Gianfranco Baruchello

Few artists have gone through the 20th century with enough energy to carry some into the 21st. For Gianfranco Baruchello, who once drove Marcel Duchamp to Rome in a Ferrari going full speed, energy is soft and lasting, it irrigates his paintings, sculptures, films and performances. It is not a “shy” energy like that of the inventor of the ready-made, but an energy focused on the tiny and on detail.

If Baruchello seems so important to me, and by contrast so underrated, it is first of all because his work offers an immensely original spatial regime. And because his way of fragmenting the world, of dilating it ad infinitum, resonates in a particular way in our time : Baruchello’s works represent islands of thoughts, circuits of forms, in short exactly what one can see in the “form-journeys” of the most interesting artists of our new generation.

If the Italian artist, after being so ahead of his time now finally seems to coincide with it, it is also because of the concrete and ecological utopia of Agricola Cornelia, the artistic project of a farm founded in 1973, which produced as many innovative forms as it did vegetables and milk.

Activist, poet, film director, painter, definitively unclassifiable, Baruchello (born in 1924) is of a generation of artists for whom art was first of all a way of life, and in his particular case an experimental meteor thrown onto the roads of existence. A huge fresco pulverized into micro details, his work is like an attack against everything massive, continental, authoritarian: his fragmented thinking process, composed of notes and comments to the book of modernity, offers a lasting transition between this modernity and the contemporary world.

Since our era finally seems ready for it, we can review the century with Gianfranco Baruchello.

Nicolas Bourriaud, curator

Exhibition organized with the cooperation of the Fondazione Baruchello

Thanks to Galleria Massimo de Carlo (Milano) and Collection Filippo and Veronica Rossi (Paris)