Cement
is the artistic medium chosen by sculptor Giuseppe Uncini. For
more than fifty years, Uncini has been combining iron and cement
to create shapes and objects that take on a life of their own,
asserting their individual personalities with great expressive
power.
Uncini’s works are exhibited in leading Italian and international
museums. A guest at the 1996 Venice Biennial, he is one of the
artists in the “Visioni” exhibition on display from
April 9 through June 11, 2005 in the ex church of Sant’Agostino
in Bergamo directed by Anna Maria Maggi and sponsored by Italcementi.
Until he “discovered” cement, Giuseppe Uncini, born
in Fabriano in
1929, worked with earth. Earth of every kind, from sand to puddle
mud.
Earth that he collected on the roadside, prepared and spread on
masonite boards, possibly adding a little tar or coal for color.
At times he used some of the copious amounts of ash produced by
the wood-burning stove in his studio. His ambition was to be a
painter and “make pictures”. But something was missing.
“They felt wrong.
They were just an ephemeral representation of an idea, nothing
concrete,” he explains. And although fifty years have gone
by since them, the “torment”, the dissatisfaction
of that period are still evident in his words and on his gentle
smiling face. He wanted to do something “true, concrete”.
To build an object that would have a life of its own, that would
hold people’s attention on the strength of its own merits,
without the need for any special effects or interpretative filters.
“With this idée fixe, one day, almost by chance,
I went into a store that sold construction materials. I needed
something for some job at home. While I was there, I had the idea
of using cement. At first, I tended to use it the same way as
the earth. But I still wasn’t satisfied.”
Then, out of the blue, an overpowering revelation: “get
rid of the frame and use the cement to create a selfstanding,
self-referential object.” So Uncini began his adventure
in cement, gradually discovering, through experimentation as a
novice artisan, the best techniques to reinforce the cement with
iron and begin to design and build his “objects”.
This was in the mid-1950s.
These were the years in which Burri and Fontana, with their explorations
of matter and space, were moving beyond the tired old debate between
realism and abstract art. Uncini had a weakness for Burri, but
stuck to his own ideas. The divide between matter and form, between
process and result that characterized the work of the great Umbrian
artist did not convince him. It did not match his own research.
“When I first started using iron and cement,” he explains,
“the choice of materials was not dictated by expressionist
or material concerns; I simply wanted a means to realize an idea.”
And the idea was always the same, a fixation, a constant: he wanted
to build, to structure. Primocementarmato, 1958-59, marks Uncini’s
move to a form where process and result coincide: a structure
in unrefined cement, reinforced by a mesh and iron, which, nevertheless,
still retains a trace of the painter. A trace that over the years
has virtually disappeared, almost as if it were a foreign body
rejected by the cement.
“At last I was building the object, and by leaving bare
all the technical procedures involved in its construction, I established
the first constant in the development of my work. In other words,
I was no longer producing a ‘representational picture’
but an ‘object in its own right’: in short, I was
realizing the idea that the technical method is the concept and
the concept is the technical method.” Until 1961, when he
held his first one-man exhibition at the L’Attico Gallery,
Uncini continued his research on his reinforced cement pieces,
the Cementarmati. In an article published in 1998, Adachiara Zevi
describes this period in the artist’s career: “An
extraordinarily creative season: in his works, all given exactly
the same name, the outcome coincides with the process, with the
material in its raw, corrugated state, while the iron elements
bend and contort, freely piercing the cement and re-emerging in
an even more agonized form.
The construction is achieved not through design but through process.
In the Cementarmati pieces of 1962 he is already moving in a different
direction, which will be the main focus of his subsequent development:
here, design prevails over process.
If the iron bars straighten out and are arranged no longer at
random but in grid formations, the cement is reduced and evened
out; the results are certainly
lucid and rigorous, but they lack the ferment and vibration of
matter.
From 1967 to the end of the 1970s, his attention focused on the
theme of shadow, on how to give substance to emptiness: Uncini
takes an object a door, a window, a chair and reproduces it faithfully
with an iron contour which he extends into space to circumscribe
the object’s shadow. Initially, this is a limit around empty
space.
Later, the shadow tends to become solid, to become the subject
of the piece. In a number of works from 1969, Uncini enlarges
his range of construction materials to include bricks, which he
uses to erect walls, arches, sewers, hanging from a wall or standing
free in space, all with their shadow. In this alternation between
wall and space, between two-dimensionality and volume, the wall
takes centerstage in 1979, as the hanging point for the Dimore
pieces: two-dimensional works violated by the drawing engraved
in the cementsemi-circles, rectangles, trapeziums in a reference
to an illusionist depth. In 1982 the removal of portions of cement
to be replaced by iron latticework heralds a new venture into
space.
Spazi di ferro combine side-wings of cement with closely meshed
iron in constructions that alternate solids and trasparency. In
1993, the move back to the wall marks a fortunate creative season.
As in the Cementarmato pieces of 1959, matter is the protagonist
of the Spazicemento works; while not as coarse as in the earlier
works, it still reveals the tr ces of the construction
process. However, while the Cementarmato were ‘objects in
their own right’, the cement shapes cut out in an irregular
pattern make an illusionist play against the back wall, which
is itself enclosed in an open, dynamic frame of iron rods.”
The dialog between design and gesture, between painting and structure
begun by Giuseppe Uncini more than fifty years ago has accompanied
a surprising artistic evolution and generated an unmistakably
autonomous art.
And the little big man who stops to study motorway bridges so
that he can redesign them mentally and turn them into
works of art, “if they are not already”, still thinks
today as he did then: “my daily concern is to make, to build,
to think while I construct and vice versa. I have always been
interested in the discipline of constructivism, but with a focus
on man’s primary gestures, on all those basic devices that
form the embryo of a construction. I’m interested in man’s
desire to build his own home, in the way the farmer squares up
the field for his crops. All these actions are governed by precise
laws, and are the result of thoughts and calc lations that also
create an esthetic.”
