Critics

 

GIUSEPPE BERTOLINI BERG AND THE POETICS OF THE OPENING.

Giuseppe Bertolini Berg’s painting is a solar system which turns around painting itself. The artist strongly claims the “resonant body” of painting, his exhibitionist “vis” (vein), his will for being a protagonist; for these reasons he does not want to hide the informal roots of his figurative culture. The matter is always dense, thick, evident, ready to point out existence and life; moved and shaken from an urgency which perfectly coincides its own beat. The core is the search for openings that reveals an everlasting longing towards the ulterior. Painting reveals and opens itself to the sensuality of both the ego and the world; what painting finds is not a backworld but the dream, the dobiousness, the enigma of objects that belong to the dimension of the finished, that never wear the inhuman clothes of De Chirico’s ghosts.

Text by Roberto Maria Siena

Giuseppe Bertolini Berg has worked during the 90s on three-dimensional proportions, building presences strongly characterised in their combination wise feature of materials and objects, all connected according to elementary archetypes, and following an evocative anthropology of strong suggestive capacity. Through a deep immersion in the consistence of the sign, between 2003 and 2004, Bertolini Berg starts to configure complex images of organic conformations, crossed by metamorphic implications of surreal accent. A strongly allusive imagination work, still through a remarkable metamorphic disposition of the image. Persuasive painter now, as he has been a persuasive “object master” before.

ENRICO CRISPOLTI

Bertolini Berg’s painting has some strong sculptural features that recalls the sculptures and objects he created twenty years ago, those compositions he realized with non conventional materials, and had some vague reminiscence of “arte povera”. What emerged from Bertolini Berg’s works were its connection with the human behaviours that found their solution in dense psychological explanations. Moving on to painting, the artist brought with him his own sculptural features, as the light emerging from the cavities of the immense blue spaces, trough which he suddenly succeed in expressing the fascination that he has for the Swedish winter.

OLLE GRANATH

I’ve known Giuseppe Bertolini for many years, he was just a lad when he worked here in the courtyard, with Marras, almost in front of my studio. He worked with me a long time ago when I was engaged on two large statues of seated figures: the “Interview”, which are in Japan at the moment, and again, for a couple of years, as I was working at the fountain of ENI building in EUR. I have taken quiet an interest in him during the last twenty years and to be truthful I must admit that he has talent as a sculptor but his imagination outruns this. He’s a young man who has met and overcome both spiritual and material hardships in a very special way. This experience increased the spiritual side of his work in harmony with his image of sculptural forms. In my opinion, unlike many young people nowadays, he conducts his research from a personal viewpoint but he never neglects the poetic sense in his plastic forms. His sculpture moves from metamorphosis to the symbol, with which he succeeds in expressing the grief, or the beauty, of the world of sex which involves both man and woman in the all-embracing universe of existence. I cannot say that Bertolini has reached his goal, but one thing is absolutely certain: he has all the chances of continuing along his own path, or perhaps I should say pursuing his personality and tracing his steps along the lengthy development of the language of the world of sculpture. He has a wealth of imagination and is perfectly aware of the sense of earthly forms.

PERICLE FAZZINI (1983)

I have known Giuseppe Bertolini for a long time and have always appreciated his sculpture, because it is born not from a vain desire for success, but from a a genuine love for research and quality. Bertolini’s sculpture is a world where daily routine and mystery pursue one another and get intertwined in such a complex and problematic way that we are all able to gather that art is an opening into future worlds, not hackneyed reality which wretchedly attempts to console us. One piece which I like to call the “Cradle” attracts me especially. Perhaps better than all others, this work defines the personality of Giuseppe Bertolini – the artist. There is nothing heavy about this object; maybe the artist wishes to free the man entering the world, from an effort which goes far beyond what life already has in store for him. The Cradle is diaphanous, substantiated tends towards rarefaction and reaches its climax perfectly at the point where it extols a thread and reveals something of an enigma. This has no intention of occupying space and begs only to be accepted out of love for a sincere, subdued dialogue. This could summarise Bertolini entirely where his way of being an artist excludes noise and social gatherings, instead, it emphasises that fragility which pertains both to the man and his research. We cannot exclude this fragility which (in the work) becomes the source of an endless poetic fabric.

LUIGI MONTANARINI

....what if the most daring hypotheses of physicists and cosmologist on the existence of a spacetime structure much more complex than the one oyr senses show us were correct?
New spatial dimensions curled-up perhaps more time dimensions.Mind-numbing shortcuts,allowing things to vanish from here-now to reappear far away,incredible jokes of a cosmic conjuror.
I have suddeenly felt the emotions that such thoughts give me when i saw for the first time the works of Giuseppe Bertolini Berg.Miraculous shortcircuit.
And now i see in his paintings traces of blach holes,seeds of new universes continuously coming into existence,forever hidden to our eyes by frozen-time horizons shadows betrayed only by the disappearance of sucked-in matter.Microscopic traces left into our universe to show that,perhaps,
infinite other universes exis.

LuciaSorrentino Zanello
Dipartimento di Fisica
Universita' di Roma La Sapienza

SYMBOLS FOR FLIGHT

Having dispensed with a generally accepted sense of aesthetics and having assumed a kind of aesthetic of the concept,Giuseppe Bertolini Berg has returned to a time in which the unreflective pathways of artistic intuition intermingle with the reflective,systematic paths of Jung and Levi-Strauss. It is the age of the (Pense'e sauvage) and lack of distinction:the auroral phase of history which is remote yet somehow current because it is unhistoric. Here the object fuses function, magic and art: the subjective is confused with the objective and thought transfuses itself into the act of which it becomes,simultaneously,the homologue.It is the time of man,appropriately definable as¨ä symbolic animal¨, where activities can really be called symbolic, for good and all, and symbols which,in generating themselves, concealed or perhaps preceded the meaning.

Through his aggregations,obscure yet fluidly woven bricolages,Bertolini Berg takes us back to this original form of symbolism.Instead of symbols seen in the usual sense as synthesis, separation from the referent and codification, he invents constructs which go beyond visualisation.They are the external or perhaps contemporary development of an interior process,from which they are indistinguishable,and establish their own identity.The symbol is obscure and created unawares, and obscure because it is unconscious, and like the inner process becomes apparent through varying phases and cross-references. For an immediate association, which may be something more than a mere association,wecan see the alchimist in Bertolini Berg who displays proven apparatus for an experiment ¨in fieri¨.Or perhaps he is a witch doctor who builds a pile of stones and invents a story whose aim,analogically,is to propitiate healing or a birth.There is no doubt that we are in a prelogical phase and this should be empehasized as we need to keep it in mind when we fall back ingenuously yet incorrigibly, to an interpretation which tends to lead us back into the bounds of logic and perspicuity.The sense of all this, and Bertolini Berg frequently alerts us with his works (without title) or with very essential titles, is in those hidden depths which these days are called the unconscious, though at the outset was the sole component of psychology.It is here,where amazement at the diversity and ductility of metals still survives;it is in the prescientific sentiment of an apparently inert kingdom but where likes and dislikes rule and a degree of nobility and purity, culminating in the element of the highest virtue,promotes order.

The inference is that this progressive order, obtainable through transmutations too, is also,thanks to the unity of the whole, found to the same extent in the spheres of the body and the soul; it implies, in othr words,that the processes whch can be seen in the elements,also occur in man.It is the primary,unprejudiced perception of the vid and fullness,male and female.This is not hermeneutic, it is simply a natural, regressive interpretation of reality.If we went further, we would be guilty of conjecturing a ¨denotatum¨ which is extraneous to the signifier.At the most, we rare permitted a compendium of scholarly terms.Om the surface,Bertolini Berg's object compositions,finely and carefully wrought, bring the last reverberation of regulated aesthetics.As a project though,they represent a radical yet passionate ¨return to nature¨ .This isa flight towards the depths to reach those heights which, though suggesting a return to the mechanistic, or an arcadian version of this,is essentially,and in its suggesting a return to the mechanistic,or an arcadian version of this,is essentially,and in its intent, a reaction to the anguishing annihilation of reality in our present day civilisation.

Mario Bologna. Roma 1995

THE PARADISE IN BERTOLINI BERG'S STAINED GLASS

Giuseppe Bertolini Berg's artistic pathway consist of reflections materializing into perfectly realized works.Building blocks of a unique and at the same time manifold sequence of tell-tale episodes, seemingly different in language ad technique, but all related to the praise of <making>,elaborating
shapes and colours with many expressive significances.An all-encompassing <praxis>:from sculpture to graphics, painting and calligraphy,following the aesthetic philosophy of imagery going back to the time when the artist,evicted out of the garden of Eden, was wizard and priest: an <artifex> creating another self and so favouring the existential fortune for himself and his fellows.

In Bertolini Berg works the visual language parable is still dynamic: colour melts and parts into streams, reminding <action painting>, into zen ideograms,alluding t eyes and windows shapes, leaves and shells,flowers and cromatic-atmospheric vortices, as symbolic stained glass windows of a
neo-humanistic Paradise or of dreamed cathedrals. So that, day after day,fragment after fragment Bertolini-Berg rebuilds an intimate universe and, paradoxically, expresses a plural introspection:<Know yourself>, so as to know the others, to make them share, the biological metamorphosis happening between your ideas and your hands.

In any case, a forever changing ambiguity, whose definition can only be found in the abstract dimension of music or mathematics.That is to say, into the lyric collective perception of Nature as the original Garden of Eden, at the same time alluding to the<hortus conclusus> of a dreamed cathedral just perceived before it fades away at the time of the awakening.

Maurizio Marini. Roma 2001

RESOR I FÄRGLANDSKAP

Giuseppe Bertolini Berg har företagit ett antal undersökande resor i olika färgers landskap under sina senare års måleri.Från att tidigare ha smakat på nordiska pastelltoner och undersökt den möjlig plastiken i måleriuttrycket,har den senaste tiden färgerna blivit klarare och har kommit att framträda i mer bestämda former.

Färgen har tagit mer ochmer gestalt.I det senaste årets måleri bryter sig sakta men säkert klaa färger ut mellan skikt av vitt och skira toner.Formerna förökar sig också och blir mer distinkta.I passagen från skulpturalt till måleriskt har Bertolini Berg nu nått färglandskap sm ser väsentligt annorlunda ut än hans tidigare mer skulpturala landskap.I hans målningar finns idag ett utforskande av det specifikt färgmässiga,och färgernas visuella effekter,jämfört med hans tidigare utforskande av färgernas skulpturala effekter.Det vi möter i Bertolini Berg måleri idag är en vandring mot ett allt mer intensiv och distinkt färgens närvaro.Hans tidigare tydliga färgmässia textur har också polerats mot allt finare nyansdifferenser, som ännu mer poängterar färgen.I enomgivning som kännetecknas av många populärkulturella referenser i måleriet,är Bertolini Berg modernistiska undersökningar av färg och färgens form en bejakande och lärorik bekantskap som i de senaste målningarna gått över i det klara röda och blå.Dessa nya starka färger gör mig nyfiken på hans framtida strövtåg.

Stockholm 03--2008
Katja Lindqvist

Hans måleri år som en gåva,först när man ta emot den blir man varse tomrummet som den fyller.Hans konst år sådan att den matar och mättar
sinnena,men samtidigt ständigt retar sinnets aptit. Färgskalor,ljus, färgens täthet och intensitet varierar fån verk till verk, liksom klyftor oc skåror som utmejslas,höjder som som skapas.Konstant är dock sökandert efter ett fullödigt uttryck för vårt jordiska livs djup
och mening.Ibland myllrar duken av former.Andra gånger slätas den ut i friare ytor där färgstarka penseldrag avtecknar sig mor matt bakgrund och skapar former,än fritt svävande,än fast förankrade i dukens mitt. Ett återkommande och starkt symboliskt laddar motiv år de öppna läpparnas tysta invit,lockande in i ett varmt levande djup där ett löfte gror.När betraktaren besvarar inviten utövar Bertolini Berg konst en näst intill hypnotisk makt.

Varje form,varje rörelse,varje färgintryck i hans måleri bidrar till att ge uttryck för en helher,till att återge ett inre universum.Varje tavla fångar ett ögonblick,utforskar en av livets dimensioner,visar en yta samtidigt som den pekar ut djupet.Att bejaka Giuseppe Bertolini Berg måleri innebär att förnimma den starka upplevelse som ligger bakom det. Bertolini Berg överlämnar med ödmjukhet ett måleri som följer ett inre krav på autenticitet:därför är hans konst så vital och så nödvändig.

Lund. 05 2008
Carla Cariboni Killander

One can paint by transferring on the canvas images that(human or natural) reality offers and being faithful to them:one can paint actively changing passive reception of shapes and colours into "impressions". In the end,one can stress the active and creative partipation of the artist through pure gestural expressiveness or imagination freed of formal and anatomical correctness of forms, that is Expressionism. If we do not consider the term Expressionism as usual that means connecting it to a specific painting movement (developed in Germany between the Wars) but we use it in a transverse xay,we can say that Giuseppe Bertolini Berg,with his artistic store made up of desperate protest and tumultuous rebellion of conscience,is a painter (and sculptor) definitely and completely Expressionist. "Informal Expressionism" (to make a difference with action painting, also defined "abstract Expressionism" although some of the artist's painting, remind it), lowers into the reality,refusing to look at it from an external point of view, dramatically, violently.

The artist refuses the age-long tradition of organicity and naturalism in art, heightens and dramatizes unreality with his powerful painting born from the felt awareness of the deep crisis of values that seems to run over without any possibility of salvation our planet, in our epoch characterized by a joyfull impending globalization, ad by endemically diffused famine.

Luigi Mazzella
Roma, 2002