Plinio Mesciulam Biography
Plinio Mesciulam (Genoa, 1926) is an Italian artist, painter and sculptor. He also worked as a performer. In 1948 he was present at the V Quadrennial in Rome in the room of abstract artists, together with Dorazio, Vedova, Munari, Soldati, Consagra. In March 1950 he held a solo show of drawings from 1949 at the Caffè Venchi in Genoa, the first of an abstract-informal nature in Liguria, in which the aim was to affirm the autonomy of the manual sign freed from any descriptive reference, moving between the ink drips of china. From 1952 to 1954 Mesciulam was part of the promoting committee of the MAC - Concrete Art Movement, developing research on the relationship between colour-form-architectural space. In the same years he founded the Genoese group of the movement with local painters of abstract tendency. In 1955 he entered into a crisis with the avant-garde. The utopia of pure shapes and colors loses the light of the future. In the following years the canvases were colored black and the artist passionately dedicated himself to the study of the New Testament. He feels the need to refer to the art of the past (especially to seventeenth-century painting), in a trend that meets and is imbued with the discovery of a material magma (Vinavil and sawdust), in assonance with contemporary Art Brut. Mesciulam believes the radical abstraction/figuration alternative is outdated (and this belief will never abandon him again): thus it will be easy for him to move from a "sacral" figuration to a symbolic abstraction. Until 1962, therefore, he worked on a religious theme in which an element emerged that would also be important in subsequent periods: the drop. Becoming an emblem and protagonist, the drop frees itself from its origin as a pictorial drip and isolates itself in its symbolic value; crying. The medialist turn began in 1963. The images now no longer come "from within", but are elaborated on those provided by advertising. He also works on the "word-image", in unconscious assonance with the contemporary research of visual poets. In 1965 he founded the Cond group, writing its theoretical text. Until the early Seventies he continued his research on visual communication (media figures transmitted by invented and enlarged screens, decomposed on spaced glass plates). In 1976 Plinio Mesciulam also started the "Mohammed Restricted Communication Center" project, the invention of a worldwide communication circuit (by a famous critic it was called the "incunabulum of the Internet"), documented with 1,300 specimens preserved at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and which an entire correspondence is preserved at the MART in Trento); Mohammed is Net Art, the original concept of building a network with many nodes with indefinite propagation, based on the fixed number of recipients (12) for each message. In 1973, technically aided by his friend Mauro Buffoni, he published Macroscopy of the precarious sign, Rinaldo Rotta Editore: a photographic investigation with strong enlargement of details of small signs of hasty daily writing. From 1974 to 1976 various installations followed in various cities in Italy. Always working with photography, but also with attention to the problems of communicating this particular revelation of the sign, on the day of the Epiphany of 1976 he proposed his principle of monstrance art with the ostensible Epiphanies carried in procession by young people through the small port of Boccadasse in Genoa. His participation in the International Performance Week in Bologna in 1977 is significant. 1978 was a crucial year for the artist. While in Genoa and Bologna he presented another form of monstrance art, The Triumphs, at the same time he returned to painting with hyperdecorativism (spread of variegated fabrics and explosion of highly colored monodic particles which he called "microworlds of light"). This hyperchromatic world expands on different planes (heteroplanar painting). Extreme example, Lebensraum, 1982, a tower full of recesses but historiated without interruption and based on its own shadow made full-bodied by an unnatural thickness (Ricchieri Civic Museum, Pordenone). Throughout the Eighties, interest in the relationship between painting and architecture returns (Bohème, 1987) and the frequent use of the twisted window, which in the Nineties will become soft and ghostly. And again in 1987, until the 1990s, the Horrores cycle began (photomontage of architectural details and interiors with impossible mirrored perspectives). In 1996, the Prayers, monstrances with sculptural-pictorial silhouettes, were added. In 1998 he began the series of Crossed Shadows, of which the Family Album is part (shadows of family members projected onto architectural structures in relief). From 2002 to 2004 he created the series the artist and the model. In 2006 he revisited his experience on the "Segno precario" of the Seventies. Even though he nostalgically recognizes an unsurpassable "purity", he does not hesitate to contaminate it with exacerbated pictorial signs. The principle of exposition also returns with the self-indicated Tables, whose theme is linked to a large installation with the work The signatures of the masters (1974) at the Galleria Rotta in Genoa in 1975. Painting works, artists' books and engravings by Plinio Mesciulam can be found in museums, archives and private collections in Italy and abroad.
