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"The forms of style"
(and the culture at the time of technical progress and globalization)

Text by Valentina Incardona
vale.inca@yahoo.it

Buga - Border town
(oil on panel 100x70)

Gabriele Buratti, a.k.a Buga, uses classical forms and techniques to express current problems through an original artistic language, engaged and thick of contents, rooted in the historical context, social and economic of our time. His sensitivity as an architect-artist focuses in the analysis of historical data, structural and human of the territory. These translate into an artistic composite expression that sums up instances pop, symbolist, surrealist, but also minimalist and conceptual.
One of the themes dear to the artist is the architecture of cities, the development of which engages in the critical comparison between the contemporary urban environment and the sacredness of nature increasingly contaminated by economic policies devoid of ethical project. The incisive poetic of Buga shows the synthesis of an urban folklore typical of large American cities, also affected by the commercial mentality of the chief town of Lombardy.There is also a certain attention for Italian and European cities and for their architectural heritage that in his paintings emerges between the turns of slight color glazes, mists often artificial, in which for example the smokiness of London are recalls a wadded oblivion of human existence tied to the earth and to its symbols and original rituals, now evolved into new expressive solutions which provide detailed and troubled architectures. With an accurate feeling for the design, Gabriele Buratti plays evocative cityscapes capturing the values ​​and spatial models. From the stylistic point of view, the works present a special lyrical romanticism that attaches to the atmosphere of silent films or those of the U.S. cities of the first decades of the twentieth century seen through the mirror of Hollywood films. There are also references to comics and traditional advertising, it is no coincidence, in fact, that in some metropolitan images are recognizable traits of a Gotham City rather than the scenarios in vogue in the spot of chewing gums of " Brooklyn".

The enveloping and nebulous gray of urban jungle sometimes arouses the attention of an astute observer represented in the paintings, which addresses, looking at them,  to the figurative heights reached by impressive architectural complex: his eyes, which seems gradually inquiring and astonished, admiring but also dismayed and resigned, seems to be that of the artist himself, who is faced with the reality that dominates him. The disquiet that pervades the scene is given by a frustration of waiting in front of the invariability of a system based, without, at the present, glimpsing alternatives on an essentially capitalist development that does not take into account either the historical and environmental characteristics of each distinctive single territory now deputy to the rapid spread of housing complexes designed to sensational heights.

Buga -Necessary step (oil on panel 64x95)

 
Reductionism and cynicism are among the aspects of contemporary nihilism, which go hand in hand with materialism, the outcome of neoliberal capitalism and with these same myths of unbridled progress and illicit traffic of wide-ranging in  which humus had rooted a predominant and nullifying existential emptiness, originated also from the absence of the instinct and of the tradition, so often the individual does not know even what he wants and consequently tends to want what others do or to do what others want, with the the risk of falling victim of conformism  or to bow to totalitarianism. In a grey impersonal equality advocated by a faceless and formless mass, terrified by the idea of ​​responsibility, the man is often marked by the neurotic symptoms of contemporary humanity, obtusely unable to capitalize his freedom (including the freedom to also say no, even to himself); at first manipulated and at the end being he himself a manipulator of the masses disposed to be filled by fervour for one or another superficial slogan, violent, populist, demagogic.The technological and scientific progress is flanked by widespread recourse from the moral point of view that also affects personal freedom and independence of thought. The unforgiving blade of the contemporary crisis affecting the world economy, but even more the man and his core values. The approval of the masses and the ideas, as well as that of conscience, produces relativization of truth, denial of the transcendent. And the spasmodic elevation to conquer dizzying verticality materials, tacit exorcism of human finitude and death, is a linear upward climb, a climb that cannot escape the pernicious logic of consumption and cannot touch the depth that would allow to go " beyond "the man himself and his desire for control of space in search of a" vertical power ", in respect of nature, of the diversity of its ecosystems and living species.

Buga - Urban container-10 (oil on panel 65x85)

The artistic creation of Buga offers,  to our eyes, jerky, stabbing spaces that look out the view and immediately after lose in the lights and darks of tones browned, sometimes blackish. The user of images grasps territories distorted from the impending of evoking eco-monsters barracks, dormitories alienating, crystal giants such as symbols of power that lurks there. In paintings, the spatial depth is represented with extraordinary ability of control of the architectural elements, often reduced to geometric shapes. The skyline of the metropolis, reproduced in a harmonious and informal way, is charged with ancestral echoes. Factories, cranes, construction sites, profiles of skyscrapers surrounded by the smog in cities of asphalt convey a charm unexpected that at times confusing, as they are dropped in night environments, where a glimmer of forms are distinguished, between dream fades, into a greyness broken only by faint streaks of purple and blue.

A thick veil of clouds wrap up the prospective of wide canyons carved  between and impudent and anonymous skyscrapers. Traveled by a cold mist that go up the space, the art itself becomes a symbolization that takes on the character of prefiguration, anticipation of events.
In urban settings the human figure is mostly absent, but the results of his work are largely manifest in every single painting. Pollution evoked in paintings, which reflects a vision of a Milan today victim of smog, it is not only air pollution but also pollution  of conscience, the uniqueness of man, the spontaneity of nature and the sacred mystery contained in it are lost in the congestion of the city-container, landlady of loneliness.
The metropolitan environments, similar to reality as a whole and artistic production itself, are marked with codes that are configured as a aseptic sequence of figures imprinted on the skin of the paintings, as if the capitalist society was felt by the painter like a Lager in which are amplified  distress and destruction. An original artistic intuition of Buga is to give prominence to some semiotic aspects of the modern world, with the inclusion in his works of bar codes we found on products on the market. Hallmark of most mature painting by Gabriele Buratti, the bar code is the language cold and occult of a power that can only be recognized by machines, but also the symbol of consumerism and of the economy today that has degenerated into a global depreciation that involves also the human beings, ethical values ​​and many aesthetic aspects. Since everything aims at the sale and everything seems to be on sale, the categories of reality are "labeled containers" and cataloged with codes that legitimize, even visually, the presence in the market.
Among the thematic predilections of Buga, there is also the graphic of feminine imagery, in which states a specific reference to forms of Pop Art and it biting cynicism. This neopop framing the painting from the perspective of commercial mold products, under the influence of American models, provides images of soubrettes depicted in series with the technique of collage, on which converges the eye of the viewer that , already prey to a obsessive hammering advertising, also the result of a hedonistic culture for which everything is temporary and relative, perceives the female figure as a body on display like an object or a monument. The media power also seems to hold the record in the handling of common feeling, globally.

Banners of economic development, of acceleration of industrial processes, and the consequences of progress, whether positive or negative, means of transportation (as well as those of communication) that capture the interest of the artist are emblems of a world in which distances are shortened and the rhythms of life are becoming more insistent, demanding content, or perhaps rather of occasional fillers. The frantic dialectic between production and destruction that has developed in the consumer society is a matter not at all unknown to the capitalist system that Buga elects to model of artistic inspiration and subject of complaint, of  which gives a reproduction mediated by the lens of his own subjective observation.


Buga -The soul of the 900 (low)
(oil on panel 61x115)
Eloquent examples of aircraft silhouetted against gray skies, near to skyscrapers, produce images that recall the collapse of the Twin Towers and the wave of events that followed. And, for its part, the dark curtain of smoke that accompanies the slow pace of ships, their austere grandeur, is reminiscent of the early twentieth century moved farewells that were detached from the ports together  with the immigrants, eyes clouded by tears and agents pollutants; arms work crammed between cargo, baggage, cattle, coal: hopes and illusions unsuspecting of a tomorrow passing through Ellis Island, as well as from the tip of an iceberg. The detachment of ships from the dock weighs as much as a useless tacking, precursors of environmental disasters.

Buga - ShipBuga - Titanic 642
(oil on panel 100x140)

Through a peculiar simplicity, the technique used by Buga  transmit an effective immediacy. In his limited chromaticity, the pasty brush, at oil, is subject to scratches of paddle and sandpaper. Among the reference models, for Gabriele Buratti is prominent the painter Anton Zoran Mušič, from which is specially influenced in the use of colours. The artist from Gorizia had been able to observe in person, transferring it into his paintings, made secretly in the concentration camp at Dachau, the terrifying potential of technological progress, clearly placed within parameters industrial and applied even in the planning of mass destruction. In the works of Buga, where the emotional intensity is somewhat veiled and, before a spatial connotation, the outlook assumes a temporal and intimate value, the search of a suffused brightness becomes rarefaction of emotional content in the art and gloomy and dark colours unfold in pictorial expressions measured.

In reflecting on the dangers of progress detrimental of conservation of natural environments, it is remarkable the position taken by Gabriele Buratti that, with a provocative intent, faces an artistic conception of the building system today and its prospects for development which would need a rethinking of architecture in favour of a life in harmony with nature. In the midst of desolate and impressive architectural complex, the artist introduces powerful figures of animals, exotic or otherwise, which symbolize a genuine primitive in contrast to the present day landscapes that are hopelessly distorted. An exorbitant land consumption, which sometimes hides shadows gain unlawful and unauthorized building, forcing nature to miss to the mankind the basic reference codes. With an irreverent and  ironic way, Buga represents a wild paradigm in which the grass verges in the imperturbability of asphalt and animals fleeing, displaced and disoriented, helpless victims of arbitrary decisions of men, with its wars, its architectonic hybris that awakens then a merciless nemesis expressed perhaps by climate change.


Buga - Urban reconnaissance
(olio su tavola 117x117)

Static forms of concrete are closer to the pure physicality of animals on the run, creating a strong sense of alienation and it is so great is the cultural distance between the entities that find themselves sharing the same painting space not to make communication possible between them. Fascinating is the visual impression of the architectural volumes, even in a simple spatial composition of the scenes, while the colour, almost monochromatic in shades of gray, also gives the background a vague meaning without substance. This highlights the images of animals that seem to materialize in the foreground. The unique pictorial language of Buga, so illogical as symbolic and surreal, brings to light the links between the most disparate elements and art has the ability to communicate the many emotions he felt as simultaneous, highlighting the correspondence between the objective world and subjective feeling.

Buga -The return of the water (oil on panel 80x80)

NOSTALGIA OF PARADISE

Africa rains, when it is
Season, so colours by copper
The meandering paths,
The thatched and metal roofs
And spreads a layer of dry
Dust that thickens even
Over the absence of all that
Each of us shares as
The more democratic and bitter
Of fate. Heat wave on bumps
Paste the green to hills,
Converge on dug lives and
falls down over joyful children
Chasing the off-roads,
Bare grains gathered from
The south wind. Walk the wilderness
Corroding savannas, exhausted
Tracks covered by prayers.
Ceased the escape, also
The gazelle stalls in
Its sold-out exile, blinded
From cut spaces. Further on,
The rind of the air grabs it
Is scorching, where now glows
Cement from shore to shore:
Is measured in spans the distance
Among the skyscrapers, disheartened
Temples of long shadows.

- Valentina Incardona -
Personal website of Gabriele Buratti:
http://www.gabrieleburatti.com

Pier Luigi Coda and the critical observation of the real

It is spontaneous to do one of the possible comparisons outside the field of art and the thought goes, for example, to the characters sketched by Pier Luigi Coda, author of texts for children, in one of his story focused on events  of the little donkey Martina; a combination suggestive and not at all peregrine if, in the midst of globalization, it is  identified a reflection on contemporary society and its future, expressed through the various expressions of culture: from the picturesque language, to prose and  poetry ... There is no culture without critical awareness. The culture, which is engaged or not, in itself is a value, generated by personal detailed valuation. The personal critical sensitivity of Gabriele Buratti, applied to the observation of reality, as well as that of Pier Luigi Coda, together with a particular ironic taste, also results in placing donkeys reluctant and somewhat resigned amid a jungle of brazen skyscrapers.

Buga - Unemployed (oil on panel 70x93)

That of Pier Luigi Coda is a surreal story, stretched between humor and melancholy, in which current and sensitive  issues are discussed, as environmental protection, the risk of extinction for many species of animals, but also the contentious relationship that exists between ethics and profit especially in the controversial world of business. Among the development of improbable characters, it is then faced the problem of uncontrolled biogenetic research, where the potential beneficial science border on arrogance of a free experimentation that skims on lunacy. Opportunism, abuse, social hypocrisy are the scenery in which luminaries operate such wiseacres as incompetent, but also constitute the ground on which thrive "subterfuge, trickery, panders" and embezzlement in the workplace, which contrast strongly with the sweet wonder of a  little donkey sunk in the reflux of events of a night  that lead her to the eighteenth floor of a skyscraper, in the apartment, which engineer Bentivoglio shares with his wife and children, the adolescents Simona and Tobia. The protagonist, Martina,  is a heroine in mid, her characterization seems to fit the vague notes of the story; a generous character but sometimes impatient, gentle yet sometimes impulsive, so mild as to be genuinely naive, simple, asinine indeed, from time to time suspicious, grotesque, irreverent.

Martina, in spite of her will, is catapulted into a human and urban reality far from congenial, measured motion of his natural existence.

«Yeah, it's easy to say:" What do we do? ". Had it been a dog, a kitten ... but here we are faced with a great big animal that, among other things, it smelled. It smelled and trembling (…).

- And she ... - continued the driver, pointing to the donkey with a nod, -s he is always in the company?
- Sometimes ... it depends ... - Tobias muttered cold shoulder to let the subject drop.
- I understand! - concluded the driver that did not really understand anything. Then, with great professionalism, announced:
- Well, we arrived.
Simona looked at the skyscraper. In the darkness found it very high, even higher than the usual seemed, its dark figure climbed to a depth without end, driven by a checkerboard of lighted windows irregularly: one here ... two in there ... some higher still.
- And now? - asked - how do we bring up this beast on our floor?
- Put him in the elevator, right? - Tobia reassured.
Yeah, in the elevator ... If the donkey is in agreement, but if (pull to the ears, push for the seat) to enter in the elevator the donkey does not want to know, what can we do? Not with good manners, not with the bad, so what?
And then we just have to arm ourselves with courage and boot up the stairs.
A plan, two floors, three floors ... to the fifth the donkey began to ask questions and look quizzically at first Tobia and then Simona. ».

Buga - Honorary citizen (oil on panel 50x60)

And, in addition to the logistical mishaps, the unfortunate animal is not lacking in domestic misadventures of the adoptive family.

«- Do not talk nonsense, - interrupted Mrs. Elizabetta, - donkeys eat grass!
 - Grass? And where we find the grass?
In the fields is obvious, but in a city of skyscrapers with paved roads and squares?
- You might look on the Internet if the donkeys eat grass than anything else, - Simona proposed.».

In the story there will be frequent mention of the relationship with the city that features the daily lives of the protagonists, the urban environment, observed for the most part "in the dark of night," looks like a smoky mess, diverse (and often hopelessly unformed ) looming in the midst of hypnotic glow of flashing lights, architectural elements of enormous proportions, fast-moving bodies elusive, fleeting shapes that vanish at a subdued pace of chaos in the background, in complete indifference of the inhabitants, which coexists with their automatic movements, activities made mechanical by habit, the slumber of the soul.

«"Tobia and Simona flashed like lightning darting over the sidewalks and chasing the bright colours of the signs: green, yellow and blue. At times they were wrapped by a jet of light that enveloped them, and that soon receded into the darkness of the night from one skyscraper to another, from a traffic light to the other, side of the winding trails of car lights. Earlier, still faster, and so disappeared into the vortex of the city and its night sounds (...).
[The engineer Bentivoglio] was on the 18 th floor of a skyscraper and the city is up there in the dark of night with a confused jumble of flashing lights and colours paraded as far as eye can reach. He opened the window and was surprised by the great silence that surrounded him. No noise could reach that height (...). Then he peered through the streets that defiled around blocks as dark snakes, slippery, rendered slippery from the mist of the night. The city appeared more gray and smoky than usual, even without colour, neutral, indifferent, distant».

In a similar environment, frantic and impersonal, it's no wonder the pathetic customs, even a little perverse that jurists representing good neighborhoods boast, surrounded by the most comical snobbery, cloaked in the respectability of their selfish myopia opulent and of their conformist hypocrite appearance that is both routine and addiction: a mixture of traits that are dissolved in a climate of cynical bitterness, on the grimace of a bittersweet smile pending half-heartedly because, outside of metaphor and narrative, too often nature and animals are bent to the whim of man, now with the pretext of medical and scientific research, now with the desire of an exotic pastime or a transitional exhibitionism, perhaps to abandon the first pitch of highway ...

«In the evening, when the lights lit up the night, the Bentivoglio family, like all pet owners who live in the metropolis, accompanied the donkey for a walk through the gardens of the park.
Of course, moving Martina from 18 th floor of a skyscraper was not an easy task, but the engineer. Bentivoglio, having been an engineer, had examined the problem scientifically and designed an operating route to facilitate the movement (...). During the night the streets are populated by distinguished gentlemen who held the lead the most amazing zoological diversity: from sheep to hyenas, from ducks to silver foxes, the beavers, the Malaysian badgers (...). In the shelter of the bushes or behind the trunks of trees, met unexpected characters, excellent professionals, successful entrepreneurs and young ladies of the best urban bourgeoisie, as elegant as if they were dressed up for an evening gala. ».

Usual and privileged  destination of such an animated  plethora can only be a puzzling and disturbing "transgenic Park" that combines within itself the connotations and consequences of a reckless thirst for knowledge, the missteps of the science and of  its stubborn and frantic race with gear selected. Far from being a place of meditation and uncontaminated peace, the symbol par excellence of Nature and its free expression, the park is the curtain on which the experiments parade out of hand in an anxiety of ephemeral goals, full of pretensions far from ethics and practical utility of common life, exasperated and condescending yearning for success and self-assertion.

«I'm the GM Park
Shown light and dark
By progress biogeotecnic
To the world of the future.
I'm the cult of science,
A perfect combination
Reinvented with wisdom
From Genesis in the test-tube».

Alembic

Clony
Just inside the park, as well as Clony, a sheep born from the tube, Martina became friends with Mustafa, "a non-EU hippopotamus from Africa," here spokesman for a host of animal species whose existence hangs in the balance between the captivity and extinction, an emblem of nature marred by man, but also and not least in light of a successful advertising imagery extensively looted over the years by several spots of effective visual impact that of this animal have exploited the immediacy of the message of peaceful and kindly tenderness forwarded by his portly figure.
Not surprisingly, the encounter between culture, art, mass media and society's wellbeing and consumerism is clearly a projection of common ideals based on the image values ​​, understood primarily as an appearance. The masses of the people identify themselves as myths from time to time created by advertising and by media, that always project artificial new needs, and not primary, to secure a growing number of consumers of material goods.

«- Why I didn't remained down there ? - repeated the hippopotamus. - The answer is simple my dear, because droughts and changes in the environment made by humans have diverted the course of rivers, lakes have dried up and my pastures parched (...). As we walked away, I could see the savannah was different, withered, I knew that I would never see it again, yet even so devastated, I felt it beautiful (...).
Mustafa spoke of Africa and of watercourses that all of a sudden disappeared and no one knew where they ended, he also spoke of the savannah that, year after year, parched increasingly jeopardizing the survival of many animals».

Mustafà

The text of Pier Luigi Coda proceeds with moderate rapidity narrative through many issues, but at some point, between the serious and the facetious, interests and logic of the market seem to creep even in the places most soothing, heated from love of the family and in private life; within the thoughts more and more  frequently prodded by marketing plans, budget forecasts and shares in a company, engineer Bentivoglio, co-star of the story, very human in the  comicality of its impulsive and inconsistent  transport of generosity, is in the meantime  the symbol of honesty inevitably targeted by professional intrigues dictated by an insatiable lust for wealth and power.

[Eng. Bentivoglio] « - See, Martina, you do not do even more revenue and market share.
Then Martina chagrined, because she thought she was not born to make market share but to watch the sun rise at dawn and sunset in the quiet hours of the evening, especially in summer when the cicadas chirp and the swallows chatter frantically chasing each other over the fields of wheat. "

Even in the work of Pier Luigi Coda, which ranges between different fields of contemporary culture, inbuilt a commitment to heighten the awareness of users, through messages that show the need and urgency for a change.

Today as never before critical sensitivity and independence of thought are also recommended as the foundation of culture. Where the capacity of assessment is weakening beyond measure and every judgment is left to the market, culture itself becomes almost a market sector or a sector of the state bureaucracy. The meaning of the word 'culture' in itself complex and polysemous, it is constantly changing and in recent decades has changed the views on the subject. In several areas, such as sociology, anthropology, but also philosophical and demographic, we are thinking about making a concept of culture in expansion, relative and multidisciplinary. Regarding the Western world, albeit with marginal differences, we found a scene of "cultural convergence" in which mass consumption is reduced, it is broken into a number of niches and subgenres. In this context, it would be not  wrong to speak of a "mass customization".

Buga - Public relations (oil on panel 98x98)

The most glaring weakness remains, however, the decline of criticism, both artistic and literary and cultural and political. In a society based on consumption is not negligible also the risk that attempts to transform not only the nature but the human beings themselves into commodities, causing that what still resists to a such an assimilation, for example on a spiritual level, it appears trivialized and marginalized. In the meshes of the after-illuministic processes of modernization it is dangerously profiled the instrumental character of rationality, as well as the prevalence of efficiency at the expense of moral responsibility. Often the use of reason has been bent to the point of breaking into a schizoid thinking, which led not only the culture but even the dynamics of power in interests of biopolitics entities, in a climax of violence, pervasive but invisible at times, which became the basis for the subdivision or for a total suspension of moral and consequently to a legitimization of violence.

 

* The images, taken from the Web by telephone permission of the author, depicting paintings by Gabriele Buratti (Buga) and exemplify some of  his artistic production.

** The texts refer to the edition of Pier Luigi Coda, "Martina and the savage Banda of Sausages," Effatà Publisher, Cantalupa (TO) 2010.

Critical comment and insert poetic by Valentina Incardona