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Enrico Baj
Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, 1974
Collage on board
146 x 114 cm
Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, 1974
Collage on board
146 x 114 cm
Press Release
Baj
Dame e Generali 1960-1975
Opening: Januray 31, 2008
February 2 – March 15, 2008
Dame e Generali 1960-1975
Opening: Januray 31, 2008
February 2 – March 15, 2008
The Marconi Foundation is delighted to present the exhibition Dame e Generali by Enrico Baj, organised in collaboration with the Enrico Baj Archive.
For the occasion a volume of about 200 pages will be pubished by Skira, including a large selection of illustrations and critical texts regarding the works on display from these series.
Certainly, the most famous by the artist, these works were mainly executed in the Sixties and, again in the mid-Seventies, particularly the Ladies.
The exhibition gathers works coming from important private and public collections, from Italy and abroad, among which the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Displayed on the three levels of the exhibition space at 15 via Tadino are a hundred works among which: canvases, papers, multiples and artist books.
From the collection of the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou in Paris, comes the General, 1969, a canvas of 150x114 cm, acrylic and collage with decorations, insignia, tassels and belt, whose "big face" Baj had chosen for the cover of his first Catalogo generale Bolaffi nel 1973.
The exhibition takes its cue from one of Baj's most significant “artist books”: Dames et Généraux, 1964 in which ten etchings by the artist were accompanied by as many poems by the French surrealist poet Benjamin Péret.
The book also contained an introductory essay by André Breton and a page graphically conceived by Marcel Duchamp, as a sort of faux-titre or pre-title.
This is the first of several and fruitful sodalices with Italian and foreign poets and writers who have led Baj to conceive about fifty artist books, the last of which has been published in 2003 in collaboration with Giovanni Raboni.
The surrealist assumption of mutability is for Baj the possibility that anything can turn into something else through an ironic interpretation of reality. The General was generated in 1960 from a Mountain that took on a human appearance by means of a personification process: the shapeless silouhette therefore has the very precise connotations of the vulgarity and brutality of power.
For the occasion a volume of about 200 pages will be pubished by Skira, including a large selection of illustrations and critical texts regarding the works on display from these series.
Certainly, the most famous by the artist, these works were mainly executed in the Sixties and, again in the mid-Seventies, particularly the Ladies.
The exhibition gathers works coming from important private and public collections, from Italy and abroad, among which the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Displayed on the three levels of the exhibition space at 15 via Tadino are a hundred works among which: canvases, papers, multiples and artist books.
From the collection of the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou in Paris, comes the General, 1969, a canvas of 150x114 cm, acrylic and collage with decorations, insignia, tassels and belt, whose "big face" Baj had chosen for the cover of his first Catalogo generale Bolaffi nel 1973.
The exhibition takes its cue from one of Baj's most significant “artist books”: Dames et Généraux, 1964 in which ten etchings by the artist were accompanied by as many poems by the French surrealist poet Benjamin Péret.
The book also contained an introductory essay by André Breton and a page graphically conceived by Marcel Duchamp, as a sort of faux-titre or pre-title.
This is the first of several and fruitful sodalices with Italian and foreign poets and writers who have led Baj to conceive about fifty artist books, the last of which has been published in 2003 in collaboration with Giovanni Raboni.
The surrealist assumption of mutability is for Baj the possibility that anything can turn into something else through an ironic interpretation of reality. The General was generated in 1960 from a Mountain that took on a human appearance by means of a personification process: the shapeless silouhette therefore has the very precise connotations of the vulgarity and brutality of power.
The General becomes the metaphor of Baj's antimilitarist and anti-war position, even though as André Pieyre de Mandiargues underlined, Baj fights his battle “against idiots and this is not only antimilitarism”.
The General in full uniform is “a golden big shot in great poverty", according to Benjamin Péret's definition, while for André Breton the General is a "mountain of importance... a threatening carnival barker".
The teaching of expressionism is evident in the Generals and it accompanies all Baj's works based on themes of civic engagement. The artist’s social denouncement is clear and strong but never rude: his irony in the choice of the collage materials makes his characters become ridiculous, as well as fearsome, clumsy, as well as threatening.
The Ladies, their natural companions, exhibit their frills with feminine graciousness, in the vain attempt of concealing the emptiness of appearance, as equally empty are their high-sounding titles and names.
About them Breton noted that they deserve a more subtle critique as they bear in themselves a quotient of seductive femininity. These very decorated and honourable females, born from passementerie assemblages, are the aristocratic portraits of ladies whose aulic names and patronymics are discovered by the artist in history, in his memories and in the Grand Larousse illustré or in other encyclopaedias.
As Roberto Sanesi observed these Ladies are not too charitable and do not have good intentions; their refinement, in perfect stylistic accord with their nature, a bit burdensome but not unbearably so, seems to grasp a funebre accent of consciousness and fatalism.
In such a theatrical context, full of nuances, the aristocratic elegance of Baj's female characters is tragic and ironic at the same time. In his own way the artist recomposes the binomial male-female: the Ladies flaunt their glamourous names, as the Generals do with their badges of honour. Their faces are the two sides of economic and military power, the hierarchies governing society.
The General in full uniform is “a golden big shot in great poverty", according to Benjamin Péret's definition, while for André Breton the General is a "mountain of importance... a threatening carnival barker".
The teaching of expressionism is evident in the Generals and it accompanies all Baj's works based on themes of civic engagement. The artist’s social denouncement is clear and strong but never rude: his irony in the choice of the collage materials makes his characters become ridiculous, as well as fearsome, clumsy, as well as threatening.
The Ladies, their natural companions, exhibit their frills with feminine graciousness, in the vain attempt of concealing the emptiness of appearance, as equally empty are their high-sounding titles and names.
About them Breton noted that they deserve a more subtle critique as they bear in themselves a quotient of seductive femininity. These very decorated and honourable females, born from passementerie assemblages, are the aristocratic portraits of ladies whose aulic names and patronymics are discovered by the artist in history, in his memories and in the Grand Larousse illustré or in other encyclopaedias.
As Roberto Sanesi observed these Ladies are not too charitable and do not have good intentions; their refinement, in perfect stylistic accord with their nature, a bit burdensome but not unbearably so, seems to grasp a funebre accent of consciousness and fatalism.
In such a theatrical context, full of nuances, the aristocratic elegance of Baj's female characters is tragic and ironic at the same time. In his own way the artist recomposes the binomial male-female: the Ladies flaunt their glamourous names, as the Generals do with their badges of honour. Their faces are the two sides of economic and military power, the hierarchies governing society.