He never said the word retrospective, but even so Gloria Moure had a hard time convincing Giovanni Anselmo (Ivrea, 1934- Turin, 2023) to embark on a journey through his most emblematic works that would culminate in a new production for the rooms of the Guggenheim Bilbao. The artist was approaching ninety years old, but, "like most of his generation, he did not like the idea of accumulating works because it involved looking to the past and he was always an artist of action" , says the historian, critic and art curator. Moure finally counted on his enthusiastic involvement for an exhibition, Beyond the horizon, which shows the worldview of an artist-philosopher who made visible the invisible forces that govern the universe and which, as he had passed into his own shadow during a dawn hike to the summit of the Stromboli island volcano in 1965, he dissolved into infinity in December, unable to attend the most important tribute has ever dedicated He was 89 years old.
Giovanni Anselmo was already an extraordinary draftsman, but his true birth as an artist took place on that trip to the small island of the Aeolian Islands, off the coast of Sicily. Right at the top of the volcano, above the sun, he noticed that he had no shadow. "The sun rising behind him did not cast a shadow on the ground but invisibly on the sky, and this made him aware of his relationship with the universe. From then on he decides to stop representing, because he does not believe in a reality that is the same for everyone, and starts working with the idea of presenting reality", explains Moure, who projects at the exhibition doors a slide of the young artist in the volcano, as if from the painting by Caspar David Friedrich. Everything that follows will be an attempt to make us aware of the role that matters such as gravity, magnetic fields, time, orientation or decay play in our lives.
In one of his best-known sculptures, Untitled (Eating Structure), from 1968, he intersperses a lettuce between two blocks of granite linked by a copper wire. If the lettuce was not replaced regularly and allowed to decompose, the whole would collapse. A sculpture that requires eating on a regular basis and draws our attention to what is there but is not obvious or visible, although it is part of life. Art also helps us feel alive, Anselmo thought. Even when danger threatens, as in the two cables plugged into the current, one positive and one negative, which if you touch them at the same time cause a surge. Or in the swimming pool covered with water and quicklime where visitors can build brick architectures at the cost of burning their hands. What matters is not what happens or does not happen, but what is latent.
In his idea of presenting and not representing, Anselmo placed a mirror facing the wall, turned into an object, and fixed his obsession with the infinite in the ultramarine color, which he used to indicate a direction in his work that related it to an external space. He was very good at merging perceptible and imperceptible realities and made poetic use of language. A projector on the floor projects the word Particolare, but it only appears when a visitor places a hand or their own body in front of it. "He was always interested in emphasizing that the world is made up of individuals who, however insignificant they may seem to us, are part of a whole and that without them the world would not be what it is", argues the curator. He photographed himself running through a field, merging with the world and with his art, in a work entitled Entrar a l'obra, from 1971.
