Luca Bertolo

HM, HE, HA is the onomatopoeic title of the exhibition that brings together almost fifty works by the painters Luca Bertolo and Manuele Cerutti at the Fondazione Coppola in Vicenza until 11 January 2025, curated by Davide Ferri and Elena Volpato.

A pause for reflection, the formulation of a hypothesis and a flicker of surprise are the interjections that title the rhapsodic itinerary that winds its way through the themes in the tower that houses the Foundation. We present a double interview to the painters, today we meet Luca Bertolo to talk about dematerialising painting, the role of the stain and painting painting itself.

The exhibition took the form of a dialogue and confrontation between works by two artists who had never exhibited together before. It was a game of actions and reactions in a context, that of the keep where the Fondazione is housed, that forced a close comparison. The first works we encounter turn our gaze downwards, towards the earth and the elements that sprout from it. Then, gradually traversing various thematic cores, we arrive at the compass, where a recent sound work of yours concludes the journey. Did anything unexpected happen in this visual dialectic? How did you organise the selection, also with the curators Elena Volpato and Davide Ferri?

It was a gamble. We did not start from a theme or stylistic affinities. I have appreciated Manuele’s refined pictorial intelligence for years, but there is also a more general sensibility that brings us closer. The one with Ferri and Volpato was a real dialogue: repartee, image calling image, word calling word. In the end, as many visitors have admitted to us somewhat incredulously, it seems that there are more points of contact between our works, which are so different, than expected. For me, what is important is the general scope: sensibilities touch each other even where one would not expect them to.

In some conversations I have read, you quote from Sol LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art (1969): ‘Conceptual Artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.” In your work, there is a subtle affinity with conceptual thinking and there resonates a polarity, or rather an articulation, between the matter of painting and the tension of the concept; an articulation that leaps to conclusions, to those ‘mystical truths’, that logic cannot reach. Is painting for you a mental thing?

Just by chance yesterday I wrote: “The famous mentalist painter Marcel Duchamp…”. Your question is a fine one, touching on a fundamental aspect, but I fear that if I tried to give it the answer it deserves, I would not have enough space in this interview. We could start with Leonardo, who also placed so much emphasis on the mental dimension of drawing. I would like to get away with an aphorism: Oscar Wilde via Google, which I consult like an oracle, and here is the first result (I swear!): “No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.” This seems to me an excellent starting point for saying that painting is matter that dematerialises itself by producing an image. The image, as the presence of an absence, travels on an orbit, moving away from us for a while, then back towards us for another while, cyclically. We should always speak of this relationship as a cycle.

The stain of colour and its ambivalence play an important role in the practice of both: it is used now as negation and obfuscation, now as affirmation and underlining.

The American painter Helen Frankenthaler is also famous for using this expedient, then she titled her paintings with evocative phrases, as if to emphasise that the world reveals itself to us more as we imagine it rather than as it actually is. In your painting, you are interested in the vague and undefined spot because of the freedom it embodies, because of the way it brings us closer without taking us into the abstract, or for other reasons?

To put it roughly, I could say that drawing is gesture, sign, construction, activity, whereas painting is sampling, texture, observation, passivity. For me, the stain is a synecdoche of painting: to surrender to the world of the visible before its determination. The stain is representation at its larval stage, pure potentiality.

Both in your paintings and in Manuele’s there is sometimes the transformation of the support into the actual subject of the painting, I am thinking of Veronica 18#05 and Abstract Painting #3 and Manuele’s Il Sospetto (VIII). A meta-pictorial discourse that shifts attention outside, behind and beyond the painting, in a dialectic between support and image that short-circuits the physical presence of the canvas-object with the absence of the image, concealing by evoking seems to be the leitmotif; is it more a discourse on painting and its tools or on the mysticism of images?

The discourse of painting on itself seems to me a minor perversion that should be kept in the private sphere. The situation changes when one succeeds in treating one’s medium in a metaphorical key (painting as transcendence, for example): in this case we can aspire to universality, and the eroticism unleashed by a certain use of a medium seems to me morally justified. You are right: a meta-pictorial discourse that shifts attention outside, behind, beyond the painting… Perhaps painting does this more than other media, but I think all art is playing catch-up with the world. Not being able to make sense of things, in order to escape the anxiety, we all – artists and the public – do what Freud’s little nephew did when he threw the spool under the bed and then happily made it reappear. He was getting used to accepting his mother’s absence, Freud explained, foreshadowing the joy of her return.

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