Antonio Recalcati, extraordinary “Imprints” of a solitary art – Corriere.it

As a great painter and celebrity of the 1960s, he was also the face of Orpheus in the extraordinary Comic poem by Dino Buzzati. Antonio Recalcati, nomadic artist and great interpreter of a painting made of shadows and footprints,he passed away last Sunday at the age of 84, after an illness that had slowly taken him away from the Italian and international art scene that had seen him as a protagonist.

Antonio Recalcati (born in Bresso in 1938, but it was Milan and the city where he lived) was truly a interpreter recognized for the innovative power of his research:he made his debut as a self-taught young man in 1957 with a solo exhibition at the Galleria Totti in Milan. In that same year we see him with Piero Manzoni, with whom he signs the manifesto against the San Fedele Prize in the name of the avant-garde, organizing a counter-exhibition at the Jamaica bar. his rebellious attitude soon takes him to Paris and New York where he develops and refines a lucid and painful gaze, especially investigating the dimension of the body and its symbolic presences.

This is how hers are born Fingerprints, traces of the human body, which Antonio Recalcati created by arranging his body painted in color on the canvas: in a sequence of images of his old friend Aurelio Amendola, we see him in 1973 in his studio in Paris, of whom he was very jealous and where he did not enter no one. Blindfolded and throws himself on the ground, he rolls on the canvas, thus leaving an imprint that becomes a painting and a metaphor at the same time. A life completely dedicated to art, his. With total awareness.And it is also captured in his words: I wanted to tell a story. I told mine. If you want to define it in some way, you can say that I underwent a self-analysis operation. If you want, you can simply say that I made a report. A report on my life.

Until the end, while aware of his illness, he was strongly anchored in his life and his works:Just a few days ago he called me – recalls Amendola -. He was voiceless, I felt him suffering, he asked me for a catalog with his photographs. He hadn’t lost his irony and his will to live: This dialysis is killing me, he said laughing. The beautiful world, we continue to fight. But he had left his last wish to his brother Angelo: I don’t want any funerals: no speeches. Only my works must speak.

Recalcati, in the golden time, he was a real star, both as an artist and as a character:a handsome man, endowed with great charm, he dressed like a Vogue model and acted like a cursed artist: handsome, but unfriendly, angry, with an intimately gloomy soul. He had also been engaged to the young daughter of Herbert von Karayan and was amused, he recalled when the great conductor suddenly appeared at his door, fearful of his daughter’s fate. Thus in a chronicle signed by Giuliano Zincone: Seeing him, blond and very pale, wrapped in his black velvet cloaks, elegant and unkempt like an incroyable of the Restoration, one might think that he is playing the character of the artist. In reality, Recalcati is comfortable only in these shoes: in his character of handsome and damnedlace jabots and skin-tight dark dresses, ankle boots and leather belts are natural expressions of her character.

But Recalcati, beyond the character, above all he had with him the strength of his art, which in those years was opposed to the domination of the Informal.And so here are his paintings in which he invents a true form of narration: portraits, panels, scenes and superimposed stories, a series of painted stories. And it is no coincidence that he enchanted Dino Buzzati who dedicated his first important review to him. From there, a deep friendship was born. And then, his footprints: pawing figures waiting to be freed. Of course, his painting evokes an anguished solitude. the search for a man on the existential dimension of all humanity, where individual experience seems to expand into a painful labor, destined, fortunately, for an unavoidable rebirth.

This is confirmed by the cover that Recalcati created (after years of silence) for the Lettura of 1 December 2013: a work that today appears extraordinarily topical, the imprint of a bloody T-shirthow Monument to the martyrs of all invisible wars. Recalcati was a friend of the Corriere: we all remember in the editorial office how one day he asked for colors and dipped his hands on cobalt blue to fix his imprint on the page of the newspaper. And he generously did it for all who asked. Giovanni Testori, reviewing his retrospective at Palazzo Reale, (in 1987) dedicated this perfect portrait to him: Wherever you saw him, he seemed to move at ease with him; he looked, well, winning; he almost as if he were a prince of the suburbs who had succeeded in bewitching and bewitching. Who, like us. he thought he knew him well beyond the armour, the rhythm and the fury of his gestures, he had immediately understood that his true strength lived elsewhere: in the opposite, that is, of the security and arrogance that he exhibited. He lived, blind, in an untreatable innocence: so untreatable as to assume the funereal tones of ruin and mourning.

real. Recalcati was exactly like that, right up to the last minute. He had never forgotten his nature as an artist torn between the excess and immoderation of youth and the measure imposed by maturity.He was also steeped in regrets: in particular of a love that was definitively lost. And who knows, we like to think that Antonio, with his black cloak, his passion and his ineffable irony, has now managed to find his beloved Eurydice