogans thrown far away. His stroke was more daring, became more thick, turned expressionist in outlines and modes. His step was marked by the most various subjects represented with strong colours and by particular styles more and more characterized as poetic digits with the strength, the surprise, the emotional charge of human heart. The artist particularly aimed at expressing the sense of reality as lived in a group, at giving shape to revolt, to the engagement for a change. At times an arbitrary stroke, both unpredictable and ironic, can tell better than many details. Not a fragment of time, but the development of the event was analyzed. Time elapses within his works in the form of narration. The still realistic colour wavers in some particular environments he was able to render thanks to his pictorial stroke which was more sure in its dynamicity: the strand with people bathing and enjoying the slow rhythm of freedom from work; the places of everyday life where every one interacts with things. Art and artist support experience which is never free from causal connections and is closely related to the logical and historic plane. A thematic subject was taking shape more and more firmly: the structure of boats left on the deserted seashores or the structure of boats still in construction. The planking struck him as being similar to the skeleton of human chest. Naked, rooted ribs and breast bone express the symbolic existence of man experimenting his unstable fragility and at the same time the power of his structure. Immutably it resists every effort, every unexploded energy. Skeletonized elements acquire the power of lightness, they become more precious in the simple linearity of beauty. They set out to flying in the silence and in the space of void. During the last years of this century Alimede worked together with psychiatric patients. He experimented the sense of loss and the difficulties related to the world of insanity, of dependence, of fragility. He used terra cotta clay, which he modelled in masses and forms with concave, refined and essential lines. He painted on traditional surfaces and also on various materials, such as board and ceramic. His stroke became violent and broken, colour advanced permeating the field with no bonds. He rendered the state of the outcasts by means of figures whose position is all turned towards interiority and closure; the eyes explore the world deprived of relationship possibility. The theme of violence in the “normality” led him to use symbols. His mother's death and the experience of her funeral appear in introspective and autobiographic works which represent that period and are preserved by the artist as meaningful legacy of his art. The battles of medieval knights, who are hidden and reduced to coloured, living armours, belong to that period. This clash is solved through the aesthetic opposition of forms, it points out to the absurdity and at the same time the inevitability of aggression and violence. Pain, fear, life and death are similar in the stroke and in the power lines, in the density of colour which has the task of transferring the meaning, of being something different. Art becomes strength against dissolution.

From the second half of the Eighties the artist felt the urge to represent change and the infinite possibilities related to it. Things gradually lost their clear shape, even if, in some fragments, they still showed elements enabling us to match the representation to its meaning. The artist would adopt the Informal aiming at refined abstraction rendered by getting close to the portrayed subject. Some kind of vision very close to things, a way of putting emblematic events in the foreground.

Alimede seemed to wonder about the forming processes of abstractism, though he was never going to definitively follow it, he would rather try and follow other, more personal ways of communication. In that period he was interested in the repetition of the prime element, the point or the short line, which he stressed in an almost obsessive way so as to create patterns. They were set in sequences of regular forms. The white space of light became the a-temporal place where aesthetic categories gave up to every content forming the abstract idea of a refined, essential beauty which was rendered through a complex process of fantastic-interpretative osmosis. The action of reading denies tradition by releasing the eyes from the unique, predetermined (left-right, above to below) direction and suggests ever possible, personal routes. Thus perception almost wrenches. After the initial impact and recognition of regular rhythm, the possibility to discover is outlined. It reduces the tension given by rule leading to that form of pleasure dictated by fragmentation and recomposition. The final meaning is different and personal for every one, although every body recognizes the cause in the combination of simple lines. The poetics of composition, representing Alimede's strong urge to searching, is coagulated around them. In a parallel process the interest for the most different materials is refined. The collage technique solved the artist's expressive requirements more than once, he produced works and sculptures assembling abandoned, collected objects: pebbles, shells, bolts, words. Thus he expressed the fragment, the part of an ensemble changing its meaning and value whether it was placed in a group, or aligned and composed according to continuously new and always deeply meaningful criteria. That kind of play became a method which gave life to accomplished works, sculptures, background painting and worlds.

Right where the mood of narration becomes more quiet, the artist shows a clearer consciousness of search. We acknowledge his repossessing of planning techniques. Graphic composition claims its inevitable presence. Pure vision is mediated by the relationship line-colour-mass. Presence and absence, combination and relation almost entirely cease the narrating function and the requirement of satisfying an emotional need. The control of perception enables the expression of values in the content which is itself beauty and feeling, beauty and thought. Every thing can be submitted to analysis; the answer must be pursued any time, tracked down anywhere. The media of flight seem the most appropriate to this process. Wings and air lines, broken in air and on water show the consciousness that poetic dimension does not rest on granitic foundations, does not allow final steps. His works move towards synthesis which includes stroke relativity, which takes shape here and now, which is constantly aware that it will be denied tomorrow, and completely changed in the future. These pictures seem close to the abstract category, to the original modalities of conscience. Mario Alimede searches with no prejudices at all, he no longer feels the urge to demonstrate anything, in the end he reveals that the world is no sum of objects to describe, no chain of events to narrate. His relationship with the world is not the one between thinker and object, whatever thought and content may be. The unities of synthesis, as they are perceived and expressed, on which the artist's conscience agrees, are made of continuously new works; they bear the contradiction, which is solved in the aesthetic field with aesthetic modalities, between immanence and transcendence. The world as perceived containing the artist as well, represents the background, the starting point which makes valuable anyone's life. «Such a conception destroys neither rationality nor the absolute. It tries to make them descend on earth» – as Merleau-Ponty says. Alimede does not seem to be satisfied with that. Once they have landed, he questions them endlessly, making them rise again, producing movement and changes which cannot be stopped. Thus he outlines the horizon of a personal, meaningful search where aesthetic and vision intertwine producing value.

Work in progress

«Where he is, he is alone. An artist, a creative mind always has to deal with the problem of overcoming himself.»

Joan Ward

Mario and I are chatting on the phone. It is the early afternoon of a Sunday with no special light. We actually talk to one another and I am not surprised if Mario does not answer my questions, he is looking for evidence in finished works, in grounded certainty. Now it is his turn to put questions, I have to listen to plans, to imagine future works. He is talking about an absolute search, about the work which could at last be master-piece, the synthesis of a long route partly discovered partly still to discover. The artist has not in mind to create many things, but to project a lot and to perform what is indispensable. Linear, overlaying fluctuations might let transition float in its nobler and higher meaning: the awaited for vagueness. The only language enabling Alimede to make out the enigma, he has always been trying to understand, lies in his hands; it lies in the step to be taken considering those spontaneous pulsations of the man who is such because of his capacity to pre-view and to project.

– What interests me mostly at the moment is the route too – Alimede says – the way to take. Like some sort of art pilgrim, I am making a journey. –

I think of the innumerable paintings tidily arranged in his studio, each of them is completed and independent, in my opinion. Yet it is not so for the artist. His search is continuous as well as his wondering whether all that work makes sense, or whether he should be now engrossed in the perfect project of the unique picture deserving to be read. The moment would explode in it, like an absolute flash where truth appears and I – Mario Alimede goes on saying – leave behind it.

With Renè Char's words all this sounds more or less like this: «My desire is infinite. Nothing torments me as life does.»