Artistic publications

ART: PUBLICATIONS

“GIUSEPPE LOCATI. ART AND THOUGHT”

Giorgio Mondadori Editore - 2017

I first met Giuseppe Locati in 1954. I was strolling through the Park of Monza and stopped to greet Amleto Emery, an established painter, who was overseeing an open-air exercise being carried out by Giuseppe Locati, then fourteen years old. Locati has exhibited in prestigious galleries in New York, Tokyo, London, Rome and Milan. His works have been reviewed by important critics such as Sanesi, Venturoli, Alberto Crespi and Daniele Astrologo. A graduate Engineer of the Politecnico of Milan, he has published works of epistemic meditations, which I read with some difficulty owing to my different cultural background. The artist’s output is classified by Sanesi as belonging to the sphere of abstraction, with “intellectual” products that can be catalogued as avant-garde. And yet, I venture to add, Locati always produces objects of a certain concreteness, almost allusive of a secret functionality. And I find myself, citing the work the artist left in Monza at the Casa del Volontariato, before a work that expresses a conceptual reading of reality, schematising it through basic components, modules and entities that graphically depict positions of a metaphysical reading of everyday reality. The evolution of the philosophical, ethical and aesthetic experience of Locati’s thought, accompanied in parallel by his artistic commitment, led him to publish, in November 2013, “Perché Cristo. Il pensiero complesso” (“Why Christ. Complex Thought”), issued by the Free University of Human and Technological Sciences of Lugano. I can say that I read and reread it with keen benefit, so much so that I earned an invitation to take part in and speak at its presentation. In this work Locati gives “his” answer to his existential questions: there is matter and spirit; there are the things of the world and the thoughts of the mind; common elements must be found, and the human being has only one means of finding them: the word of language. Toward the end of the last century, Giuseppe Locati suffered — and confessed — a long disappointment and the rejection provoked in him by contemporary art. In art there weighs, in truth, the silence of thought, though abundantly yet uselessly compensated for by the loquacity of criticism and the megaphone of the media. What prevails is thought already declared “weak”. But why not define it better still: “short”? Add to this the immorality of considering economic value alone, which has destroyed or, at the very least, heavily constrained every sound criterion of judgement. Undeniable is the opposition between the things of the world and the thoughts of the mind. A new way of thinking is needed. The works of recent years are grouped and designated by the author with the significant title of Entities: they have the structure of an atom, “bound therefore to the cold, scientific, physical-inductive component of our understanding”, but also “a decisive, disordered and warm presence of colour bound to the psychic, spiritual and deductive component of our perceiving”. “Strong” thought and the search for beauty, by contrast, continue to exist happily, entrenched in the sanctuaries of classical thought.

This is the point of arrival of the long, suffered, meditated cultural and artistic life of Giuseppe Locati.

Prof. Pier Franco Bertazzini