Writings by Bruno Pinto

Monteveglio, May 2005

I am well aware of how “difficult it is to propose something to another’s judgment without corrupting it with the very manner of proposing it,” and how much the curator of an exhibition must bear a strong ethical-political responsibility, engaging all his critical intelligence, not separate from but rather sustained by the desire to understand the life of the other, one’s neighbor, with authentic human participation.
Thank you first of all, dear Pietro, for having prompted the exhibition of my work at the Fondazione Mazzotta and for taking on the responsibility and effort of curating the critical framework necessary for the adequate presentation of my works.

[…] I believe that the exhibition should not be so concerned with staging an “anthological” journey organized according to chronological time-space, but rather should seek to make perceptually evident the alterity of my work in relation to contemporary artistic chronicles from which fate has kept me apart.

In my research there has not been that significant moment of negation or the crisis of rupture with respect to an art and a social position acquired and recognized as false, to be contested or rejected, as has instead occurred for all the experiences of modern avant-gardes.
In adolescence I began to practice painting outside of educational institutions, then, in early youth, driven by the urgency to find a means to learn to observe, reflect, and assume what I was experiencing in an anomalous existential condition, estranged from any economic system whatsoever, at the limit, agitated by violent as well as conflicting, devastating tensions, the exercise of painting imposed itself upon me not as a way of representing the experienced within a pre-established scenario but to try to inhabit the living paradox of an existence that does not know how to recognize what it is or where it is. From that moment painting began to be for me the means to learn to breathe the true sense of my destiny.
This means first of all resisting the anguishing experience of one’s own impotence in the face of the abyssal depth of the World without betraying, evading, or hypocritically sublimating the desire for omnipotence that animates our every action, because this desire is the expression of the inalienable human passion for the absolutely Other, and I believe it is homicidal to speculate arbitrarily on this original aspiration of Man to full Freedom.
There was a time in my early youth when I was fascinated by certain emblematic protagonists of modern art; their stories exalted my imagination, provoking life choices decisive for my future.
In that time I fell in love with the desire to realize the aspiration to the absolute.
I believe it was this intense as well as confused desire of the Self that made me always reject from my earliest scholastic attempts every pre-established life project, imaginary ideals, the vacuity of stereotyped rites that govern the daily economy of public and private life, those of the “family” first of all.
In the works of the most significant protagonists of the revolt (not revolution) of modern art, the procedures invented to realize their intuitions about the true sense of art revealed the abyss of dark places that every human individuality carries within itself, concealed by false representations of truth.
The consciousness of these artists remained annihilated by the senselessness revealed to them by the very work procedures they were experimenting with to free art from old and new fictions, lies, and complacent mystifications. […]
But how to discern the authentic, why do we feel the need to seek the true sense of work, of art?
[…] It is necessary first of all to have a lucid mental perception of the increasingly invasive forms of the false that assault us from within and without if one wishes to actively hope to confront it by exorcising the phantoms aroused by interpersonal and intersocial media communication.
How to create an artistic practice that does not occlude the intellectual faculties with false representations of the world but disposes them to the vision of the true identity of life? […] The recognition and assumption of my human vocation inevitably passes through anguishing bewilderments, betrayals, and impostures; nevertheless, it is with a work practice not pre-constructed that I find step by step, along the way, the authentic forms of life that allow me to welcome the abyssal meaningfulness of the world and to bear witness to it in obedience with the whole body of my personal earthly existence. […]
Personal experience is foundational but it is unspeakable.
Of it one cannot speak.
Intellectual discourse refers to the path followed by the subject up to the moment of entering into his experience; it is the indication of a journey that must be made, that one is obliged to make driven by a need that will be understood later, when consciousness unexpectedly gathers itself without any concern for itself and thought, freed from fear and gathered in a state of productive silence, begins to see and understand new things utterly imperceptible when it is subjugated by the painful conflicting flow of the ambivalences of feelings, thoughts, and will animated by the spirit of predatory and incestuous appropriation.
The difficulty of expressing this singular experience is real; it is a matter of communicating facts of which it is possible to speak only if they have been personally experienced; for the author it is a matter of presenting an unprecedented experience whose first appearance caught him by surprise. Nevertheless, he feels the need to communicate it, but trying to recount it renders it senseless; it can be expressed only in poetic language or with a simple human gesture that bears witness to sharing with the Sorrow that dwells in the heart of all Things.
It is in pictorial practice that I am particularly permitted to access the perception of this more hidden Self not subjugated by the fear of death.

Dear Pietro,
thanking you for your attention, awaiting the opportunity to meet you to reflect before my work in painting with the hope of being able to recognize together the manifestation in it of the moment of authentic redemption from the False.

I greet you with ancient friendship,
yours Bruno

Bruno Pinto, in Cat. Di fronte e attraverso, Mazzotta, Milan 2005

“[…] I began to distinguish the various types of poetic knowledge: there are painters who do not express reality, they establish it; they do not represent it, they show it, they reveal it in its full actuality; I mean that they do not give us a reflected image of reality as an echo of their individual way of thinking and psychologically animating it, they do not express their participation in a sublimated image that merely screens reality. These painters experience painting as the manifestation of reality; they must penetrate into painting, while simultaneously penetrating into the life of the world; they allow themselves to be received by reality; for them pictorial matter is not a simple instrument that provides the possibility of constructing fantastic images to project onto things, it is not the means to artificially construct psychological aggregations in which the Self, identifying with them, becomes alienated; it is the living matter of their Self and that of the world.
For these artists, painting is the body of the world that they must fertilize.
Giotto, the men who painted on the walls of prehistoric caves, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Courbet, Michelangelo, Cézanne… Masaccio, Monet, all these and others in different ways have not made a discourse on reality, nor have they expressed to us those dazzling suggestions that arise in the soul of a Self separated from the life of the world; they do not make a discourse but reveal a silence within which reality lives; they do not wish to convince or captivate us, they simply present life in its becoming, they reveal it in its actual being, they render it present beyond the limits of their person. There is instead an art that is the expression of an individuality that does not seek reality, an art that shows us appearances, the various aspects of reality; this art is the expression of the human soul losing itself in fascinating reflections of images; artists of this type always struggle to possess life and continuously lose it.
Their art may also be the expression of a generous attempt to understand truth, but this continuously eludes them: Caravaggio, El Greco, van Gogh… Picasso, Pollock, Mondrian. Then there is an aesthetic art, of “style.” Here art can achieve the most subtle forms of enchantment. An aspect of reality entirely absorbs the artist’s spirit so that he remains magically attracted and enchanted by it; he is then subject to a fascinating magic: he is bewitched and loses all human will: Paolo Uccello, Vermeer… Corot, Matisse, Poussin.
Another type of artist is one who, immediately renouncing the struggle for understanding reality, trades in the obsessions that such renunciation causes to arise in him; he plays with these hallucinations, manipulating them culturally. This artist cultivates lies; he skillfully peddles his impotencies as virtues; he is the artist for whom art never has relations with living human reality, but is only a linguistic game devoid of words: he invents and constructs forms that are more or less skillful yet sterile contraptions animated by his death throes.

There is therefore a breed of painters who experience painting as a reality that substantiates human nature. […] There are painters who paint to make “beautiful” or “ugly” paintings according to this or that project, it matters little, and they matter little. They may also invent images of great effect expressing certain aspects of the psyche and the appearances of the world, but they never grasp the spirit of reality, they remain prisoners of their inventions, they are builders of tombs; because the soul of painting is not in its plastic values, nor in the expressive possibilities of its linguistic matter; these are merely accidents; the greatest artists tend toward the understanding of a substance, which they perceive beyond every image.

The values of painting are not in its expressive possibilities, just as the essence of man is not found in his merely psychic existence.
From prehistoric paintings to our days, man, through the forms of art, has always, consciously or not, sought himself; but painting is not a mythical entity, a presence outside historical time, a body situated in an abstractly metaphysical space; its essence is understood
in the very act of painting, it is a reality that man creates.

The temptation to make paintings is the painter’s original sin; it is overcome by painting.

Certainly the aesthetic suggestion is strong, but the desire of our being to transcend every contingent determination is stronger: whenever the will to possess life drives us in the attempt to enclose it in determined forms, this same will to absolute possession, perceiving the limit, drives us to transcendence. […]
We inevitably project our will onto things, for better or worse; projection is the only way to set out toward things. In projection we seek to transfer all forces onto things, we engage all the powers of the soul thus seeking to realize the deepest will of our being: to unite totally with things, the embrace.
Commonly projection is a psychological reaction, an automatism, expression of the vegetative life of the soul; a confused, undifferentiated echo of our psychism, it is devoid of intentionality, a product of passive emotional and mental habits: projection is nothing other, in this case, than a phantom that feeds anxiety and despair in our soul, this being the expression of the absence of a truthful relationship between our Self and the world, constantly renewing our unreality.
But in active projection all our vital forces are involved as in an immense cascade whose beginning is existential chaos and whose end is those differentiated figures that are simultaneously a fulfillment of our human Self and of the world; it is a creative relationship that gathers within itself the subject and object of projection: it comprehends them in a relationship in which they are found united and distinct in a rhythm that transforms them, increases them, emancipating them into freer and higher forms of existence. The confused projected forces, transforming into rhythm, realize erotic fulfillment. In fact, the subject and object in naturalistically experienced consciousness are felt as contradictory, opposed, or promiscuously confused. Thus, we, while desiring to realize a true embrace, in reality in projecting our fantasies invent unreality.

Exorcising those fantasies is the first, real, moment of truth to be realized in the work.

At the moment when, in pictorial work, the psychologically regressive repressed contents with which we unconsciously identify begin to objectify themselves in our consciousness, then a new state of being appears and we discover a new dimension of our soul and our flesh, a new life of feeling and a new mental attitude make their way, entirely different from those naively vitalistic, amorphous and automatic that we commonly suffer: the negative turns into positive with an act that is the immediate expression of this revolution, conversion of our spirit.
The Self is freed from coerced identifications, […]. The experimental certainty that this possibility is the only true one to realize, experimentally, forced me to abandon all the useless pathetic crocodile tears, the evasive and consolatory flights into worlds of dreamlike transcendences; this certainty was an evidence from which I could no longer free myself: every attempt to evade it procured for me only deeper confusions, anxieties and disturbances, thus forcing me with greater violence and determination to practice painting to find the right sense of practicing it.”

(Monteveglio, 1970-73)

 

Bruno Pinto, Per uscire dalla Valle. Critica di me stesso, edited by Omar Calabrese, La Casa Usher, Ponte alle Grazie Editori, Florence 1992, pp. 67-76

Bruno Pinto, in Cat. Di fronte e attraverso, Mazzotta, Milan 2005

“Man already carries within himself a glorious event without perceiving its presence.
For many, many years, we go on an anxious, even desperate search for an image that satisfies the need to recognize ourselves in our own original nature.
For many years we search, but we find only images that dissolve over time and, if we are not cowardly, we recognize that what we actually experience is fear—the fear of death experienced masked by a kaleidoscope of delusional images.

But that glorious, misunderstood event occultly sustains us even in our ignorance until one day, unexpectedly, it may happen that we simply become aware of it:
and nothing of the past is lost; everything reveals itself as infinitely meaningful.

“. . . not a flare of dead flame but a thing seen
in a mystic eye, not a sign of life but life.
In itself, the presence of the intelligible. . .
in that which is created as its symbol”.
(Wallace Stevens)

“The intelligible darkness is the intellect devoured by wonder at the intellection in spirit that suddenly falls upon the soul and holds the intellect immobile, while all visible things hide from it, in ignorance and imperception of the object of their consideration”.
(Isaac of Nineveh)

A consciousness that does not allow itself to be confused by the spell of conventional representations of phenomena—because it is intimately disposed not to let itself be cast away, far from itself, by those continuous, manifold, daily, and domestic occasions that can suddenly open a disturbing breach in the web of automatic justifications with which we delude ourselves into living, thinking, and possessing the world—this consciousness anxious for the truth cannot make us elude the passage through the sub-rational psychological unconscious. This place that opens suddenly behind the hard skin of conventional appearances has a viscous, slippery nature, and in its vitalistic, indistinct swarming (a caricature of the true infinite), it is also attractive to those who take pleasure in alienating themselves in a fragmentary, generic, cerebral sensationalism, rather than awaiting that qualitative perception which founds the reality of the sensory organism, of consciousness, and of their relations.
The indistinct swarming of automatic mental images provoked by the sub-rational unconscious is the symptom of a “psychic black hole,” of the absence of real qualitative perceptions of living phenomena in their complexity of relations; indeed, it conceals the origin of this lack.
This formless psychic place swallows everything without creating things, producing only other derealized and derealizing fantasies that destroy historically determined spatio-temporal objectivity, the immediate perception of the irreducible depth already present in corporeal appearances.
In this place there is no growth, nor birth, nor childhood, nor youth, nor old age, nor beginning and fulfillment, nor real problem and resolution: everything is dissolved in and by the delusional psychic vitalism into a leaden magma shaken by automatic impulses: it is the formless mass of disorganic psychic residues, waste devoid of fertile seeds, a place of sloth and avarice.
If we avoid facing the emotional disturbance, the sentimental ambiguity, the madness of a mental activity devoid of thought that the dreamlike animation of this sub-rational unconscious arouses, its obsessive and sterile vicious circle will recur indefinitely without the possibility of ever being extinguished.
The imagination subject to this sub-human psychological mechanism is already alienated from its unconscious-supra-rational intuitive potential; its representations dissolve the objective dualism of natural consciousness into the formless spectrality of hallucinatory fantasies instead of resolving it beyond the hard concreteness of a dualistic logic (“The solution to my logical problem is trans-mental…” Majakovskij lucidly stated).
This sub-rational psychic condition is fundamentally paralyzing, devoid of an elementary, clear perceptive activity; it is commonly evaded or repressed, aggravated by the breathlessness of abstract, dazzling sublimations, laborious intellectualistic constructions that sever it with a “lifestyle”:
“… as if in sparks…
or like a damp wrapping, or like knitting…
That lifestyle with the appearance of images,
with the appearance of enchantments
with the appearance of emotions
with the appearance of wonders
with the appearance of genius
with the appearance of moods
with the appearance of studies
with the appearance of everything.
Unbearable bazaar where you find no bread
and this journey, but where is this journey?”
(Henri Michaux)

Isaac of Nineveh, addressing those who take pleasure in phantoms aroused by their own minds, warns:
“…let these and their like delude themselves with their hallucinations…, let us prepare ourselves with all recollection in simplicity of heart, not looking at any of the figures that the mind arouses with composite thoughts, but waiting with faith for the sun of knowledge to rise in our hearts.”

“The problems connected with thought disorders force us to think about thinking, and this in turn raises the problem of technique: how to think about thinking, what is the good method for doing so?”
(W.R. Bion)

Reverie confused with the “spontaneous” appearance of poetic imagination (capable of strong, evident supra-rational apperceptions and transformative practical creativity) clutters the mind with false representations that deprive thought of its possibility to adhere to the concrete spat-temporal rhythms that form things, and imagination of the power of intelligent vision of the phenomena of nature and culture.
It is thus that respiratory and cardiac rhythms, constantly syncopated by hallucinatory representations, become disorganized instead of emancipating themselves beyond the times of conventional dualistic consciousness.
A thought that takes pleasure in confusing itself with fantastic imagination, mistaking it for spontaneous and substantial vision compared to the banal, daily representations of phenomena, prevents the intellect from manifesting itself immediately in a simple action, overcoming abstract, exhausting conceptualizing mediation.

This grave confusion is denounced by ancient and modern doctrines. Using very different languages, these doctrines reveal the subliminal, sub-rational automatisms that preside over the degradation of supra-rational creative imaginative potential.
The animation of the unconscious-sub-rational imagination degrades psychological life: the supra-rational one has the power to exalt it into intelligent, “noble enthusiasm” (or poetic sentiment), freeing it from fragmentary, automatic, amorphous psychism, thus disposing the “spirit” to the conjugation with the “mythical primordial matter” potentially containing all those living qualities that the creative act will make active in our common daily actions.

“Just as women alone can even cast out formless masses of flesh, but to create a child they need a seed different from their own, so fantastic spirits devoid of discipline produce reverie; the soul without a body loses itself.”
(Montaigne)

“…and take great care that your door is firmly closed, so that he who is within cannot escape… your imagination must be directed according to nature; observe, therefore, according to nature how bodies regenerate within the bowels of the earth, and then imagine this according to true fantasy and not by mere daydreaming.”
(Rosarium Philosophorum)

“My method is hatred for fantastic imagination… wanting to force the expression of nature, twisting trees, making rocks grimace, or even refining too much… all that is still literature… there exists a pictorial truth of things.
But how difficult it is to approach nature without prejudice… But if he, the artist, intervenes with subjective consciousness, if he dares to meddle consciously, wretchedly, in the process of translation, then he introduces only his insignificance and the work loses value…; all his will must fall silent; he must silence within himself every voice of prejudice, forget, be a perfect echo. Nature outside and nature inside must amalgamate, to endure, to live a half-human, half-divine life, the life of art.
I mean that I become clairvoyant in the face of nature and that yet the realization is accomplished very laboriously because nature offers itself to me as very complex… the artist is parallel to it (nature) if he does not intervene voluntarily… one should be able to see like a newborn.”
(Paul Cézanne)

The activity of fantasizing dreamily alienates the bodily senses from their realistic and conflictual relationship with the hard concreteness of living phenomena; it diverts sexuality from its own function, which is to mediate the active understanding of the other in the physical embrace up to the extreme amorous passion that can only be realized through that simplicity of spirit in which contradictions, antinomies, and paradoxes are instantaneously suspended and overcome by a supernatural perception that resolves the frenetic excitation of physical sexual bipolarity into a unifying bodily rhythm while maintaining it, indeed increasing it, in its distinct qualities: an erotic-amorous epiphany.
This ontological transformation can only be realized by means of a simple event in which the intimate conflictuality of naturalistic desire animated by a possessive craving is instantaneously suspended and transcended.

“The union of the two is accomplished in the ethereal space of the heart.”
(Upanishad)

“A concept of beauty imagined and seen within the heart.”
(Michelangelo)

“Through the liberation of the heart, the virtue of the disciples bears fruit.
In the senses applied to contemplation, emptiness arises.
The principle and basis of contemplation is the simple point without dimension…
And yet the mode of contemplation is known by means of the liberation of the heart…”.
(Milarepa The Song of Joy)

The various subliminal mechanisms that preside over the degradation of mental activities, of the heart rhythm (of the Heart experienced as the vital center of the human being and the seat of the “intellect of love”) and of the breath, are provoked and hidden precisely by all those forms of vulgar cerebral-psychological sublimation of those who believe, or pretend to believe, that one “…rises because, while maintaining the same lower tendencies (for example, the desire to prevail over others), they have provided them with elevated goals. One would instead rise by connecting elevated tendencies to lower goals.” (Simone Weil)

These are the ideologies that provoke and maintain an irrational dominance by speculating with disguised cynicism on legitimate, though misunderstood and distorted, desires for good, on the most authentic human aspirations, selling aesthetic, religious, political, and technological fetishes, economic automatons, inducing the individual to renounce a real effort of emancipation of their own human vocation, a true conscious transformation of existence, as painful as it is joyful, by means of a transformative idea of their legitimate desires into acts of free creative will: a freedom that, to be authentic, cannot be planned but only experimentally sought and gratuitously achieved.

“…those who attack knowledge without practice kidnap it, that is, instead of the truth, they steal a semblance of it. It dwells of itself in the movements of those who in their own life… have breathed life from within death.”
(Isaac of Nineveh)

Power over things and over men is exercised for good or for evil through the dominance over their hearts via mental representations. The truth or falsehood of these determines, beyond good or bad faith, the slavery or freedom of consciousness: the understanding of the qualities of this imagination is precisely the domain into which Modern poetic knowledge ventures. This founds its first movement in the acceptance of given reality, but urged by the need to increase it and bring it to a plenitude of glorious life, it strives to assume it with “noble enthusiasm.”
This erotic emphasis of the poetic imagination toward and with the real other imposes the painful preliminary work of an extinction of delusional fantastic automatisms and the realization of a transparency of the mind freed from all “composite thoughts,” from dreamlike sentimental animations; it “waits for the sun of its knowledge to rise in the heart” in the “suffering of thought” and in the “unbearable pressure for the pain that torments the heart…”.
(Isaac of Nineveh).

Critical dialectical thought is, for a modern contemporary man, the indispensable instrument for achieving a first real autonomy of the mind toward the otherwise elusive phantoms, the excited fantasies that bar the way to free, authentically creative poetic imagination.
The experience of a first real autonomy of the Ego toward the sub-rational unconscious provokes a first positive “split” of our naturalistic psychic structure (the alchemical “separation of the mixed”) in the sense that it introduces a real ordering principle; an effective autonomy of the spirit, founder of an original historical place, neither mythological nor liturgical or sacred, and through successive regenerative metamorphoses of our living anthropological preparation of the “mercury of the wise” and reduction “to the prima materia”: “denudation” and “conjugation.”
The way is thus opened, once the phantoms of the sub-rational unconscious are dissolved, to the direct experience of the creative thought of a supra-rational unconscious, the place of intuition and creative inspiration; that is to say, to poetic knowledge proper.
An ontological change of level is realized, a metamorphosis of our entire living organism.
One experiences supra-rational perception and a first effective awakening of the heart center, the seat of the operating intellect, without any conceptual mediation.

“the unseen seer, the unknown knower shines in the heart”
(Upanishad)

“Through the liberation of the heart, the virtue of the disciples bears fruit… the holy palace which is the region of the pure idea.”
(Milarepa)

Thus, the experience of an original poetic experience, absolutely unprecedented; as the imagination, freed from reverie, from the residues of mythological, metaphysical, sacred, and liturgical-religious thought, autonomously carries out the experience of the spirit founding its historical humanity: apoetic knowledge, not comparable with any other type of knowledge, which through the observation of historical phenomena arrives at new qualitative-perceptions (Paul Cézanne), which are original ideas, living principles, and also invents those intelligent representations of the real as unprecedented as they are true. Real ideas that free the Heart from the suggestions produced by the head (from every regressive bond with dreamlike memory), revolutionizing in the overcoming the entire dynamic of the first movement of critical dialectical thought: passing with an ascensional motion from its initial critical-theoretical experience into a place where it experiences a purely intellectual, “trans-mental” perception (Majakovskij).
The Heart is re-established as the vital center of the human being (the first awakening of alchemical gold).
This Heart is:
“…the holy palace which is the region of the pure idea.”
(Milarepa)
“…water that sprinkles the earth and makes it sprout.”
(Artesio)

Awareness of the deception of false mental representations demands a confrontation with real fear because, once these representations have fallen, the will no longer has a thought to direct it and falls back paralyzed onto its violent primitive impulses; devoid of perspective, it is forced to remain in the oppressive condition of impossibility, like the revving of a stalled engine (Bachelor Machine). If it resists in this condition of annihilation, it spontaneously imprints a contraction on the psychological-naturalistic system that shakes it to its roots (purificatory contrition “preparation of the vessels”); in the impossibility of choosing between ideological perspectives all recognized as expressions of the same fundamental error of abstract mental activity, it resists; a profound need dominates it and does not allow it to indulge in evasive solutions and lying transcendences that propose themselves with more incisiveness and suggestion, emerging from the simulacrum of a past, even a remote one, from deeply internalized opinions and convictions but now no longer confused by the mind with “the wave of deep intuition” (Milarepa), perceived as devoid of generating spirit.
The Ego is forced into a terrifying immobility because it is hindered in its first volitional movement (“The work in black,” the “regime of Saturn” of alchemy, the Dark Night of the will of Saint John of the Cross, the psychoanalytic depressive crisis). Here the nature of the forces symbolized by ancient representations is realistically experienced: titanic forces and demonic temptations; but now these forces, stripped of the old mythological, liturgical, animistic, and cosmological personifications, manifest themselves in their pure worldly actuality.
One also distinctly perceives the impulses provoked by the rhythms of the bodily organism; one distinguishes the confused yearnings of desire devoid of real free will and sentiment, the complicated psychological strategies that the historically determined ego invents to extinguish anguish and despair but always remaining a prisoner of the limit it wishes to transcend: an ego obstinate in remaining camouflaged in its old privileges, to reconfirm itself once more in its habitual hypocrisies newly disguised in an imaginary renewal of itself, to reaffirm its illegitimate power, to dress itself once more in an artificial light.
Here opens the ancient passage of the human spirit into the lower universe; we encounter the old figures of mythological, cosmic, and telluric monsters, of auspicious and inauspicious demons, as acting forces present in common daily acts, in the labyrinthine relations imposed by historically determined relationships: we observe them as inventions willed by historical consciousness, quite other than the nihilistic will. Observed with an attention not subjugated to the contradictions and ambiguities inherent in dualistic consciousness, the knowledge of good and evil is experienced with evidence not as an ethical ideality or religious faith separated in any case from its coincidence with a real, free act of interior renewal; an act from which the inspiration of a morally creative doing, founding a non-ideological, non-repressive political action, can manifest.
The Ego experiences a willing, thinking, and feeling no longer moved by abstract ethical and moral representations artificially introjected and abstractly, voluntaristically transposed into action.

But who “forces” the Ego to resistance against abstract, necessarily “false” choices?
Who imposes on the Ego the need to keep watch so as not to be enchanted by false representations of itself and the world?
Where does this force come from that can contrast and contradict, despite ourselves, every desire of ours for compromise with lying, alienating habits, occultly provoked by despair?
What is the force that from the most intimate place of our will obliges us to resist against the promises of the fascinating, suggestive images of death smuggled as regenerated life?
Who obliges the ego to an oppressive experience of annihilation?!
Forced into the impossibility of choosing, we experience real pain, that which the mind inflicts on the Ego with an imposition to which the Ego cannot consent because, recognizing it with all evidence as a lie, it cannot decide to alienate itself in it. In this living passion, the historical ego experiences its fundamental limit and is thus induced to the acceptance of the extreme complexity of the World, to renounce its proud dream of power; to lean spontaneously beyond itself, to sustain the incredible pressure of the fundamental paradox: life and death.
In this healthily painful endurance, it recognizes its original foundation because it sees that the force that imposed on it the resistance to the lie and the endurance of the fundamental paradox is, this force, the perennial foundation of its own Life, its original Truth.
Here the paradox is no longer suffered as an insoluble opposition and, while remaining in the world, instead of being a means of contradiction and discord, it slowly converts, becomes a means of reconciliation.
In the painful assumption of a conscious impossibility of real transcendence of dualistic consciousness through the motion of its own thought, the Ego endures the fundamental contradiction, sees it born from within its historically determined will and expressed through conflictual mental representations; this experience changes, converts its behavior toward itself; the Ego is freely forced to be patient, with an active and productive patience; from this new disposition, unsuspected “moral” forces spring forth, and the Ego is forced to await the void of every thought and, in this void, instantaneously sees the Other and relates to it with a movement freed from the desire for violent possession.
It sees that the need to resist evil is the immediate expression of faith in Truth.
It recognizes this Faith as the inalienable foundation of the living human Ego, which sustains its own personal life like an infinite sea.
Then the Ego learns from this water to let itself be sustained, and the mind remains increasingly transparent; with a “marvelous wonder,” it welcomes the necessities of daily existence by means of the “wisdom that generates thought,” which disenchants the heart from the fear of death with the motion of “fervid and splendid movements.”
The confusion of our automatic thought, the ambiguity of our feelings and desires eclipses; the old, dead representations of reality dissolve; the nervous impulse that forced the muscle into the overbearing, mechanical gesture is released.
Without further fears and anxieties, freely, the transformative action is born: it emerges from an experience born and lived entirely in the world, which returns to the world, perennially renewing its forms of Life.
Revolutionized from within, our faculties turn toward a dark but not gloomy universe which, to the extent that we manage to see it, illuminates, illuminates us; our spirit is animated by presentiments, thoughts, will, feelings, intuitions that we cannot at first understand, but which make our action more vast, profound, unanimous.

Beyond, on the other side, within the regressive, sub-human, unreasonably rationalistic and rationalistically formless psychological unconscious, producer and product of hallucinatory perceptions and institutionalized delusions, beyond the common, conventional representations of the world, one can perceive the “perceptive hole” of a radiating supra-consciousness.
It is the experience of the “… ‘perceptive hole’; a dark sensation that seizes us if we observe ourselves within without prejudice. … ” (E. C. Gori); the Ego that gives us the certain and immediate vision of our own and others’ selves.
An Ego simply other, always present, unrecognized by the dark, formless psychological unconscious produced by our old and new false consciousness.
Radiating, productive supra-consciousness, perceived as a force full of unexpressed original energies that sustain the World: we experience it bodily as a breath that penetrates into our very bones, regenerating them, and we lose it as soon as the impulse to possess it arises in us—it must simply be Recognized, Loved.
This human love gives real life to the infinite meaningfulness of existence; however, it would have no other sense than that of a different enchantment if our Ego did not realize it in the actuality of contingent daily doing in works of laborious and transparent, simple, patient, tenacious amorous conjugation, which transform the infinite possibilities of this primordial force into glorious, recreative activity.

It is in consciously adhering to the historical limit that the everyday reveals to us its further unprecedented truth, here, now, happening now in this conventional, common, no longer banal act of ours.
This supra-rational Ego has manifested itself from the moment we began to renounce the patterns of the lying sublimations of anguish and to resist the regressive calls of death of the truth: we finally recognize it as present in the “trifles” that distressed us, but now with our return to them in the act sustained by the wisdom of the productive, supra-rational unconscious, we understand them, compensating existence by leaning out, together, into the infinite, beyond our own and others’ limits: reconfirming our humanity in that force of faith which, unrecognized, had unconsciously sustained us from the Beginning.

“Dreaming is harmful
And fantasizing is useless,
one must endure the boredom of work,
but it happens
that life
shows itself under another profile
and great things
you understand them
through a trifle”.
(Majakovskij)

Modern art, urged by the intimate necessity to found itself as an autonomous path toward the knowledge of reality and an active “revolutionary” practice, has in its research revealed some aspects of reality that seemingly appear to us as dissociated and contradictory, regressive, which do not seem to realize a renewed and unitary cosmos and therefore plunge us into desperate anguish.
But this lack of organicity is a self-hypnotic spell and the product of an image of unity or organicity that is precisely the residue of old representations that magically suggest the mind and are irrationally animated with artificial psychological emphasis, inadvertently lived as moments of authentic creative inspiration.
However, the true “modern poetic” experience, passing through terrible trials, failures, illusions, voluntary sacrifices, precisely in the courage to face them, to endure them, and beyond the more or less acceptable justifications of individual protagonists, has, to our deep persuasion (beyond the cultural homologations that represent it to us by always reducing it to an ideology), founded a new real knowledge of the world, an original experience of truth.

In the darkness of intellectual silence and in social isolation, the greatest “modern” poets had the courage to sustain to the end the search for truth against the lying pressures of a world dominated by the desire for violent and oppressive possession.
This tension of faith in the truth seems to us so much, everything: it is a simple testimony of love
(because it is not ideological and fideistic); and it is in the artistic forms of these poets that the reality and the validity of their research is concretely readable, beyond their personal errors and failures.
If these forms are not understood in their real historical context, they are necessarily reduced to aesthetic fetishes, psychological simulacra devoid of creative force: in reality, they are living testimonies of the ancient and eternal hope for a victory of life over death.”

 

Bruno Pinto, in Cat. Bruno Pinto. Works from 1953 to 1987, edited by Claudio Cerritelli, foreword by Filippo Sassoli dè Bianchi, with writings by Enrico Cesare Gori, Concetto Pozzati, Luciano Nanni, Bruno Bandini, Vezio Ruggeri, Giuseppe Dossetti, Bruno Pinto. Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1987

Bruno Pinto, in Cat. Bruno Pinto. Controversial Places of the Heart, edited by Silvia Evangelisti, with writings by Bruno Bandini, Andrea Emiliani, Silvia Evangelisti, Flaminio Gualdoni, Luciano Nanni, Bruno Pinto. Nuova Alfa Editoriale, Bologna 1990, p. 107

Bruno Pinto, in Cat. Pinto, edited by Silvia Evangelisti, with the contribution of Andrea Emiliani, Silvia Evangelisti, Flaminio Gualdoni, Luciano Nanni, Bruno Pinto. Nuova Alfa Editoriale, Bologna, December 1991, cit., p. 7

Bruno Pinto, in To Exit the Valley. Critique of Myself, edited by Omar Calabrese, La Casa Usher, Ponte alle Grazie Editori, Florence, 1992

Badini:
What advice can you give to a young artist today?

Pinto:
First of all, a young artist must ask themselves with great sincerity: Why do I want to be an artist? What is art? What is the intention that animates my work?
This questioning was instinctively and obsessively imposed upon me at every moment when I found myself faced with the need to choose what form to give to my existence: I chose to be a painter because, through the practice of painting, I confusedly sensed that I could understand the true meaning of Life.
For me, the art of painting is a work of knowledge and self-awareness.
This choice primarily forced me not to give credit to already codified artistic practices, toward which I have always felt an inalienable, impatient aversion, because they were instinctively perceived as mortifying the natural disposition toward learning in consonance with individual talents.
If one chooses to become aware of one’s own destiny by working with the art of painting to understand oneself, any pre-established work practice proposed from the outside cannot be accepted uncritically: we then find ourselves faced with a paradox, having to confront an inevitably conflictual existential condition.

Badini:
How can one learn from the work?

Pinto:
First of all, by seeking to honestly exercise critical thinking, learning it from those who developed it; by rejecting all simplistic, and precisely uncritically reductive, approaches. Authentic critical thinking, if practiced with great mental rigor, inevitably provokes a healthy crisis; it reveals to us an existential condition animated by violent contradictions. Critical thinking has the power to make us clearly perceive our limits, the limits of the institutions to which we are expected to surrender the governance of our Life.
But it also allows us to intuit the mental, emotional, and volitional attitudes with which we can face—hoping, actively hoping—both internal and external limits.
By not despairing over difficulties, we can begin to glimpse, to intuit how to overcome them with an authentically creative act, which is to say, a dramatically self-founding one.
But to succeed in expressing a creative act, one must abandon the critical mentality.
Critical thinking does not provide us with the mental tools to overcome the difficulties it nevertheless allows us to know lucidly: the lucidity of critical thinking can establish itself as a prison, a desperate trap.

Faced with the problems posed by lucid critical thinking, it is a matter of activating a dimension of oneself that, anthropologically speaking, is ontologically entirely other than critical thinking.
Critical thinking gives us awareness of the conditioning that limits, in a strictly political sense, the form of life imposed by a historically determined economy of existence, but it does not have the strength to create within ourselves a disposition of soul and spirit, an intelligence liberated from the limited, mortifying forms of existence abstractly imposed by cultural institutions: the authentically Creative act is self-founding; you must create it in yourself, from yourself.
The creative act requires an inevitably, healthily painful effort; our small, presumptuous common ego—even if culturally very sophisticated—cannot bear it, but this painful, healthy effort grants the virtue of a real ontological transfiguration of all the forces of our existence. It is founding, self-founding: an absolutely other, unimaginable thing; it is necessary to pass through a grave, dramatic, but healthy pain.

Badini:
Does the fact of reaching a crisis generate a dramatic, personal event, a drama?

Pinto:
A drama!
Inevitably.
One must renounce any form, every mere emphatic reaction toward the habitual formulas of institutionalized culture, to develop a real, vital creative event, an epiphany; one must pass through a dramatic transformation of our common, stereotyped consciousness.

Badini:
Does it mean losing the certainties even of critical knowledge?

Pinto:
Critical consciousness, if rigorously exercised, leads reflection to the point where you consciously and unequivocally recognize that there can be no certainties within the current cultural condition; anyone who does not think so is—willy-nilly—intellectually dishonest, a mystifier, or a superstitious person, bordering even on being a delinquent, willy-nilly.
The experience of truly “modern” art—I do not say contemporary, which means everything and nothing; the contemporary in the common sense is conformist. The Modern? How can we define it anthropologically and ontologically? Where and when is the Modern born? It is born from the moment one abandons all metaphysical thought, every abstractly pre-established conception of truth, every operational project intended for a pre-constituted end, primarily the end of satisfying the desire to know the truth. For me, the contemporary Modern, strictly speaking, is born with Giotto, Dante, St. Francis… St. Francis was not a monk, he did not want to found a monastic order, St. Francis did not want to dictate a rule of life; for him, the rule is either internal or it is a prison! In Giotto, the gold background no longer appears!

For the modern, meaning is born and manifests itself through experience based on the world perceived with the bodily senses—this, obviously, does not mean merely physiological ones. But sensible experience can also regress into stereotyped, abstract behaviors, producing a disembodying and mentally delirious existential condition. In the economy imposed by the nihilistic system that governs our existence today, everyone must begin to de-conceal their own delirium.

The images of life proposed to us by the contemporary economy are subreal, regressive; they present a delirious, kaleidoscopic imaginary, effectively mystifying an existential condition dominated by a state of despair.
The reality of natural sensible appearances, if you observe them without mental prostheses, the more intensely you see them, the more you experience anguish and terror, because the ego cannot contain the immeasurable complexity of natural appearances—tree, sky, earth, birth, death. Modernity is the search for an original state of life that can be experienced here, now, in this moment between me and you, in the present: projecting it into the future or the past is delirious, desperate.

The great personalities who were animated by the need to be modern, beyond all failed experiments—let’s say Duchamp, Picasso, Giacometti… Rilke…—are the prototypes of a grave, tragic existential experience because they understood what it means to be Modern, and even if they failed, they authentically sought… sought, sought: their “failure” is nevertheless, paradoxically, edifying.
Their work is a knowledge—not an ideology—of the negative, which in itself is not evil.
Why did Picasso go through so much?! Every pictorial practice he invented to free himself from the memory of the past, every aesthetic invention, he recognized as a trap, a prison—finally, he practiced irony to escape a mortal anguish. Invented to forget, but he understood that to forget, to be free, he had to experience the unimaginable, the unthinkable; Cézanne had succeeded in this miracle, as Picasso recognized.
Picasso, and not only him, obviously, sought the absolute.
All those in the contemporary era who sought the essence of the modern recognized Cézanne as the authentic witness.
Cézanne has no style: you cannot say that a tree has a style; the tree is a living being, and any reduction of it to an image betrays and mortifies its existence.
The Ego that reduces appearances to images deludes itself into possessing them, but in reality, it regresses its own existence to a formless vitalism, to a mass of anguished impulses.
Cézanne’s painting does not have a style, there are no geometric procedures: Cézanne’s painting is a living being, it manifests the existence of an Ego seeking the truth of its own immeasurable Life.
It is his Ego seeking its own foundation; there is the presence of the immeasurable in Cézanne’s work. The presence of an original Life appears, a Life that is beyond all birth and death.
Cézanne Sees: he simply Sees, but to truly See, he experiences darkness, he makes himself blind to all imagination; his true strength is remaining in that blindness: he does not think, he perceives the presence of his life in consonance with that of the Other: Tree, Air… Stone… Sky… Man. Presences like that of Cézanne are rare in the entire history of modern art.

Badini:
There are not many.

Pinto:
I have named a few; as far as painting is concerned, there are also Masaccio, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Velázquez. In Cézanne’s work, one can see precisely the healthy, painful, liberating, non-anguished effort he makes to rid himself of pre-established images; there is a way of feeling, thinking, and willing that is other than lethal aestheticizing mystification.

Badini:
I understand, I understand perfectly.

Pinto:
Yes… it can be said in many ways…

Badini :
I wanted to ask you what relationship you have with art defined as Italian “Informalism.”

Pinto:
Informalism: in the 1950s (I was born in ’35), when it was not yet well-defined what work I could do—indeed, I was instinctively impatient and fled from any programmed project of existence—I saw the great retrospectives of Picasso, Mondrian, and then, also at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, that of Pollock.
I had the strong, though confused, impression that with Pollock, the extreme consequences of the search for modern art had been reached: it was not possible to proceed further in the attempt to find an artistic practice that allowed for reflection on the actuality of lived experience to gain authentic knowledge of the true meaning of Life: what was to be done?
Informalism, which does not mean devoid of form, is an aesthetic category that has caused major and gross misunderstandings; very few are the authentic Informalists, and Pollock is its clearest expression.
Generally, the so-called Informalists turn psychic lyricism into a form of naturalism; Pollock is something else entirely.
Pollock reaches extreme psychic aphasia; he suffocates, he experiences the extreme vital limit, anguish in itself without any objectual mediation: he sought a form of art as knowledge of the world, not as interpretation.
In the 1950s, Palma Bucarelli, director of the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, organized Sunday lectures on modern art that I attended assiduously. At that time in Italy, there was the ideology of neorealism on one side and various abstractions on the other; there were the likes of Guttuso, Turcato, Dorazio, Novelli, the abstractionists. For me, it was not a matter of choosing one side or the other; the powerful experience of modern art was animated by the original need to know the true sense of the being of existence in Itself; it aspired to know man in himself. The strong individualities of Modern research sought an art, a work in painting that, while remaining within historical existence, allowed it to be observed from a trans-historical peak; they sought not another artistic style—inevitably mystifying, alienating, artificial images—but a founder of authentic life in the sense that it would allow the Ego to know itself, its original foundation other than the economically determined, projected ego.
The Ego desires to experience the world within and outside itself; it desires to observe and understand it simultaneously from another vantage point, outside the small common self, even if culturally very sophisticated. The Ego aspires to understand the nature of the relations governing the connection between the small contingent ego, anxious to dominate natural phenomena, and the nature of the will that animates its intention.
The Ego wants to understand the world, but if to realize its aspiration it invents an abstract conception of the world, the art and the work will only produce inevitably mystifying operations—as overbearing as they are impotent, intimately contradicted, alienating artifacts of ways of thinking, willing, and feeling coagulated in a certain determined psychic condition that indefinitely founds and refounds conflict, discord, separateness, murder, and suicide: an existence spinning its wheels.
The ontological need is to exit the labyrinth of psychic phenomena; if you manage to set aside psychology and gain awareness of what provokes it to enter into an authentically cognitive relationship with yourself and things, this place other than the historically determined ego is what men who had the innate feeling for the true sense of work were seeking, whether they were great or small.

Badini:
That is the great drama of modernity.

Pinto:
On these grave questions, I have always been spontaneously, intuitively spurred to reflect as best I could, even without realizing it, leaning here and there; the results of my attempts were collected in a book edited by Omar Calabrese: To Exit the Critical Valley of Myself.
Of course, the experience cannot be had by proxy; every individual must create it for themselves through absolutely unimaginable paths.
For me, contemporary modernity is born precisely with those three people, those great figures named above.
Everyone must recognize the path within themselves.
One must, above all, always be aware of one’s own infinite ignorance: never betray it.
Let’s go back to Rome in the 1950s, to Palma Bucarelli, Guttuso, Argan… Ragghianti, Nello Ponente, De Grata; to the exhibitions in the 1950s of Picasso… to that of Pollock: this, as I said, provoked a dark intuition in me: painting had celebrated its funeral, it was over! Art could not begin from art; it was necessary to start from something else, from an experience of life, of a life not at all governed by a codified economy.
In Rome, I worked in advertising, I attended courses at the free school of the nude at the Académie de France, I had met Guttuso… and I made a new acquaintance that radically changed my imaginary.
This new encounter sparked a fantasy that led to the abandonment of Rome; with new companions, we went to live in an abandoned farmhouse in the mountains of Arezzo.
Here I experienced an unpredictable daily condition that forced me to discover forces within me that I did not know; this happened as spontaneously as it did confusedly. The imaginary that prompted the abandonment of Rome immediately revealed itself to be absolutely dreamlike, incapable of containing what was being experienced daily, so different from the previous way of life.
I found myself experiencing an existential situation at the limit of, if not outside, the habitual, urban organized economy of life, and I experienced a state of mind shaken by violent disturbances and anxieties, even those without objective references. In a easily vulnerable psychic condition, one is irrationally driven to seek a rehabilitation of one’s consciousness, inevitably destined for a sequence of failed trials that humiliate the pride always in search of an autonomy that will always be deluded and disillusioned, with the risk of regressively resolving the violent crisis; but this, despite myself, did not happen: by destiny?

Badini:
You already told me that inexplicable events then occurred in that house where you lived.

Pinto:
Yes, of course, unusual psychic phenomena: one decides to leave for an unknown place, believing oneself equipped… then, suddenly, one realizes they are on the high seas; an horizon opens up ahead with no landmarks on land, one is in a boat and no longer has a compass. In such a condition, a real force can make its way within you, which, although obscure, sustains you intuitively at certain moments.
Then I began to trust this force; you feel you are no longer adrift, you no longer think of turning back; it is a force in which you hope without a plan because you begin to have the feeling that whatever you encounter will be able to sustain you.

Badini:
Did you have a sense that Italian Informal art had a political meaning?

Pinto:
Yes, obviously every human expression has a political meaning, but what is the sense of this meaning?
Informalism manifested itself after the end of the war.
I was telling you that in Italy in the 1950s, aesthetic problems were, on one hand, those of the abstractionists supported critically by Argan and Bucarelli, but their positions were the recovery of artistic phenomena already experienced and discounted by the so-called historical avant-garde; on the other hand, there was neorealism: two illusions.
For me, there was no choice; I sensed they were two “lies,” two manifestations of the same epochal Crisis: the throes of the end of a thinking that was nevertheless ideological, the so-called end of ideologies. I felt, obscurely, intuitively, the need to free myself, so to speak, from every form of ideologized psychologism, and I suffered a sort of existential impatience: but where to begin, what to do?! Informalism, compared to historical abstractionism, was nothing more than its inevitable, fatal conclusion, and left-wing neorealism was another lie.
But what is meant by “Informalism” or Abstract Expressionism of the post-WWII period?
Informal does not mean it has no form: a painter empathetically chooses certain expressive procedures, certain rhetorics of making. Choosing, for example, to paint still lifes—pears, apples, tables, drapery, etc.: many still lifes have been painted, but what distinguishes one still life from another? One landscape from another? One pear from another?
It is not the theme that gives value, but the way it is painted. So it is a matter of seeing how it is painted, what that specific way of painting means, what feelings, thoughts, volitions, intuitions, psychic and mental tensions manifest in the procedures of this or that pictorial practice, regardless of the chosen themes. The operational processes of pictorial practice are always necessarily “abstractions”: but how to evaluate the intrinsic sense, the anthropological value of this or that pictorial procedure?
It is a matter of understanding the value of the feelings, volitions, desires, thoughts, and the imaginary that manifest while painting; it is a matter of empathy, of empathetic quality: of Eros.
Eros!! Do you understand?! Informalism—and I take Pollock, a De Kooning, even Giacometti as emblematic examples of that historical situation: what empathetic qualities, what in-tentions do they express in their pictorial process?
They express a grave, dramatic, even tragic existential condition, a condition of existence in a delirious state, an abyssal anthropological, indeed ontological, crisis.
Giacometti, in my conviction, is a unique case; he manifests a great pictorial intelligence, a deep awareness of the state of crisis; he also had a critical awareness in a strongly political, non-ideological sense. He had understood the anthropological error professed by surrealism, the mystification, the fetishistic superstition practiced in surrealist procedures; for all the interest surrealism has historically had from an experimental point of view, it represents a phase of the epochal crisis: the surrealist act is symptomatic, inventive, not at all creative.
Now, for all the interest surrealism had from an experimental point of view, it failed anthropologically; Dadaism too; all the experiments of the historical avant-garde failed with respect to the intentions that had provoked them.
One must understand the reason for these failures.
They were all attempts not to give another frame to existence, but to remove every frame and understand the Origin of Life, the mystery of good and evil, of birth and death.
The original need that animates every true, authentic artistic search is that of seeking and finding the Meaning of the World, of the forces that bring it into being, not of interpreting them.
It is a matter of knowing the Nature of the World: seeing the forces that give life to the tree, the stone, hatred, friendship, enmity of the early twentieth century and the end of the nineteenth. So we speak after these, but the true transition—how did we move from figurative representation to the possibility of painting whatever one wanted?
No artist has ever painted what they generically wanted, far from it! Mondrian, for example, paints to understand the true nature of his will; he intended to seek a pictorial process that would return to him the true vision of the being of things; he sought an art generating Knowledge.
He was animated by a need that can be called strictly “mystical”; he aspired to an intelligence capable of actively contemplating the living Mystery of the World; he desired to be aware of the mystery of Life and Death, to no longer be subjugated by dialectical-dualistic reason; he wanted an art not at all ideological or merely aesthetic, but capable of giving him the immediate Vision of the original, irreducible forces generating the world of Appearances.
But to reach this state of Creative, archetypal Intelligence, you must first pass through an absolute mental silence! You must extinguish every mental image and every conscious, but especially unconscious, psychologism, which means thinking Nothingness, or rather experiencing the death of the small, pretentious, delirious consciousness.

Badini:
Are we living in a paradoxical situation today?

Pinto:
Paradoxical in the sense that we are not capable of enduring and transcending the conflicts that anguish our emotional, volitional, and thinking life.

Badini:
Paradoxical, as always in modernity—that is, paradoxical modernity, in the sense that it recognizes itself as paradoxical.
The art you represent seems almost like a sort of stratagem with which it is possible not to lose the thread of reason, the sense of the discourse.

Pinto:
This is only one aspect already evident in my early works: if you carefully read all the critical texts contained in the catalog of my anthological exhibition at the Mazzotta Foundation, you will find that from the beginning, intuitively, instinctively, and increasingly consciously, I have sought to practice an art not at all ideological; in different forms, Ragghianti, Argan… Bellasi, Marramao, etc., testify to this.
Massimo Cacciari understood it immediately when he saw my works: my work seeks to know the Truth, but for this, one must Transcend critical thinking, zeroing out all conscious and unconscious, sub-rational images, without getting caught in the labyrinth of indefinite psychic automatisms. But one must begin by exercising critical thinking with rigor, not practicing it in an ideological, haphazard, approximate way.
To reach an authentic intelligence or transcendent Vision, one must first assume critical thinking, not evade it.

Badini:
I mean reason in the sense of the possibility of operating; otherwise, there wouldn’t even be the possibility of living, at the limit.

Pinto:
In the current moment, we have a way of existing that is well-defined, for example, by the concept of Mass man.
It is mere survival, not Living. The mass individual needs some psychological tricks that estrange them from their condition of real insignificance; otherwise, they could not bear it. Human individuality in the system of the contemporary economy can only passively vegetate; the Person, a unified Ego, does not really exist, but rather an ego that continuously oscillates between paranoia and schizophrenia. The human is a ghost of itself, and if by chance it notices, tragedies occur; it has no means to face the crisis, it takes pills and goes to the psychologist or psychoanalyst, who cannot but have a function no different from the pill.
A social situation has been reached in which the reification of the false is as overbearing as it is impotent and unnoticed. The forced conditioning is as strong as it is unnoticed; one survives through the use of mental and psychic prostheses that cannot but engender indifference and slothful states of mind. When meeting others, a dialogic relationship is not created, and individuals no longer exercise an authentically dialogic word or intersubjective relations: passions and emotions are betrayed, denied, and instrumentalized by the unreasonable, irrational reasons of the Market.
The beginning of the awakening of an authentic possibility of human conjugation with the other—first of all with the other closest to us, ourselves—must pass through a conscious assumption of the state of grave crisis in which one survives daily, day and night.
But assuming the state of crisis is painful, healthily painful: but how is it possible to be cured if one does not perceive that they are ill?

Let’s go back to the 1950s: at that time, I instinctively did not feel I could choose between one aesthetic direction or another, and I sensed with great unease that with the advent of Informalism, pictorial research had definitively curled up, tangled in itself, closed within its own emotional and mental pains without a way out.
The real question of the historical avant-garde had been: how to make an art that would forget itself, its indefinite falling back into its alienating separateness, and grant man the ability to See Things as they are, to grasp their authentic Presence, to have an immediate perception of the real rather than a fantastic, delirious reception?
Some strong individualities had understood the drama of the Modern but then glossed over it; they practiced, according to various individual temperaments, psychological irony, which is a way of fleeing the real problems. Irony, at its core, is a fascinating cowardice, a cover, an expedient for practicing a pusillanimous state of mind; irony masks an abyssal existential void, useful only for inflating and deflating one’s own small, historically determined ego.

Badini:
Does irony hold up poorly in figurative art?

Pinto:
It is an expedient, an emotional trick; it masks an intellectual impotence and a real sentimental impotence! In the practice of irony, Picasso is deadly; he would exercise it in a ferocious way.

Badini:
It becomes dramatic and playful.

Pinto:
It is humanly a failure: it is a betrayal of the fundamental need that every individual naturally has: the need for freedom and fraternity.

Badini:
In the field of visual arts, it is then completely ahistorical; it must nevertheless draw from literature, and it always draws in the wrong way.

Pinto:
Ahistorical? Why?

Badini:
It is not recognizable by anyone.

Pinto:
Irony says and unsays: whoever practices it is inevitably destined to be overwhelmed by anguish and sloth. Irony mortally wounds natural emotions and passions; it betrays the original desire for truth, freedom, beauty, friendship, and love. Irony is the mask of an abyssal despair.
Life cannot be betrayed; the innate violence of the contradictions that animate the human soul must either be faced or narcissistically mystified, but in the end, one remains fatally overwhelmed by the nihilistic spirit—bored, indifferent, oppressed, depressed, desperate.
The sado-masochistic oscillation is lethal; it distorts the natural vital energies of existence, engendering indefinite forms of overbearing impotence.
But if one exercises slowly, very slowly, patiently, the strength that grants us the ability to inhibit the perverse—first ironic, then angry, and finally even delinquent—narcissistic, sado-masochistic complacency, we actually accept to suffer the healthy pain of a cure that will blind the diseased gaze but in reality heals the eye. And slowly, patiently, we will begin to simply see the World: it will truly be Seen.
It will be Seen simply with a heart full of wonder at recognizing, beyond the apparent senselessness of existence, the already innate beauty of created Things.
Octavio Paz states that “If the eyes are the organs of contemplation, the Heart is the center of loving.”
In the Moment in which the impulse of the Faustian will is extinguished and one experiences the indifference or detachment of the Ego from automatically adhering to the flow of indeterminate, blinding psychological vitalism—and yet attention does not remain enchanted in a state of slothful insignificance, but remains awake, vigilant—in this very particular moment, the artificial procedures disappear and the immediate, unspeakable presence of the Other appears, which “teaches the clumsy and hasty hand delay and a greater delicacy in grasping […] the genius of the heart, from whose touch everyone departs richer, not graced or astonished, not benefited and oppressed as if by an alien good, though richer in themselves, newer than before, unsealed, breathed upon and inspired by a southern wind, perhaps more insecure, more delicate, more fragile, more broken, but full of hopes that do not yet have a name”—it is Friedrich Nietzsche speaking.

Monteveglio, 1991

“Why do I paint?
At a certain point, I began to sniff around here and there like a dog searching for a trail: I was looking for the path to understand the meaning of my life.
I observed, read, looked, frequented different environments, desired to know thoroughly everything I felt animated by a presence that obscurely resonated with what troubled me. It is necessary to emphasize that this wandering was practiced in a condition of economic scarcity; economic circumstances assume great importance in the context of truly cognitive experiences.
Two orders of necessity animated my search: to succeed in perceiving with immediacy the obscure object of my anxieties, to find the means to render these transitive, humanly, creatively active among people.
I wanted to assimilate entirely, without possibility of misunderstandings and misrepresentations, what I encountered: Saint Augustine, Simone Weil… Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Freud, Steiner, Evola, Adorno, Bloch, Benjamin, Marx, Mondrian, Duchamp… Canetti…, any circumstance, thing, phenomenon in which I found myself involved.
This work, from a certain point onward, developed under living conditions radically outside the conventions of existence to which I was accustomed.

I stopped practicing painting in 1959 because the need to understand the nature of categories and mental places from which artistic theories sprang became primary. I intuited forcefully that there is a way of thinking about necessities and problems that does not allow cognitive faculties to understand and resolve them truthfully; rather, it complicates and conceals them in a boundless labyrinth of pseudo-reasons. It was urgent to try to understand what the proper method was for “thinking about thinking,” what the position of a mind capable of producing comprehension and true intelligence of the things one experiences. I found myself in an existential condition where the entire economy had to be invented from the beginning: production, management, productive techniques, and the exchange system; everything was foreign to that firmly ordered, technically established existence in which I was nonetheless inserted before. I lived in a condition of real economic confusion, with many fragments of intense and harsh exterior and interior life to reconnect in order to produce things of elementary necessity (money, fire, water… sympathy with the other…). It was necessary to decide how to organize life economically to satisfy the most elementary subsistence needs in an environment uncultivated morally, ideologically, technically: a situation reset to zero and pregnant with urgencies, disruptive tensions, violent disturbances.
Especially from 1960 to 1964, I lived in a state of confusion and anxiety just beneath the surface because I no longer knew how to organize my life prospectively.
But it was in this state of interior disorientation and material disorganization that, engaged in doing the things that are elementarily necessary (getting up and washing at the spring, eating, cultivating, reading, procuring heating, etc.), meaning began to emerge. In that truly poor condition, in an old abandoned peasant house in the middle of the Aretine mountains, in a situation that would not have been possible to choose had I been aware of what it truly meant, I began confusedly to feel that my existence had its own foundation.
Slowly, I realized that a highly complex and determining will was expressing itself slowly but firmly beyond any ideological justification and sublimation.

These are reflections in hindsight, certainly. It was, as I said, a limit condition, not voluntarily chosen.
It is not easy to communicate this experience to those who have not in some way experienced it; it is difficult to understand even for those people who were daily close to me, since, while accompanying each other in the same exterior situations, while obliged to perform the same gestures, one can remain substantially foreign to the interior experience through which these are experienced and assumed by the other.
The assumption of the meaning of certain facts in terms of human experience depends on imponderable and entirely personal interior factors.
There are experiences that hurl us far back in our individual existence, forcing us to become aware of facts and phenomena that in common life remain in oblivion, concealed by the weight of appearances, by conventions, by the repression of fear.

In the second half of the 1950s, I worked in advertising (at the American Advertising Agency, by A. Calabresi). I painted, began to exhibit some work, frequented the French Academy at Villa Medici, worked with a group of friends.
But oppressed by the leaden cultural climate and by the turn my existence had taken, I left and spent about a year in London, in 1959.
I returned to Rome from England after a stay in France and shortly afterward left it definitively; this effectively meant leaving the entire previous system of life, the one in which I had lived since birth.

I took up my first painting (Still Life, 1953) again after the years of Aretine detachment. I was struck by it because I saw that everything I had been searching for was already there. I realized that in this painting there was absolutely nothing of the sensibility and sensoriality of the Roman School type, except for a very superficial resemblance. Instead, I saw that there was a sensibility and sensoriality closer to that of the early Cézanne.
In that first still life of mine from 1953, I recognized the traits of a pictorial character expressed in an immediate way. There is no lyrical emphasis; I do not see in it that emotional dilation characteristic of the entire Roman School and of expressionism in general. There is no psychologism. […]
Who in those years, but also afterward, concretely posed the problem of practicing artistic exercise to exorcise psychological repression?
[…] In the arrangement of forms, I perceive a strange gliding movement from above that now rather makes me think of certain Duchampian forms. The more I observed that little painting, the more evident it appeared to me that it expressed an archaic presence. Now I know that I stopped painting because I had intuited that in contemporary artistic experience in painting there was nothing that could positively serve to indicate the path toward a truly realist art. Yes, there was Cézanne. But precisely Cézanne’s art is a testimony, not an indication of poetics.
When I resumed painting with The Stump in 1966, I was inadvertently trying to rediscover that mental condition present in that first still life of 1953; in this, I consciously recognized the only condition for being able to sensibly seek broader knowledge.
I say “I resumed painting”: fundamentally, without fully realizing it, I simply wanted to repaint my first painting, which was not, despite everything, culturalized, was not the expression of acquired poetic representations… The similarities with some poetics were merely occasional. There was no poetics, in my opinion, because the references are superficial, infantile; instead, the sensorial structure is here present in a living body in its first spatial-temporal relations, directly expressed, genetic.
The only person who immediately perceived the authentic quality of this painting was Massimo Cacciari; he surprised me because it was the first time that someone did not immediately say Roman School, but named Cézanne.

If one speaks of Cézanne in this case, one does not speak of his art understood precisely as obstinate, conscious, complicated, stubborn effort with which he seeks the vision of reality, but of some consonances with the fundamental data of the character of sensoriality, understood precisely as the basis of a “matter” to be grown; one speaks of a need to be assumed as the practice of painting, as knowledge and not as representation of thoughts, feelings, impulses presumed already experienced. Therefore, when I resumed painting, it was clear to me that I had not and could not “break” anything at all, but had to find the ways to undertake a painting capable of reflecting objects and phenomena, silently, assuming them with truthful intelligence, without pathetic identifications and conceptualisms. In those years, when I showed the works to critics, they inevitably misunderstood. Even Arcangeli, when he saw them in Ferrara, for the first time in 1971.
Even Ragghianti, who nevertheless intuited forcefully, supported me and presented my first solo exhibition at the Strozzina in Florence. One can imagine then what those who in the sixties, seventies (and beyond) played at being the neo-avant-garde could “think.”
But at that time I could not clearly realize the nature of these misunderstandings and misinterpretations.
Certainly, more or less everyone sensed that my research was serious, even if they thought I was confused and excessive, perhaps not very gifted. But I believe they also felt discomfort, irritation, and fear.

[…] What I experienced at the Valle is not so easily representable. Over time, I discovered that that “feeling” was of a nature, how to say, ontological; it had a permanent quality, it was not a feeling determined by the ambivalence of naturalistic consciousness, it was an evolved, unifying feeling, it contained with generative force. In any case, it marked my life decisively, bringing forth from the depths of my existence dimensions of feeling, willing, and thinking that without that experience of such different life could never have emerged. Those presences remain and, beyond my thinking will and contingent determinations, still orient me. And they orient my work in painting; they are its object, the thing to be understood infinitely.

I resumed painting in Monteveglio in 1965-66.
In 1970, after having made a certain number of paintings, I wanted to show them, and I began, with photos taken by myself, to go around here and there to critics and galleries. Then I had another extremely significant experience: the absolute foreignness of my work and my position, the impossibility of communicating and dialoguing with those in the field. I understood that an enormous, perhaps unbridgeable distance had been produced. The “professionals” worked confident of what they were doing, cited, distinguished, combined and uncombined dates, places, names and, above all, decided on how and who had the right to exist or not, on who was already dead and on how one needed to be born, on what was or was not necessary to do in order to exist.
There was no possibility of contact. I was frightened, because the reactions of others to my works were simply absurd. They never referred to real facts, to the real experience expressed in the artistic operations I showed them. Their observations, all or almost all, took as a point of reference consolidated ideologies, more or less in vogue; in short, I found myself dealing with different forms of conformism, with standardized languages, not with forms of knowledge. They were encounters wrong from the start, absurd, hallucinatory, which cost me great effort and with apparently insignificant results. Certainly, I showed them awkward things, in which real difficulties were spoken of, and I was answered with stories of gods, cosmic cycles, mythical dates, planetary mechanisms. Yet I became increasingly convinced that this was the only realistic path to pursue, the only one useful also to give me clearer awareness of what I perceived as valid and pregnant with future in my experience and in my work.

The first to realistically take an interest in my work was Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti; the exhibition at the Strozzina in 1971 and then in Ferrara was the first concrete conclusion of his interest.
These exhibitions, however, marked the beginning of a new period. And it was in Ferrara, at Palazzo dei Diamanti, that I brought Arcangeli one day; I spent a very useful afternoon with him.
Already from his first contact with my works, I understood that he had not grasped the starting points of the research (and it could not have been otherwise), nor the mental mode with which I confronted strong needs that were partly also felt by him. […] my real problem was to understand the nature of the forces that animate the Super-ego, the quality of the will. […] It certainly remains, however, that he made an authentic effort to try to understand me, that yes. But I do not believe he grasped what I was searching for.
For example, he told me he did not find “sufficient pressure” in my works. I understood very well what he meant by “pressure.” Arcangeli with this word expressed a psychological content that he considered an essential quality, the human contribution of those aesthetic theories on naturalism to which he always referred. But those theories of his are very reductive of artistic experience and, in my conviction, vitiated the perception that Arcangeli had of the work, did not allow him to understand some aspects and, in my opinion, the most complex and elevated ones. Some of his perceptions were confused—but he did perceive, yes, with intensity and participation.
Of my work, he did not intuit the nature of the need, the quality of the vocation that moved it. I myself in those years had not understood its character with sufficient clarity, and I could not express myself except gropingly. But he said: “Show me how you look at these works of yours…”.
After I, in front of the paintings, had more or less mimed, so to speak, what I saw as the most significant movements, Arcangeli told me that he seemed to understand them better and that he needed to reflect on them.
I believe, however, that the nature of the obsession that compelled me to paint escaped him, that is, my vocation to painting as practice, instrument, and means of knowledge of the nature of the will as the foundation of the living Self.

Before recognizing the basic quality of this vocation, there were harsh, anguished crises. But from the moment one begins to perceive the quality of a vocation, the entire individuality begins to breathe, to rise, and elementary vitality gathers around a magnetic nucleus; then many phenomena that were previously experienced as contradictory and conflictual simply lose the sense of enmity, a deeper, ontologically founding feeling shows itself increasingly strong and clear, a force of growth manifests itself and emerges spontaneously beyond the representations and affections of habitual consciousness: the split or separation between conceptuality and praxis is simply overcome, not evaded through a regressive movement provoked by an artificial composition, lyrical self-contemplation that is mere manipulation of natural conflict, not its real transcendence.
The true nature of this transcendence is what matters here to make the effort to understand: to observe the ways through which this need for overcoming manifests itself, how it is assumed by us, to follow its paths, the real or artificial solutions, the achievements, the evasions that we experience through art: it matters not out of cultural curiosity, it is a need that imposes itself as an obsession.
Obviously, this purpose cannot be pursued through a defined project. One perceives a point, but not the perspective vanishing lines that lead to it.
These lines must be invented through strokes of knowledge, courage, pain, hope, dedication. When I resumed painting, all these things were, obviously, congested and confused, with a character that was also delirious and hallucinatory. I intuited that this turbulent condition originated from events that animated the life of the Self, from a tension of demonic will that certainly could not be exorcised with intellectual projects or simple sentimental good intentions. Will subjugated by an uncontainable impulse of predatory affirmation that lives spontaneously within our volitional impulse and perverts intuitions, good intentions, desires for peace and forgiveness. It is a murderous, overbearing will that degrades knowledge, intuitions, that knows how to gratify itself with acute and realistic justifications, that performs good and evil, beautiful and ugly.
What I am saying, these phenomena were obscurely present and experienced in me since the 1950s and I believe also much earlier, in childhood. Now I have some active understanding of them. Now I understand why I perceived as nonsense, superficial and contrived intellectualism, what I heard said about modern art and the avant-garde in the cultural climate of the fifties and sixties, and things have not changed to this day.
I simply could not digest, for example, those discourses on modern abstractionism opposed to realism or other.
Oppositions such as those between abstract and figurative were and are pseudo-problems. The cerebral and pathetic expressions of artists and critics so-called militant in this or that tendency: constructions of a reason of ministerial inspectors, from the cognitive point of view were and are absolutely nonexistent distinctions. Kandinsky, Mondrian, and others never proposed oppositions of this type.

When I understood that I had to paint, it was a true liberation: it is truer to say that it was painting that chose me. After the intimate recognition of my vocation arose the need for how to assume it concretely, how to adhere to the “destiny” that had imposed itself on me. One is then assailed by a thousand problems that seem unsolvable.
Certainly, at the moment of taking possession of my “destiny” as a painter, it was as if my body had been restored to me together with the intelligence to make it grow. It is not easy for me to represent this experience with completeness, of which, among other things, I became fully aware only many years later. Speaking of such determining experiences, one always risks making rhetoric. Yet it is the apparently most banal words that correspond most to the interior sense that certifies us of our vocation and its destiny. Obviously, painting is not the only means of searching for truth. When for several years I did not paint, I was obviously trying to understand what the “matter” was with which I had to confront the need for this search. I turned in several directions, I knew different environments, the most distant from each other. But what made me recognize the value of vocation that the practice of painting had for me was that experience begun in 1960 and which in certain of its peculiar characteristics continues to this day. […] An experience that evoked from the depths ancestral forces, unimaginable dimensions of the soul, the mind, the Self.
But how to assume this misunderstood universe, how to express it? It was then that painting presented itself to me as a vocation, as a means of observation and objective knowledge for the search for truth and the meaning of what I was experiencing.

With painting, I can intuit and attempt to dispose myself to that intelligent comprehension of intuitions, thoughts, feelings, impulses, volitions, concerns, reasonings, fantasies, of all that elementary vitality that emerges chaotically. It is a matter of not analytically dissociating this vitality, of not making it regress through abstract schematizations. One must observe it in all its eruptive force, without dilating it in a fantastic emotional expansion, without oppressing this natural chaos within some ideology, without evading it with intellectualistic idealizations.
This chaos must not be interpreted, but only observed and resisted, “simply” thus acquiring the capacity to see it globally, to see in this “black hole,” in this indefinite swarming of physical, psychic, mental reactions. To see while resisting fear, anguish. To the extent that one succeeds, then one begins to glimpse the meaning; the chaos slowly illuminates from within. This transmutation I seek to express in the exercise of painting.
The sensible signs of this resistance, if they are not a coerced response given by fear, introduce into the operation an original element that, precisely insofar as it is such, is initially unnoticed, but that works in depth, releases the powers of the soul, increases sensoriality and, finally, emerges to conscious perception. All this happens very slowly and through repeated efforts and continuous struggles. Everything began from the moment I irreversibly perceived that, reflecting with common reason, I could neither grasp nor realistically animate the nucleus of even profound intuitions that I experienced. Indeed, I understood that the manipulation of intuition by means of this consciousness deformed and mystified the true nature of the intuited truths. I searched here and there, hoping to find a “matter” by working on which the same intuitions, so to speak, were already potentially present, in a latent way, certainly, within the matter itself. Present subliminally, latently active. Finally, after various and harsh attempts, I understood that only painting had this elementary and founding value for me.

Here is the reason for painting. As I said, a vocation, for me, not a simple profession to indulge in the construction of more or less learned linguistic games.
I resumed work because I had perceived that painting was the only means at my disposal to confront the complexity of the experience of the limit lived with the hope of not being overwhelmed by it, or regressing on infantile tracks, but of assuming it transitively.
Without painting, I saw no hope of growth.”

Bruno Pinto, To Leave the Valley. Critique of Myself, edited by Omar Calabrese, La Casa Usher, Ponte alle Grazie Editori, Florence, 1992, pp. 11-20

Bruno Pinto, in Cat. In Front of and Through, Mazzotta, Milan 2005