I’m
roberto
Bertazzon.

THE JOYFUL METAMORPHOSES OF ROBERTO BERTAZZON
By Fabio Girardello

Meeting Roberto Bertazzon in his atelier on Via Moranda in Castello Roganzuolo, one is met with a white, tree-lined path that separates his farmer’s house, cocooned amid greenery and vines, from Menaré. It’s an abruptly different world, distinctly unlike the “buen retiro,” the typical workspace and contemplative retreat chosen by many artists to produce on the fringes of what is commonly defined as the “art system.”

Bertazzon’s factory is more akin to Hansel and Gretel’s Gingerbread House – albeit upended and reinvented, morphing into a workshop and show-room perpetually in progress. In the meadow in front of the building, Iron Frogs stand guard, totemic animals that are the artist’s indispensable signature. Inside, room by room, floor by floor, spaces are filled with 1960s furniture and objects, which are cherished parts of the artist’s experience, rescued and temporarily displaced as sources of reconsideration and inspiration. Among these active relics, the colorful artifacts and polymaterial creations that Bertazzon continuously crafts burst forth, aligning with large, deliberately gestural canvases, often monochrome, that hang frameless from the ceilings. Dark canvases, almost like blackboards, where the artist traces votive signs and verbal fragments, which mutually reinforce each other in their eager intention to signify. Clear clues that the artist, now fascinated by the three-dimensionality of the object, has never abandoned pictorial research.

Almost twenty years ago, I wrote notes on Roberto the painter, emphasizing the blessed nonchalance with which the artist had seized remnants of Fauve, Nabis, and Pop grammars, Matissean memories, echoes of Transavantgarde, and tribal suggestions to condense them into a synthesis that astonished due to its chromatic confidence and structural establishment. An omnivorous painting, also transient in its themes: volcanic islands, vaguely rococo interiors, pirate ships, and Venetian landscapes chromatically saturated to the point of unlikelihood. Those themes surprised, and as an “heretical” observer, I was amused by Bertazzon’s irreverence, who took no pains to pay homage to the academicisms and trends that prevailed and still prevail, despite the cloying postmodern proclamations heralding stylistic and conceptual freedom.

Even twenty years ago, the figure of the Leaping Frog, with its wide-open webbed feet, almost in a prayerful posture, appeared in the works. The consistent re-proposal of this theme goes beyond mere amusement or the need to establish an identifying hallmark: the icon is adopted, increasingly convinced, as a strong and universal symbol, since the Frog translates Bertazzon’s ecologist and animalist faith into a sign. It’s a conviction far from fashionable. If anything, it’s an invitation to perceive, beyond the mandatory concern for the havoc humans wreak on Nature, the element of regeneration and eternal mutation that distinguishes natural life, which the amphibious, mutable characteristic of the Frog fully expresses.

Over time, Bertazzon’s imagination has been populated by a whole Bestiary, in which the figures of the Donkey, Goat, and Chicken recur. The Bestiary is not “moralized” in the medieval manner; it’s much more akin to the sensitivity of Umberto Saba, who sees in the animal – as Mario Lavagetto said – a guardian spirit, which claims an uncoercible childhood (which is “age without words”); an enigmatic and patient entity, capable of enduring man’s utilitarian violence, which has reduced the animal to something to consume or a counter-figure to his shortcomings. Emblematic, in this regard, is the icon of the Donkey. “The image of the Donkey is dear to me,” says the artist, “if I think by contrast to Buridan’s ass, which faced with two heaps of hay does not know which to eat and dies of hunger, thus reduced to a mask of indecision and foolish greed.” Wholly alien to animal existence.

Bertazzon’s interest in the design and manufacture of the object has been hinted at. The need to move beyond the two-dimensionality of painting has led the artist to propose established themes and new ones using various materials: from fiberglass to resin, from wood to iron and glass. It is the confirmation of a creative vitality, once again transient, of a philosophy of making, through which the artist demonstrates that material is not the “maid” of form, but the medium through which the idea assumes specific concreteness, gains presence here and now, and becomes charged with different, additional meanings, necessarily subject to change.

Bertazzon believes that aesthetic ideation lives as it transitions: the idea-sign not only becomes sculpture but also an object usable in everyday life, because Bertazzon does not shy away from grappling with the replicability of the artifact. Bertazzon is also a designer but, to be clear, a sui generis designer. In these inventions, Bertazzon reveals a disenchanted verve, politely Dadaist, but especially renews that particular concept of “applied art” propagated by Futurism, according to which artistic action finds its total sense only if it overturns and poetically reconstructs every aspect of everyday living.

Therefore, the artist activates a process that grasps the aesthetic potential of the everyday object to practice a sort of detournement: thus, the cork stopper of a bottle of prosecco enlarges and, translated into glass, becomes a glass. And the humble ladle becomes a decanter.

But, in experimenting with this daring act, it is the artisanal making, in its essential manufacturing essence, that has seduced the artist, attentive to those manifestations of artisan wisdom that mass production is erasing (or has already erased) forever: such is the case of Murano glass processing, and in particular of the conterie, the minuscule beads produced from thin monochrome rods, which were once used to produce necklaces, floral embroidery, and small clothing accessories. Working in symbiosis with the glassmaker, Bertazzon also reinvents the ornament object, be it a necklace, bracelet, or pendant, without however giving up loading it with that symbolic value which is essential in his vocation as a total artifex.

It is no coincidence that the artist’s long fellowship with the master glassmaker has been hinted at. In glass, Bertazzon indeed finds the primordial matter, that raw material, initially shapeless and infinitely malleable, that more than any other is ready to find definition, changing color and consistency.

In this process, what is ultimately the primordial sense of the creative act is actualized, which consists in translating Chaos into Cosmos, which is order, but, according to Nature, does not presuppose staticity, but rather eternal metamorphosis.

In discussing the artist’s procedure in “high” terms, there is a risk of burdening him with conceptualisms as abstract as they are deceptive; a danger which, in reality, Bertazzon’s work has always escaped thanks to teasing grace, a very Venetian irony, captivating but not benign.

The secret lies in the most difficult art, which is the administration of lightness, through which crucial themes, such as the protection of the environment and forgotten traditions, can be addressed without falling into neither gloomy pedagogies nor caressing commonplaces. Because the lightness, which is dominant in the artist’s work, has nothing to do with the superficiality of thought. In the American Lectures, Calvino says that ‘lightness is associated with precision and determination, not with vagueness and abandonment to chance.’ And he quotes Paul Valery: ‘One must be light like the bird, not like the feather.’