A scribe of our time

At the time of Informalism, that is more than half a century ago, much was involving the so called "wall" poetics, meaning with that the use of unrefined, rough surfaces against which the signs of the hand were squashed and thus absorbed. Then the process evolved taking on more elaborate forms and the wall was replaced by papery pages as in a sort of code upon which one would master the skills of a scribe. We owe much of this change, that of moving from the brutality of the wall to more delicate and gentle forms, at least in our country, to Gastone Novelli. Furthermore, the softening of the interventions, or rather the feasible conciliation between a primordial lack of shape and traces of civilization, mainly exhibited by the appearance of writing, has meant that along shapeless stains or other almost natural gestures, letters came as well, as long as they were written by hand with no use of printing processes. It is thus obvious that, for a production as such, no-one can talk, for instance, of visual poetry which tends to relate images to mass media icons.

The formula created back then by Roberto Sanesi and Ugo Carrega, that of a "symbiotic" poetry which exploits the coexistence of several signs, both human and nature-made on the same surface, prompted to endlessly feed on these fine nourishments and keeping nonetheless the same light and "portable" quality of paper, maybe even ready to recover the seriality of code and volume, is therefore far more suitable.

The reason why I have felt the need to make such an ample framework of references is because Marco Pipani's art finds in it its perfect location, he is its valuable, confident and tenacious heir, successfully achieving in each single work assorted constellations of interventions, intelligently hanging between physical and mental. Or rather, we may say that the battle with computer science, with its being so virtual, is not over yet, that it is still worth carrying on the ancient exercise of scribes or illuminators, but in his work, to no avail would we look for traces of red lead or bright colors, to the contrary, here we witness a well controlled symphony of whites and grays which is, after all, perfect for an activity based on writing as its main deed.