The most important theoretical innovation in the visual arts in recent years is undoubtedly the concept of viewing works of art in the broader context of social relationships. The idea of the work of art as an immutable being is contested, and is viewed, rather, in relation to all the existing forms that interact with the form of the work itself.

If we read Nicolas Bourriaud’s key essay Esthétique relationnelle, published in 2001 and still highly relevant today, the precise ancestry of the situations considered most up-to-date and advanced today emerges out of the historical and neo avant-garde movements (above all dada and the situationists). The French critic identifies a number of different types – ranging from the convivial happenings of Tiravanija to the parties organised by Parreno, from the forced, ironic involvement of the key players in the “art system” (Cattelan) to use of art itself as a tool for interpersonal relationships (Gonzalez-Foerster) and to construction of true systems and networks (such as Huyghe’s networks).

If we take it for granted that this is the aesthetic outpost of the crucial transition between the second and the third millennium, this reflection has perhaps too hurriedly excluded those idioms which are by definition more static. But while photography, for better or for worse, can still contain within it the so-called processual stage required for inclusion in a relational context, painting is still prejudicially interpreted as a means of expression which is inadequate for the dynamics of the present day, a tool that is no longer effective for the purpose of reading and interpreting today’s urgencies.

If we interpret Corrado Zeni’s work solely from the point of view of formal or iconographic criticism of painting, there can be no doubt that this line of reasoning stands. His works are attractive but synthetic, created with that contemporary taste that prefers the intellectual approach  to the classic painter’s virtuoso creativity, with that minimalist dryness that takes concrete form in chromatic reduction, materialised in the anti-descriptivism of the neutral white background. On the basis of this interpretative grid, Corrado Zeni would still be a perfectly contemporary painter in the European style, fitting into a current, active trend. And yet in my opinion, there are other reasons why his poetics are elevated to a discourse “beyond painting”, to the point that we can quite confidently describe him as an artist tout court, without having to limit ourselves to his specific medium.

For Zeni, painting is in fact another “form of relationship”, just as capable as any other contemporary idiom of establishing connections and systems, completing itself by means of “active” intervention on the part of both the spectator and the object portrayed.

In his earlier cycle, Six degrees of separation, Zeni was already reflecting on the dynamic potential of painting. On the basis of the well-known theory that any person may be linked with any other person through a chain of no more than five people who are acquainted with one another (so that any one of us might boast that he knows the pope, indirectly), the canvas once again becomes the site of potential recomposition, the theatre of an unexpected event: it is the magic of art that makes it happen.

Crossing, his new work, is in fact literally about crossings. People Corrado Zeni photographs almost distractedly on the street form a sort of archive in progress that will only in part be of use to him in his final work, in the act of doing everyday things that are anti-rhetorical and by no means noble, and find themselves “passing” over the surface of the work and therefore just as casually coexisting. Against the backdrop of city spaces, which are of no particular interest to Zeni as representatives of an architectural and urban aesthetic that, in the early ’90s, insisted on concepts such as “non-places”, a theory now considered very much obsolete. Zeni’s method is therefore that of study, and it is an interesting challenge to locate it in an idiom, painting, which many would find inadequate. His work must be viewed in the light of that stylistic type that has its roots not so much in the history of painting as in conceptual art and photography. His sphere of action is the city in which he moves about, using his camera as a sort of appendix of his arm or eye. The people who end up in his paintings are some of those people he has quite randomly chosen to photograph, following them in a path that might reveal something about their lives. His method is reminiscent of Vito Acconci’s shadowing, an aesthetic that various Italian and international authors have applied, including some in recent generations with an interest in reflecting on narration, in which the time of art and the time of life end up being the same (Sophie Calle, Betty Bee and Francesco Jodice are the first to come to mind). But Zeni uses photography not to determine the stylistic quality of his images, nor to underline once again the relationship of reciprocal dependency between painting and photography which appeared so evident in the ’90s. Corrado Zeni is interested in photography as a tool for observation, a procedural methodology which brings him closer to a champion of analytic photography such as Beat Streuli. “Streuli fits into a kind of photography that displays no idiom. Conceptually, the image reveals itself for exactly what it is: what the machine sees, purely revealing itself, with no concessions or embellishments. Out of all the various ways of being an icon, a symbol or an index, which photography has used over the years, becoming first one thing and then another, or all three at the same time to different degrees - Streuli chooses the indicator. His photographs do not represent reality by virtue of the power of similitude, they do not employ rhetorical methods alluding to other realities, but they simply show or reveal existing situations which the machine has rendered permanent”.

The presence of the architectural element which literally reveals crossings has neither a symbolic nor a representative value: rather, it is an algorithm, a geometric figure, which does not necessarily refer to any socio-anthropological conclusions.

In Zeni’s challenge of extracting the result of painting from its merely contemplative function in order to transform it into something active and relational, the entire Crossing project poses a problem which is normally new and regards all of painting, not only his work: being dynamic and active. In addition to his paintings on canvas, a watercolour installation introduces the possibility of recomposition, of annulling distances,  of manipulating given concepts such as time and space. What at first glance appear to be ordinary pairs of portraits are faces of people who really did meet and, in different ways, still share some part of their lives. Their meetings are therefore, here too, metaphors for crossings in space and time, redefinitions of other universes and, perhaps, suggestions of a different way of understanding the world.

 

 

Note: the citation is taken from Roberta Valtorta’s text, “La folla come corpo. La fotografia muta di Beat Streuli” (“The crowd as body: Beat Streuli’s mute photography”), in the Beat Streuli catalogue, GAM, Turin, 2000 (published by hopefulmonster)