I learnt of Albino Lucatello’s death from the newspapers and was reminded of those verses of Shelley in which the poet says “the shadow of a dear lost friend is like time out of the past”, and something remained in suspense, like a note, for the long talk that has to be carried out.
I was surprised that the fact of reading the news in a newspaper gave me such a strange feeling; yet it was normal. He lived in another town and we had seen each other off and on for years. Our old friendship was a dear, happy remembrance. I found myself thinking that a newspaper is also called a daily, but dayliness (Altällckeit) was for Heidegger a basic way of living, and Albino had been a man whose greatest extravagance consisted in naturally dissimulating all those strongly innovating elements, always going against fashion and conventions, that he had within and expressed in his painting, yet with an exterior behaviour that was daily and bourgeois. His way of dressing for instance, his manner of talking, even his physical aspect at a first glance made you think you were dealing with a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer; to see him in years when, at an age when the fact of being an artist found its confirmation in a non conventional manner of dressing, you would never have thought you were dealing with a painter. In point of fact this everydayliness which he followed so naturally, this common sense, that was up against fashions in painting, was his way of getting to the bottom of things, in an effort of auto-conviction which was all in one with his research for truth. He had to be convinced, he had to understand, he had to reason with his own mind. Thus for me to learn of his death in a daily paper appeared as something normal; actually there is nothing strange in the fact his friends should learn of his death from the dailies, there was no other way.
The fact is that in him this dailyness was a paradox, a way of pointing out the non-authentical (zumächst und zumeist). The gossip, the prattle, for instance, that Heidegger underlines, which has no significance: “gossip is the possibility of learning everything without any preliminary intention of approaching the things one wants to understand… gossip, which belongs to everybody, not only exempts one from an authentic understanding but gives an unconcerned understanding through which nothing remains uncertain”. His controversy against a certain kind of painting is a controversy against gossip and the false uncertainties it shows.
Even Shelley’s verses which emerged in this confused sense of things in evident obviousness, were above all true and therefore “zunachst und zumeist”, the two adverbs that Heidegger applies to this “everydayliness”.
Then one day Giselda, Albino’s wife, asked me to write these things that I am now writing, and she told me things that gave me pleasure: I felt I was receiving a posthumous investiture from Albino, and I felt this was a way of giving life to those verses of Shelley, but also that I should be careful not to slip into the pathetic whilst carrying out this research.
I decided to remain objective, to carry out a strictly philological work; Albino in Venice, his studies, his shows, his friendships, his talks: from a chronicle to a criticism, or rather no criticism, only a chronicle. We want the facts. And this is what Albino was always looking for and no “prattle”.
Albino Lucatello was born in Venice the 2lst of March 1927. Who were his parents? What was his father’s job? It might be interesting to know. I shall ask. And then, how was the vocation towards painting born in him? And at the “Carmini” who were his teachers? Who were the teachers in those years at the Academy? And at the free school of the nude? These personal remembrances do not come to my aid. The difference in age, which is felt when one is young; a certain precociousness… when he was taking his first steps and was presenting his work to the judgement of the public and was getting his first awards, I was still a school boy. Our meeting came later and it was a useful one. From the end of the war to the first sixtees the Zattere, this quiet quay on the Giudecca canal, open to the sun in all seasons, with its cafes, its noisy groups of students, the wonderful suggestions of its landscape closing to the east with the island of San Giorgio and to the west with the Mulino Stucky, were with an easy analogy called the “rive gauche” with a larvate and moderate allusion to the political leanings of many of its habitués, but above all for its gatherings of intellectuals, real or self nominated.
However even when culture becomes a pretext for frivolous affectation or exhibitionism, even in these cases or maybe because of this, it is lived and felt as a certain value. The fact of posing as an intellectual is, even so a manner, paradoxically genuine because ingenous, to underline this value, even if Albino would not accept the idea. On the Zattere there was a climate. The presence of well known personalities was a fact. Poet Cardarelli passed his last hours sitting in the sun. Ezra Pound’s white beard attracted dubious looks, there weighed on the poet the accusation of collaborationism. Virgilio Guidi, who often, perhaps always, accompanied Cardarelli, was surrounded by youthful groups of painters whose talent was promising, and among these Lucatello, who kept to himself, though enjoying great esteem on the part of the maestro.
Academy of Fine Arts, Architecture, Artistic Lyceum, Art Institute, Marco Polo Lyceum, constitued at that time, as today, with the exception of the University of Architecture, now transferred to the Tolentini, a kind of background of the Zattere, all these schools being at not more than a few yards from the quay. Not far away was the Ca’ Foscari University. One may say that there was no theme of cultural topicality that did not circulate among the tables of the Zattere cafes, giving life to conversations (prattles) often quite frivolous or conventional and boring. The sun, the socialite element by surrounding everybody, also placed everybody in a joyous frame of mind. But even when the sun was not there, and fog surrounded everything, you would find the eager enthusiasts, collars turned up, who could not leave those tables and those chairs. The meekness of the surroundings in all seasons attracted the groups, with the fervour of their ideas and the joy on meeting friends and acquaintances.
Albino was not cultured in the scholastic or academic sense of the word. A man of well calculated reading, he knew how to boast of his ignorance with candid malice. When he began “I don't know…” you could well despair. His statement of ignorance was a declaration of war, it was his way of getting rid of prejudice or obviousness that could have been used by the interlocutor. The daily, that is the non–authentic, disappeared; there was no more place for the “prattle”. He put himself alone in front of things and took his distance, obliging you to do the same. He never feared being ingenous, on the contrary he brought you to a tabula rasa. Of only one thing I believe he never doubted: the existence of matter. He was irritated when you put in a doubt, considering this kind of doubt an unbelievable extravagance that made one doubt of the honesty of the doubter, or a philosophical habit of bourgeois intellectuals. He refused with all his forces any variation on the theme – esse est percipi. There is outside me a thing that exists since before I was born and which will continue to exist even after I am dead: and it is not only outside me, it is also inside. lt. is me. And all is matter, without which there is nothing else. But there is nothing outside it. Of this he was absolutely sure as he beat the palm of his hand, open, on the table, and that gesture meant to assert, and also to demonstrate, as if that open hand and the plane of the table were sufficient evidence to confute every idealism.
Our meeting goes back to those years, to those discussions. It is the second half of the fifties. The problem is Realism. Albino was a communist. He wanted to be. As in all his things he wanted to be a good communist. But he still wanted to be convinced. In years in which “zdanovism” was leaving heavy traces in the cultural debate, he opposed to the authoritative indications on how to make art, his free examination. The objectiveness of his thought was for him all in one with the objectiveness of reality, of matter.
On the professional plane owing to the undisputed quality of his talent he had never had a bad time: he made his debut in 1944 when he was only seventeen, and was admitted to the collective show at the Bevilacqua La Masa; in 1947 he obtained a first prize at the free school of nude, in 1948 he won another award at the Exhibition of young artists, in 1949 he got a first prize in the drawing section of the Bevilacqua La Masa, in 1950 he won the first prize at the City of Oderzo show, and that same year he had his first one man show at the Bevilacqua La Masa. His activity gains in certain moments a frenetic rythm. In 1958 he has had many one man shows, has participated in 63 collective exhibitions winning twelve awards and among these he gets an award at the Biennale. The same year he obtains the Burano award. In 1960 he has fourteen one man shows and takes part in 86 collective shows and obtains 16 awards. His work is now in the most important museums and picture galleries in the world. These figures give an idea of the personal success and consent Albino Lucatello has so far obtained. But all this seemed to have little significance for him. It belonged to the sphere of the ordinary, of the non–authentic, of the “prattle”. And often he seemed to be annoyed by a success that he feared might hide a misunderstanding and he got mad when his painting, which actually contained an excess of realism, only because it got away from the conventional scheme of iconographic realism, was called abstractism. He accepted that every form of abstract painting was the immediate manifestation of the interior requests of a colleague, who “felt” that way of painting. I think we can interpret pretty nearly his intentions, saying that for him the abstract, and in fact all forms of non–figurative painting was some form of idealism of the artist. He respected this form of painting, but it was not his.
He lived in their problems, because there was no dialogue between his realism and the abstract, but with the so called socialist realism.
Since his first one man show, the sharp intelligence of Virgilio Guidi in writing the introduction, placed the problem of his painting in Goethe terms: “I am convinced – wrote Guidi – that naturalists, be they scientists or artists do not know nature… the young painter Lucatello (he was then 23 years old)… has a naturalistic appearance, a youthful indetermination in the face of the problem of nature, but actually the structure of his painting is not naturalistic…”
His point was to gather the material essence of nature, running the much greater risk of subjectivism, the contrary of subjectivism, and behind all appearances, metaphysical, eternal, still and unchanging, therefore unreal. There were many dangers and Lucatello had only one thing of which he was sure, matter.
The first series of paintings by Lucatello of which only a few examples are conserved, and other of which unfortunately only black and white reproductions are in existence, have nearly all of them the Zattere as their subject. They were painted in 1947. At the age of twenty. He had the world in his pocket and the Giudecca Canal before him. His problem still appears confused but already one sees those features that Virgilio Guidi will point out three years later with a clearness that probably went beyond the consciousness of the young painter; the sagacity of Guidi could see far away. Good. In these paintings of 1947 no line of the landscape is similar to reality. Through those mysterious canals that guide the execution of the works, almost unknown even to him, Lucatello opposed the authentic to the exornative, to the superfluous, to the “daily”. And at once the eternal risk, the accusation of subjectivism, of the transfiguration of reality, according to a terminology that was used in the thirties.
All through his life Albino has felt he was not understood, and with reason. He moved in the direction of the concrete, of objectivity, but that world faced with complete ingenuousness, with complete absence of idola, that real world, which he intended to reveal to the eyes of all in its true and objective data, could have been confused with has own personal and private way of seeing things. Those Zattere, that Giudecca could appear just as they appeared to him and only to him: if only he had accepted it; but it would have been a lie, it would have been a denial of his work, of his research. And yet that was the objective reality, a reality not only for him, but as it showed be revealed to everybody. A fact that should appear as a reality to all.
Therefore, in order not to be misunderstood, with a good dose of humility and perhaps that secret fear of making a mistake, he now reproduces things as they are, or rather as they appear to the eyes of all, in the first place and above all, the “daily”. But this should have been in colour and Albino works in black and white, this is the great season of Lucatello’s drawing. His theme is man, a man who works and suffers; the coalmen, the rice reapers, old men, old women. Material reality is for a moment abandoned. There is a great effort to understand man until he gets immersed totally. Only the most scholastic conventionalism or a superficiality of classification would make us say that these works are realistic. If there is any sense in giving a definition one might talk of psychology or humanitarianism.
Lucatello will go back again to his drawing and this will remain a constant and recurring element of his work. After the Friuli earthquake, for instance, that destroys his studio, of which he was so proud, together with many of his paintings, he will be induced once again to identify himself in others, because the sufferings of others coincide with his own suffering, the grief of others coincides with his grief, the damage he has suffered coincides with that of others. He goes back to his drawing as we shall see further on, and it will have the same formal touches, the same signes, the same technique and almost the same subjects, the same traits, the same faces.
During his life, his painting will have notable evolution; but the manner of his drawing instead, of his black and white, will remain the same in the substance, strong, thick signs, wide outlines melting into short shadows, delicate networks of delicate traces, apparently constructive, in point of fact allusive: relationships in the traits of the faces are emblematically represented, the thoughts that are passing, the attitudes, the expressions, the superimposed psychological dimension, is identified in the wide conceptual consciousness and the instinctive pictorial exigencies.
Drawing is at the same time painting. Therefore it is correct to talk of black and white rather than of drawing. In Lucatello it is the underlying ideology of his drawing that is different from that of his painting, with which he is dialectical. The two moments of this diversification explain each other because one serves the other, just as from the unity a multiplicity is obtained, from the eternal to the transitory, from the identical to the different. And this explains how Lucatello has recourse to this unity, this perpetual identity. There is almost a metaphysical exigency, or may be a religious one, it is the religion of man who creates a god in his own image and likeness, and that finds his citizenship in the fact of existing, because he too is fashioned in clay. But when this clay intervenes to take possession and adapt itself to his own needs, there is born a hope and an illusion and a delusion.
This has a great meaning for Albino. It constitues an exploration on this side of the wall, that gives greater resilience to the problem of exterior reality, to that materiality in which three dimensions are given to his problematics: matter as reality, and this is common in current realism; the material data of painting, and this was at the base of the confusion of his critics, the historical ideological dimension of dialectic materialism in which is summed up the full consciousness of his first precedent two dimensions.
His “roofs” of Venice, which he took as models of human reality seen from his studio in Palazzo Carminati reveal a first confirmation of this new confidence and of his being sure that light, colour and matter can be one thing.
Goethe in opposition to Newton, dialectics in opposition to intellect: “I had understood – writes Goethe in his Materials for a history of the theory of colour – that one must approach colour as a physical phenomenon, in the first place as part of nature, if one wants to learn something about them in respect of art”. Nobody spoke of Goethe in those unending discussions, but in Albino’s quick mind was making its way an intuition, an idea: the error of socialist realism (an error with deep and tragic historic roots) was the loss of contact with matter and the acquisition of purely sociological interests, that put before the making of art, politics, pedagogy, propaganda. In going over an old essay of Armanda and Roberto Guiducci on Plechanov, one realizes how Albino Lucatello by instinct was opposing in the actual making of his painting, the insistence of Zdanovism still not overcome in a materialistic–dialectic conception that allowed vast spaces to his liberty.
At this distance of time it is difficult for me to determine to what depth Albino Lucatello brought his problems, but certainly he was satisfied and convinced it was possible to remain within a milieu of a correct marxist concept and yet refuse the practice of socialist realism of Zdanovism origin, developing a research of Engels ideas formulated in the Anti–During concept and above all in the Dialectic of nature, ideas that were widely accepted by Stalin not in the field of aesthetics, but in that of knowing, and more generally in what we may call marxist ontology. In the field of aesthetics reasons of state imposed the rough logics of pedagogy and propaganda.
There was in Lucatello a knowing, a sort of “Kunstwollen” that presided over his choices, legitimate, in as much as his solution included original choices at the level of motives and execution, the general problem was the problem that in those years was becoming mature. On the 5th and 6th of July 1959 in Rome at the Gramsci Institute there had been an important debate on the theme Avangarde and Decadence, and the paper “Il Contemporaneo” of October related the minutes of the meetings. I believe the historical importance of that meeting has never been sufficiently underlined, and in particular the introductory report of Mario De Micheli. It should be pointed out that among others participated Galvano della Volpe and Carlo Salinari, the former had already written Critica del gusto and the second Miti e coscienza del decadentismo italiano, works both published in 1960 and which marked a fundamental moment in the history of marxist aesthetics and criticism in Italy. On examining the various interventions, one notes instances on the part of intellectuals of coming to a contrast with the indefensible separation among old models of realism and the historical trend art had taken in Italy and in other western countries. The general picture remains however of a political and social nature. The reabilitation even if only cautious and partial of avangarde takes place more in terms of concession and recognition of the positivism of certain works and certain authors. Let me say that the progress, should we call it so, is at a critical level (historical and sometimes at evaluation critic) not a level of getting at any depth in the aesthetical problem. This undoubtedly favored the backward manoeuvres of the conservative authors still tied to the models of realism.
Lucatello follows his own way, that we might in a word call dialectic materialism. He now lives his great season of the Delta landscapes, preceded and prepared by those orti (kitchen gardens) of Portosecco and San Pietro in Volta. Here we truly find the cosmic sense that animates the words of Engels in his Dialectic of nature when he writes “all nature, from the smallest molecule to the largest bodies, from the sand grains to the sun, from the primitive living cell to man who is in an eternal process of birth and destruction”.
His colour redundantly thicken, the landscapes become a curve, the grain of the painting becomes porous in order to declare its materiality.
The compass of the landscape becomes wide in order to underline cosmic suggestions. “The convex smouldering Earth – I wrote at that time – appears as seen from a triumphant sputnik”. But at the same time the extension of this dimensions proposes a condition of details within an even greater reality. The lines of the composition structure assume almost all the time a centrifugal proceeding, and the painting has a centre, almost always. Mostly in Lucatello the painting is a point of beginning; there are very few paintings without a centre. What escapes completely is the order, the enclosure, the periphery. The painting sometimes appears all centre, a dilated point and examined analytically to show its own simmetry.
Later Lucatello with almost polemic obstentation will sometimes enclose the painting in order to contain it and give it an order not allowing it to overflow. But in those impetuous years the sense of explosive expansion prevails, matter is sensed from inside, and is allowed to escape in all directions, but it is always known as matter. Earth is the concrete sign and the intuitive immediacy of materiality. An earth that in order to be deliberately indicated as Delta earth, therefore earth soggy with water, acquires primordial beginnings and is known as a place of grief and human suffering, at the same time a place of suffering work, showing the dialectic relation man–nature not only in simple terms of reflection, but in terms of direct intervention. On the other hand the materiality of his forms and of his colours clearly points out the relationship: the artist works on the matter of the painting, subjugates it and is at times beaten and there is a contrasting relationship, a battle, because matter is deaf to the penetration of art, as the peasant fights with his matter and the miner with his.
Then suddenly in this context of suffered reality, suffered in itself, like an object to be reproduced, and suffered in the relationship to man, but even more in the soul of the artist, suddenly in this contest comes to life a “teapot”. The series of the “teapots”. For years I have considered this theme as a moment of irony, almost “dada”, a sort of clashing image in contrast with the suffering of matter to underline the extreme disengagement of the artist and the visuality of things. But this explanation did not satisfy me. It might have been a bent in Albino’s character, but a slight bent. Now in systematically re-examining his painting and having a sequence of his work before me, for a further meditation of his thoughts and intentions, I am induced to an interpretation that, though not entirely going against my first idea yet placed it in better harmony with the context. The “teapots” are inserted in the series of his works with a precious function: that is the representation of the human act not at the very limits a representation of technique, even, we might say, of industry. And here we now find derision, placid, blended, and meditated, but it is there. The world of men is disturbing in respect of the materiality of nature, disturbing because superimposed, and finally extraneous, even if imposing and gigantic, nearly always in the foreground to carver the look and to hide the landscape and its possibilities. It is the heavy linearity of the contours that in some way takes us back to the drawing (in the drawings we have seen Lucatello studied the world of man), that could confirm this interpretation.
An interpretation, if it is right, that confirms also something else: that Albino having reached a culminating point of his career feels the exigency of going direct to the heart of things. That same dialectic materialism, animated up to then by the sense of materiality and the acute knowledge of dialectics, appear not to satisfy him anymore. If dialectics means meditation, from now onward we find even more present and necessary the exigency of immediacy. The seriousness of his intellectual elaboration has brought him to this, and it now appears logical and coherent that this Venice all built by men, protected and defended through the centuries by the magistrates of the waters against the ambushes of nature, a typical example of the dialectic man-nature, this gigantic “teapot” that derides even itself in its deceptive wisdom, becomes irritating. And yet he had been prodigal in his recognition that had brought him the greatest satisfactions that an artist can ask for in the capital of art, but all this was of no use to him. The Friuli will never represent an exile for him, it will become his reality, his nature, almost a kind of amniotic liquid.
And he cares no more for his career. He will be everything and only himself. If before he was himself and reality, himself and his painting, himself and his ideas, himself and… culture.
Naturally he will not always be only himself, because he will still have to keep before him reality, culture, his thoughts are still with him, but he will impose the rules of the game to these ideas, to culture and above all to nature, within which he will be panicle immersed.
And then again, I do not believe it is a case of individual crisis, a kind of satiety of one who after having enjoyed success now feels its inconsistency and retires to suburban kitchen gardens. There would be no reason to continue to talk of Albino Lucatello. There would not be a period of Friuli. What is surprising, and yet not really so, is the coincidence of this personal evolution of Lucatello with the afflictions of Italian painting, but in a sense not only Italian.
In the first years of the sixties the painful contrast between the figurative and non-figurative art has been concluded. Artists only a few years younger than Lucatello do not even feel it as a contrast, and do not give a polemic significance to their choices. People like Lucatello had faced it with annoyance and insufference, as a disturbing element that they had to face because it was imposed upon them by the press, the critics, colleagues and comrades. But now the party was sending everybody home: a sort of 8th of September. He who no more paints workmen in blue slacks, under the sun, is no more a traitor. Freedom, freedom. But this is not what Albino lacked, he has always considered his freedom a moral duty, almost Kantian. The problem remained always one of the legitimacy of choices; because even if I don’t draw a coalman (figures however that Albino Lucatello continued to paint to the end, even if these were not coalmen, but old women, victims of the earthquake etc.) – “I must know why I am doing something else”. And that other thing Albino had found with growing conviction ever since he had been painting the roofs from his studio in Palazzo Carminati, since he painted the vegetable gardens at Portosecco and the splendid landscapes of the Delta. With one or two “teapots”, like a shadow or a nightmare, or a joke.
Friuli on one hand is the logical prosecution of this main road of his painting. No sudden turn, no contradiction is evident. But would be a mistake to get the idea from these words of mine that by 1960 Albino Lucatello had already said everything and had marked his future, after which he only repeats himself. It is not so because even in continuing his evolution we find at the end works that are profoundly different from those of his last Venetian period and the first years in Friuli. And further one cannot say that his evolution, even if it is so revolutionary, remained at the same time slow and gradual. Even this is not correct, there were rushing forward and returns, second thoughts and repentance. Note the typologies, the motivations of his paintings, which at times disappeared for ever and then came back and gave life to a long season and at times end up by having completely different meanings from those of years before. Over twenty years in Friuli are long; another lifetime.
But let us put some order in these happenings. The experience of the series of the Delta is immediately placed in discussion in the impact with the surroundings of the Friuli (by surroundings we really mean the physical ambient). Because here we have landscapes that are similar and different, that oblige us to reconsider and repropose. Certainly this would not have happened had his painting been coarser, content with reproducing exterior aspects of reality. In Lucatello instead the decomposition of his relation with nature in its articulations and the emergence of a necessity that will become more than a necessity to become immersed, rather than to possess nature, but it is born and brings forth genetic mutations of a certain kind. There are changes that may appear casual, but are very significant. There are changes in the tones of green, his reds become like lighting, at times a promise, at times admonishment, his thick coats of black are a function rather than an object. This as far as concerns the evolution of typology, which in some way follows the line of the Delta landscapes.
Side by side with this begins another line of painting, which though presenting analogies with those landscapes, does not, in my view, have much to do with the former. It is the line of the “Tagliamenti” (the Tagliamento is one of the great rivers of the Friuli). In an intense and daily contact with this river, on the shores of the river, Lucatello discovers a dimension of reality especially suggestive, consisting in an investigation at a much nearer distance; with the curiosity of a geologist and a formal research for a suggestive composition Lucatello now puts together visions in which nature expresses a matter that is no more cosmic as in the Delta's phase, but very special, almost microcosmic. The stone, the earth, the grass, the posts are seen without context, they are called upon as a context of themselves. The picture is open, without boundaries, it is sent back to something else, the composition is made of continued “so and so...”. Nature is seen as illimited in the moment in which the details become similar to what in poetry is called the “objective correlative” of Eliot. The allusion is serial, it sends us back to what is adiacent, not at what is behind the image. The attitude is absolutely phenomenological.
In these works however owing to these representations and allusive exigencies, he now has an exigency of composition. I have just mentioned the “framing”. This framing is a symbolic form. There are certain exigencies of a formal nature that begin to appear in Lucatello’s painting. The conviction that through the composition can pass a message, that the analysis of matter can become concrete even through the organization of form.
And at this point we find paintings with a centre and others with no centre, paintings surrounded by strong signs of colour, generally in a corner, usually in the right–hand upper corner, and paintings that are open to a centrifugal, explosive dimension. From this moment and to the end of the sixtiees, the formal research lived in an experimental dimension that will accompany to the end the work of Albino Lucatello alternating or side by side with moments of more definite themes. For instance the reappearance of human faces full of expressive contents will at times be placed at the service of this research, whilst at other times it will remain attached to the progressive definition of the data of material reality.
Every time these conditions are once more placed under discussion and every time they appear as definitely acquired: in this going and coming there is more enthusiasm than torment, more creative joy than anguish, but perhaps it is best to say that at an individual level there is the joy of doing and searching in the midst of a nature that he loves, an ambient, now also human, that gets hold of him. On a more general plane which involves the responsibility of the intellectual there is a sense of collective anguish and anxiety of unsatisfaction, of a necessity for a lost naturalness that is lost and his being immersed in nature now satisfies him only in part, because he recognizes himself in a special moment, happy of this particularity. For this reason I would not say there is a contradiction between the joy of creating a living, the joy of going through this exhalting, magic experience of the Friuli, and submit at the same time to the sufferings of Italian painting, and the contradictions of contemporary civilization.
Another series, the Ostacoli (the Obstacles): those, for instance, constitute the graphic representation of difficulties, those of the employed, the nuclear physicist, the difficulty of the people, of the housewife, of the artist, and why not, the painter. Even Albino Lucatello, who had to go to school and teach, had to buy the colours for his pictures, had to find a suitable studio, and finally had to make his paintings: that is, we reach an extreme limit where the facts that we call “obstacles”, in our language are obstacles that can be overcome, beyond the form which expressly indicates the barrage (though it is not radical, allowing all the time the possibility of circumvolution) there is nothing anguishing, no awareness of a nightmare, an unsuperable suffering. There is space for the joy or at least the normality of life. The anguish is hidden, it is existential, it is the original sin, the common condition of life at times exorcised, at times got ridden of, at times concealed.
The formal research, that at a certain moment from the vein we have called experimental flows to the central axis of the painting, giving life to an interesting monochrome, represents the most canonical way of dissimulating it. It is the perennial logic of classicism, but in other parts the anguish is driven out of its den; the series of the Musi, which take their name from the mountains that Albino considered as the unattainable yet within reach, gives a precise description of the fundamental characters of this uneasiness. But generally all the production is monochromatic (and this can be said also about certain landscapes of the Delta, and should not be referred to the measured and classic monochromes). These measured hints indicate the uneasiness more as a condition than an experience.
We have tried to describe these events with sufficient trueness but also with the knowledge that we are dealing with a key of reading rather than with an exhaustive image of such a complex reality as the whole work of a painter, in which specifically professional aspects are not missing, together with a consistent dialogue with European painting, admonishments and polemics wing to certain choices and ironic attacks at others. It is perhaps the most rigorous aspect of Lucatello’s work, who in his chosen and happy isolation in the Friuli continues to see the work of others, to judge and evaluate it. His polemics with fashions is consistent, but at the same time he is conscious of being faithful to his times, for him a moral reason in the life of an artist.
Famous and undebatable from a historical point of view, is the affirmation of Georges Mathieu that “actually Kandinski and Mondrian have done nothing but transfer into the non–figurative the aesthetics of the Rinascimento”, whilst after them was born the problem, as Gillo Dorfles says, of having a “significance that foreruns the settlement of the sign, a sign that foreruns the meaning”. The problem of Albino Lucatello’s spiting, after having overcome the false, but historical animony between the figurative and the non-figurative, was just this: on one side the determinating historical condition of a Renaissance tradition which, as we have said above, meant for him the composition, the setting, the “symbolic form” and on the other hand remained the exigency of going beyond this condition, reproducing the tipological charachters of informal art, at times even tachism. The dialogue between these tendencies from Wols to Mathieu, from Hartung to Fautrier, from Tapies to Rothko has been stringent above all in the Friuli period. I have no doubts about refusing any hypothesis of aggregation of Lucatello to these tendencies, beyond apparent likenesses at a purely exterior level. May be useful the comparison with some typologies: the Ostacoli for instance might recall some tendencies of Rothko, and yet they present an essential difference that brings back Lucatello to a condition of space that is undoubtedly of the Rinascimento. The painting has depth, one can easily distinguish a foreground and a background; if the Ostacoli were not placed in foreground and did not consent a diversion, already mentioned, they would not be “obstacles”. Look at the confrontation with Mathieu: in Mathieu generally the work has a centre, or at least a point of departure, generally situated at the centre of the canvas and from here the painting moves to the right and to the left, with echoes and reverberations above and underneath. In Lucatello’s paintings, that recall to your memory some movements of the painting of Mathieu, the placement is completely different; the centre appears mostly hollowed, almost like a cavern, reproducing the Rinascimento conception of perspective, often even getting beyond the painting, behind it, that is even another depth of matter. With these two painters, Rothko and Mathieu, I would say that the dialogue leads to negative issues, as almost total overthrowing of their aesthetic critical instances, a renewal of the copernican dimension that never forgets that light is brought into a tri–dimensional space and it is light which is finally the vehicle of colour. From this point of view the juvenile experience that we have defined as Goethe inspired, in connection with the relation matter-light–colour, remains one of the most stable elements in the complex and changing painting of Lucatello everything he practices experimentation, and this is the most significant aspect, an aspect difficult to explore, he throws himself beyond this materialistic, copernican, goethian reality, but then comes back reproducing, forcing the experiences of others within these boundaries, within that solid conceptual frame which has been and continues to remain his materialism: as if to ironically demonstrate that the fundamental problem of the informal is always the problem of form, because if the magical gnoseological priority of information belongs to anything, this is matter, hyle.
May be it is for this reason that I tend to discover a kind of devotion in comparing Lucatello to Wols, whose disharmony between the inside and the outside (and we here appeal to the synthetic indications of Argan) reproduces in some way the central condition of Lucatello’s Friuli experience, divided between the personal joy of creating and the consciousness of the existential anguish that is common to all men. When Lucatello meets Wols, though this rarely happens, almost for some kind of shyness, then his experimentalism is not so easily absorbed by the canons of Rinascimento aesthetics, the allurement of certain perspectives is lost, the painting bursts out in a torment of colour without light and without transparencies. The inertia of matter becomes total, as if separated from energy, only graphically represented by lines of force. And we shall never know if these moments constitute the failures or the triumphs of the art of Albino, because their radical consequence that constitues the defeat of poetics, that since Piero della Francesca and onward, still represent a place of this world, but at the same time the position of new poetics that Albino’s experimentalism was looking for, he tried to constitute and yet feared – I believe – very strongly the destruction of that world these new poetics had called for.
These are the fundamental terms, schematically presented, of the relationship that Lucatello has with painting, and which shows we are right, on the basis of certain precise convictions. He talked of “historical fraud”, with reference to the history of art which “has never been written, because it has been looked for where there are other things but art” (on the occasion of a one-man show held at the Falaschi Gallery at Passariano, Codroipo), in January 1979, and it is not accident that he used the word “fraud”, which is the same used by Montale when he defines “habitual fraud” the representation of material reality, “trees, houses, hills”. Not the material reality is a fraud, but the history: “storicism is a fable”, “the human mind is a space that has whithin it the past and the future”. These are not casual affirmations, they are precise relations to certain positions of present day culture. It is not important to ask how much Albino Lucatello knew at the level of historical intuition and how much through direct reading. I want to quote a passage by Hans Georg Gadamer, from Verità e Metodo (Truth and Method) that for sure Albino Lucatello could not have known in 1979, because the book was published in Italian for the first time in 1983. The passage reads: “Art authentically historic thought must be conscious also of its own historic basis. Only in this way it will not be running after the ghost of a historical object that would be the object of a research developing progressively like natural science – but it will be a way to recognize what is other than itself, thus recognizing the other himself (page 350)”. I would say that this coincides with the attitude of Lucatello in front of the problem of history and his words confirm it. Actually he is not a historian because he refuses history as a “fable” and Gadamer talks of a ghost and it is the same thing – that is not art, that is the object of history of art, yet he is conscious of his own historical placement, whilst the art historians are looking for “something that is other than art”. His relationship with tradition is different, it is living (and we have seen his relation with the Rinascimento conception of space). Lucatello writes in this unforgettable page “time without chronology and without chronicle is within things and within space. Thus, man is memory, new and old”.
This is a way, at the moment, in which he refuses or seems to refuse history, he becomes conscious of “his own historical essence”, a historical essence that he lives intensely and actively. The object of this sense of history, which becomes an exigency with which he must deal, and not only to know it objectively. This is precisely what Gadamer says. I remain in the field of this author because he appears to me in these problematics the nearest to the meaning of the work of Lucatello and is a guarantee of the adherence to the culture of these years that he calls Wirkungsgeschichte, history of the effects and determinations, and among these determinations there is that of recognizing “what is other than oneself, recognizing in this way the other oneself”, which is at the basis of the dialectic between drawing and painting, as seen above.
In this sense Lucatello in Friuli far from keeping away from the debate of European culture has weaved a deep web of discussion and evaluation, using his own work as a painter not only as an operating instrument (or creative if you prefer) but above all a critical instrument.
It is important to remove the suggestions that in the serene exile of Friuli Lucatello in his direct relationship with material reality has been thinking only of himself. It remains however a fact that, in the total independence he obtained from all conditions of official painting, he was able to organize an action according to his own rules, accepting or refusing the different suggestions according to logics of which he had built in the roaring Venetian years a kind of table of verification. Thus the effects and the determinations of the experiences of European painting are not distinguished from the effects and determinations of his personal experience. Each painting builds the premises of the following ones but connects and enters into a relationship with all his possible and not always apparent roamings. The variety of typologies, including those that represent the difficult aspects of his experimentation, are reduced to a unity, in this consideration of effect of each one of his works, that is in his recognizing his history. The different kinds become series, successions that cannot be considered according to analytic succession, because “history, thus understood – is a fable”, but according to a formal scanning, this explains the returns, the goings back to expressive and stylistic models at times abandoned or left aside for years. That Friuli was his second fatherland is not therefore just a loving manner of saying; with reference to the genetic meaning implied in the word fatherland, apart from any mechanical consideration, and positive in the relationship man–surrounding air, the Friuli represents not so much the place as the time in which Lucatello carried out to the end the concept that work is a situation in as much as the author is a situation, and that one cannot reduce the work to a simple effect of its author, because it should be seen as a reality that produces effects in the moment in which it acquires its determination.
This is I believe also the meaning of this exhibition. That should not be a homage to Albino Lucatello; as such he would have scorned it, but as an instrument of work, a verification of the effects of his work.

translated by Giselda Lucatello