The Brooklyn Rail

The standard history of modern art is one of ever-increasing abstraction and, as the story often goes, purification. There are many reasons to doubt the neatness of this narrative, not least the way it was instrumentalized by CIA-backed cultural “diplomacy” in the context of the Cold War. As far as Italy goes, though—for reasons that have as much to do with the larger context of postwar Italy as the communist faith of those involved, as well as their desire to exorcise the hideous legacy of fascism—this often looked more like a recuperation of the country’s agrarian past, a synthesis rather than a clash between avant-garde ideas and local vernacular traditions.

Mario Cresci (b. 1942)—whose exciting, composite oeuvre as a conceptual artist and photographer is for the first time in the UK the subject of an exhibition, now on view at Large Glass, London—is in this sense not a curious outlier. Rather, he is a striking member of a loose tradition that includes the likes of artists Giuseppe Penone (b. 1947) and Pino Pascali (1935–68), designer Enzo Mari (1932–2020), as well as of course Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–75): artists who tapped into Italy’s rural past and celebrated the richness of its vernacular culture, implicitly seeking to offer a rebuff to consumerism and spectacle, which at that time were radically changing the face of the country.

Cresci’s work was included in Viaggio in Italia, the cult photo book and exhibition curated by Luigi Ghirri (1942–93) which in the mid-eighties revolutionized the idea of Italian landscape. Like Guido Guidi (b. 1941), another photographer featured in the project who shows a similar interest in photography as a medium as well as a Giorgio Morandi-like fixation on the nondescript landscapes of his native Emilia-Romagna, Cresci frequented the Bauhaus-influenced Advanced Course in Industrial Design in Venice in the early 1960s. And indeed, entering the gallery space at Large Glass, the viewer is met with what for lack of a better word looks like a series of architectural reliefs and surveys.

Pointillist sketches producing different colored textures and drawings imitating the modular “feel” of steel rods extending from reinforced concrete foundations sit side by side with experiments that explore the different ways that—as the artist himself puts it in an essay by curator Luca Fiore introducing the show—“photography can transform reality.” Avvicinamento [Approach] and Traslazione [Translation] (both 1973) show how our perception of the same wall traversed by a chalked line can differ greatly just by positioning the camera a little closer or moving it slightly to the side. Meanwhile right by the entrance, Alterazione del quadrato, dalla serie Geometria non euclidea, Venezia 1964–Matera 1972 [Alteration of the Square, from the Non-Euclidean Geometry series, Venice 1964–Matera 1972)] (1972) welcomes the visitor with the same black square seen from sixteen different angles, radically distorting our visual experience of the subject.

Just a few steps further in, the exhibition appears to suddenly change tack. Around 1968, Cresci got involved with the Roman gallery L’Attico and began to take pictures of iconic exhibitions and performances by many artists associated with Arte Povera, including Pascali, Jannis Kounellis (1936–2017), Michelangelo Pistoletto (b. 1933), and Alighiero Boetti (1940–94). Before that, not long after finishing his studies, Cresci had been invited to collaborate in an interdisciplinary urban study of Matera—a town which, much like the region Basilicata where it is located, had long been a shorthand for Italy’s backwardness.

Two triptychs on display—which belong to the slightly later series “Ritratti Reali, Tricarico 1972” [Real Portraits, Tricarico 1972]—show two elderly peasant couples. These photographs could appear as ethnographic studies or perhaps snapshots taken in the documentary tradition of August Sander. However, a closer look reveals that their intention is almost the exact opposite. Deploying the same technique as Avvicinamento, these triptychs actually capture the same scene from three different degrees of proximity. The top image captures husband and wife from a safe distance, surrounded by the paraphernalia of their humble, barren abode. The second is a portrait which reveals them holding what appear to be pictures of their parents. The third is a picture of the photograph itself. The effect is one of revelation as the subjects cease to be passive specimens fixed by the entomological eye of the photographer, and are instead returned to the status of individual possessors of culture and memory.

As it happens, Cresci ended up living a sizable chunk of his life in Basilicata after falling for a local woman. Indeed, the main room is dedicated to exploring this dialogue between the more conceptual aspect of Cresci’s practice, his exploration of the medium and language of photography, and his fascination with the material culture of the region. The documentary snapshot of a gaunt girl he took in 1967, La bimba di Tricarico [Tricarico’s Little Girl] is remade in a series of graphic experiments and a Warhol-like poster. Similarly, a carved horse toy as well as other peasant artefacts—beautiful objects that stand as talismans of a whole way of life—are reworked into works that present themselves as strange body scans.

The feedback loop between the abstract and the vernacular is also at the heart of what probably remains Cresci’s best known photograph. Titled Stigliano, 1982 (1982)—and featured in Viaggio in Italia—it portrays what appears to be the unfinished white facade of an agricultural depot set against an empty Basilicata landscape. On a second look, however, it could easily pass for one of Kazimir Malevich’s white squares.