indietro
15 gennaio 2013

There are many different ways to look at the sky. Man has been looking
at it for millions of years, and yet it remains mysterious and enchanting.
The lights that dot it at night, the phases of the gleaming moon lighting
up the darkness, that circle of fi re providing us light and heat, comets,
and all the celestial bodies that cross the heavens have prompted infi nite
questions for science, religion, and art to answer. “Search, search search
search and then search”, Renzo Bergamo wrote in one of the many
sheets of paper where he noted down his thoughts in large, generous,
honest, strong calligraphy. These were the thoughts that gave way to
the shapes he got into motion, which Bergamo literally exploded in his
paintings. Movement seems to be imparted by colours, the backdrop in
front of which signs, shapes, passages and trajectories light up. “Jewels
cast on the ground” in a chaotic and violent way, searching for order:
“The Libra Goddess” busy creating temporary, precarious balances.
There are particles, atoms, molecules, cells, stars, galaxies, but also
points, lines, triangles, squares, circles, curves, and all the elements that
put them into relation and make them move. “Cell after cell, body outline,
surrounding vibration. Lit cell. Lit body. Vibrations. Turn off, turn on to
fi nd the shape, outline after outline, to come together where everything
is harmony. Fecundating ourselves with life.” This is not movement just
for the sake of movement. It is not movement with a specifi c direction.
It is not the Futurist taste for progress. It is not politics.
This is the particular movement that is generated with life and its infi nite
shapes, and which resolves when man merges with the cosmos.
“The universe lives” in its every hidden corner, in its infi nitely small and
infi nitely large parts, in cells and in galaxies. Looking at Bergamo’s paint-
ings, we can almost hear the sound of this life, the music engendered by
the world. The world’s harmony was music for Pythagoras, but Chaos
is sound as well. Every part of the world vibrates, twitches, screeches,
squeaks. Or makes light, imperceptible sounds, tinkling, whispering. Looking
at Bergamo’s paintings, it seems like somebody has taken the sound
away. All of our senses are engaged. We even feel like tasting something.
The artist who tried to live in symbiosis with the cosmos, who deeply felt
like he was part of an unstoppable motion, perhaps found it challenging
to stay closed up within the borders of a canvas. In his works shapes
escape the painting, with its closed and circumscribed space, and the
viewer can feel the warmth, energy, light, sound. In his art the elements
of nature break free from their constraints – the constraints determined
by the need to exist, by reality. The artist searches for a contact with the
whole, with invisible spaces. “My vocation is not to do, but to understand.
Not to realize, but to see.” Seeing even beyond what is visible. One must
surpass shapes to enter a cosmic dimension: “... I am not.” There are no
things in the invisible dimension that Bergamo’s art pursues and “sees”:
there is only light, energy, matter. Perhaps even numbers. Pi, part of so
many of his paintings and drawings, and zero. Symbols, abstract entities
living in the invisible space: “Mathematical thoughts fl ew into the sky.”
Bergamo’s symbols are not inaccessible, abstruse, foreign. Sometimes
they have ears and eyes, they are placed on a face where a nose usually
is, they are joyous and look back at us from the canvas with humour and
benevolence. The world is not headed for destruction, but for the rising
of constantly new shapes. Contrasts, fi ghts, atrocities must not scare us.
“A new era is about to begin, the era of Pi.”