SMOKING

Alessandro Mendini

For some time, I had been thinking of reflecting on the figure of my young friend Alessandro Busci, who came to work in my studio as an architect a few years ago. An artist who has always aroused my curiosity. I have to say that his work eludes me, also because I always regard it with the tainted eye of a designer. And little by little Busci cut himself a private area (on the computer) among our projects where colours, models and the use of perspective allow him enough space for honest, as much as controlled, possibility of expression and vision.

I often saw this refined character leaving my studio (architect’s studio) with pieces of materials, samples of smooth or moulded sheet metal, sheets of fibreglass, bits of masonry, textures on surfaces of every kind: the materials of an architect. But then I also saw him return here from his studio (artist’s studio), showing me the images of paintings (real and proper paintings) of an immediate, synthetic touch, where the brushstrokes struggle to spread out their fluid enamels, watery and pasty over the rough, hostile and violent surfaces gathered from the components of building materials.

I think that the solution of Busci’s possible conflict between the soul of an architect and that of the painter (and maybe even of the art historian) lies in this original debate. A path full of obstacles. Ransom, sublimation, and the evanescence of the pictorial sign in contradiction with the harshness of reality.

He generates delicate signs as a sapient calligrapher, outlining dark flashes, nocturnal lights, hypnotic monochrome landscapes with difficult promise. A dark vision of the urban drama in the world. A sort of inverted De Pisis, where the light choreography of the brush movement of De Pisis is wholly substituted by scenarios of metropolitan apocalypse, by the lyrical, theatrical monochrome suggestions.

His paintings full of gestures that prophesy the oily, petroliferous worlds, of atmospheres where hope persists only through some rare concession of a few touches of yellow or orange.

And yet there is no sense of admonition, no punishment and no rhetoric in Busci, instead there is love and great dedication in these pseudo instant shots, these films of the new Milan. Busci’s landscapes seem to me to be the fruit of very slow psychic and mental maturing and sensitivity. Images found and observed from up high in a building on Corso Lodi where, since high school days, he has looked at and metabolized all the possible shades of the railway hubs, skies, long walls, lampposts, clouds, rain and tarmac (from the window and table of his bedroom). Right up to the airport and motorway nearby. Yet never once a human figure exists? The privileged observatory of a romantic suburb, predestined by Busci to become the immaterial material that would be slid onto the uneven textured supporting materials like a glossy transfer.

By a curious twist of fate, looking down from his window, Alessandro Busci can even see the courtyard of my studio. And as for me, my psyche and memory are saturated with those of Sironi, of that Milanese landscape culture so dear to Busci, and of the artistic emotions and melancholy that matured within me in the same mire and limbo…Yet I believe that it is not enough to reflect on the external figure of Busci. His painting (which is frightening) has to be transformed into experience. It may be that in order to truly comprehend his paintings and their message, one must “get inside them”. A deeper interpretation requires a different type of approach: an existential approach. I am not quite ready for that, yet it will come and I am preparing myself for it. I thought of organising myself to take an excursion (me, as a real person) inside, in the interior of Alessandro Busci’s paintings. I want to understand. As a good Milanese bourgeois gentleman (as is Busci, as it happens), founded on the most precise traditions, I am going to the “right” shops to kit myself out with those clothes and instruments that I imagine will be suitable for allowing me to survive the adventure. An oxygen mask, clothes suitable for freezing or boiling weather, etc, Factor 30 face and lip cream, non-slip overshoes, asbestos gloves (one never knows if one might have to touch some of that metal), fleece, high protection goggles: the inventory of exact (and elegant) clothes and equipment to gain access to an unknown habitat, that will surely arouse strong sensations. Certainly, a difficult, particular and dangerous environment. But perhaps not unknown, maybe almost familiar, recognisable, even very well known. What great desire, what great nostalgia to undertake that disconcerting dive into urban- cosmic space of the painter-not-architect Alessandro Busci. What great urge to find out for oneself. To breathe the unimaginable breaths of improbable air, to the distant sound of an orchestra (surely that of La Scala?) And then perhaps a surprise… that is to say, if after so many preparations, exploring Busci’s world, I discovered that one should be dressed in a dinner jacket? The rare yellow and orange brushstrokes: perhaps distant, fresh energy of a rising sun, instead of the dusks of our civilization?