"FOREVER SPRING' by Francesco Maria Bandini The sense of impossibility is to escape the presence of the conditions favourable to change

30 May to 30 June 2023 - Thursday to Saturday 15.30/19.30
Atelier Balderi
Iginio Balderi Archive, via Ausonio 20 - Milan
archivio@iginiobalderi.org
@archivioiginiobalderi

From 30 May 2023 at the Atelier Balderi exhibition space of the Archivio Iginio Balderi in Milan, Francesco Maria Bandini's exhibition entitled 'FOREVER SPRING' opens. On display is a selection of 15 works, almost all large-format, recently produced by the artist.

"EXOTIC ACCESSIBLE DESIRE" - 2023 - cm 140x195

Francesco Maria Bandini, FOREVER SPRING
march - observe - create
text by Alessandro Romanini

What Francesco Maria Bandini achieves is not the structuring of an aesthetic process in all its components and a display to make it usable, but rather a much more complex and articulated operation. First and foremost, his is a metalinguistic process, which aims to reflect, question and evolve respectively, a method, a purpose and, above all, the reflections that evolutions have on the artist himself as a man and as a creative being. First and foremost, the aim is to investigate the role of the artist in this specific historical and existential conjuncture and his ability to impact on reality in general and on the personal in a specific way. An expressive strategy that aims to shake perception out of the widespread phenomenon that crystallises our senses on an eternal temporal present and a self- defined circumscribed space, at once reassuring and limiting. It is not a thaumaturge the artist Bandini is thinking of, but an individual who intends to restore a virginity to the gaze, making it capable of seeing beyond the mere surface of the existing, to grasp that vital and perceptive potential. A creative strategy that investigates the existing and the personal, managing to combine the biographical, personal dimension with those of universal values in the final outcome. Those potentials, which the pervasive rain of images devoid of communicative foundation that bombards us every day have anaesthetised and encased in pre- constituted categories that invoke a passive vision. The Roman artist, with his multidisciplinary training (architecture, fashion design, product design, photography...) and vast and in-depth knowledge, creates photographic works that are in reality devices - in Focault's sense - which 'force' the observer into a participative, active fruition, to give rise to further reflections and fruition paths, with a high degree of subjectivity. A kind of invitation for the observer to empathise with the artist, Stanislavsij's method, with his process, resulting in a virginity of the gaze.

"IN THAT SPECIFIC MOMENT" - 2023 - cm 160x213

The artist's finely designed expressive form combines ethics and aesthetics, wishing to conflict with that contemporary iconographic production system, which churns out images that do not stimulate the individual's own scopic function. An iron self-discipline, a carefully planned method leads Bandini to investigate urban reality in search of those interstitial elements that are deictic of a further reality that escapes observation and thus the perception-reflection-sense circuit, remaining anonymous and unproductive. A relentless search for those elements, insignificant at first glance, but in reality harbingers of that 'eternal spring', which can constantly awaken provided it is activated by a gaze that is aware of the potential inherent in this dimension. Bandini is part of that historically noble line of flâneurs, whose pioneers and theorists range from Baudelaire to Walter Benjamin via Georg Simmel and then find their natural historical evolutions in the deambulations of the Dadaists and the Surrealists' investigation of the urban repressed, through to the psychogeography of the Situationists and the nomadic analysis of groups such as Stalker. From Palaeolithic wandering to Neolithic nomadism, from Dada to Surrealism, from Lettrism to the Situationist International, from Minimalism to Land Art, the history of art has constructed a narrative that feeds on the territory of wandering, accompanied by observation, while recounting the evolution of the perception of the landscape and reality in general, in search of a possible elsewhere, real or presumed. A possible elsewhere in which to graze another verisimilar and desired self. In Bandini's creative process, in investigating, identifying and recombining the signals of a spring constantly in the making, hidden and screened by the perceptive repression hosted by the urban dimension, lies the intention to investigate a mirror, in which the artist himself goes in search of himself and the conviction that the metropolitan space can be traversed like our mind; all supported by a conviction that in the city a non- visible, interstitial, fragmentary and ephemeral reality can be revealed, governed by rules and dynamics other than those of the circadian rhythm of existence. His is a cine-vision, a clear vision that cannot be separated from movement and is nourished by it, transforming visions in transit and metamorphosis into well-defined and structured forms of expression. As Breton stated in 1924, 'The road, which I believed capable of imprinting surprising turns in my life, the road, with its restlessness and its looks, was my true element: in it I received as nowhere else the wind of eventuality'. Eventuality and chance are synonymous with opportunity in Bandini's creative universe, above all, they are the detonating elements to unhinge the perceptive forms encrusted by ordinary and pre-established use and the associated prejudicial interpretative forms; two true collaborators and co-authors of the artist. Bandini is aware that before the invention of architecture, man possessed a symbolic form with which he modelled space: the dynamics of walking and seeing. And it is by walking and observing that man has begun to construct the natural landscape around him, from the 'sing-song streets' to the modern megalopolis, and it is also by walking that in the last century the categories by which we interpret the urban landscapes in which we live have come into being. The artist's method cleverly oscillates between a desire for exactitude and a respect for indeterminacy; an open work is the aim, leaving room for the viewer's further interpretations and inferences. The transience, the poetry of the fragment that Bandini structures in his path of observation, selection and recombination of elements, carried out in a dynamic version, by Flâneur, also benefits from voluntary alignment to an obstructive system of rules. The resistance that reality with its various phenomenological declinations opposes to vision and classification and above all to its representation and the paradigm of ethical- aesthetic rules that the artist sets himself. A path littered in a premeditated manner with obstacles, closely reminiscent of the metalinguistic strategies implemented by director Lars von Trier in his feature film 'Five Obstructions' (2003), a variation on the theme and development of the film by his friend and colleague Jorge Leth, 'The Perfect Human' (1967). A set of strict rules aimed at breaking the procedures of pre-established visual narration. In this context, images acquire the status of 'real events', as Guy Debord prophesied in his 'La Societè du Spectacle': 'Where the real world changes into simple images, simple images become real beings'. The artist, thanks to his knowledge of architecture and design, has in fact structured a personal mythopoeic dimension and, above all, has articulated a specific signifying syntax of space, which is translated both in the arrangement of the works and, above all, in their being seen. It builds devices, 'open structures' in the sense of Umberto Eco, that contain a vast paradigm of interpretative possibilities in which the spectator can venture to create his own narrative, interpretative and perceptive profile. Light Boxes, which set up a 'guided' vision for the observer, distracting him from the pre- established 'centralised' perspective vision of the mass media and inviting him to a fruitful, laborious but rewarding 'illumination'. A continuous and unrelenting search for wonder. Bandini's ability to design and operate in a multidisciplinary dimension, freeing himself from the limits of the expressive disciplinary categories and the classificatory ones of the contemporary art market and marketing, combined with his desire to break free from decorative instances, produce tools for visual purification and the structuring of alternative forms of thought.

"NAUFRAGAR M'E' DOLCE" - 2023 - cm 88x74

The individual works are the result of a selection of botanical elements - symbolic of a new eternal spring - branches, inflorescences, etc., which become pretexts for the construction of expressive apparatuses. In these botanical elements, Bandini has the ability to see their expressive, compositional, geometric potential in a Cézannean perspective, which will be expressed through a skilful combinatory and modelling ability. The artist, in this inexhaustible wandering observation, continues to nurture his existential and artistic research and to relentlessly nurture the observers' scopic function, an inseparable element of human nature and the construction of identity. Alessandro Romanini

"FOREVER SPRING"

In our existence we are often confronted with a sense of impossibility, constriction and limitation, especially in the event of a major change. Sometimes we are subjected to external events (and patience: we can only resist) but more often it is we who create these constricting conditions for ourselves by drawing around us those boundaries within which we find ourselves interpreting the meaning of existence. We familiarise ourselves with these separating elements by giving them a meaning, sometimes protective, to preserve us from the context. Instead, we exclude the fundamental part of our experience that consists of curiosity, expressive freedom, the possibility of emotional growth, questioning ourselves in facing ourselves and the unknown. Beyond this unknown comes a new emotional state: shaped in possibility, in renewal, in lightness. It is at the moment when these elements become oppressive that favourable conditions for change are created and we focus in a new awareness trying to go beyond. This is where my project originates. We begin to look for a more critical reading of these divisive elements by giving them a different relevance; looking for a crack, a fissure, a weak point that allows us to look at them, aware of their fragility in order to face them and with the will to do so. Here we find ourselves and the geographical coordinates of our presence in the full context of existence. Here we are again with the perspective in front and the horizon wider, on the stage of a new emotional territory: "FOREVER SPRING".

Francesco Maria Bandini

"SUPERCONCETTUALISTICHESPIRALITOSO" -  2023 - cm 80x86

Francesco Maria Bandini (1965) A designer and architect, he began his professional career in Rome while studying architecture, as a stylist in his mother Alba Armillei's haute couture atelier, an experience that earned him the acquisition of some of his sartorial works in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Gemeente Museum in The Hague. In 1996, he moved to Milan and founded 'B3 Designstudio', later named 'Francesco Maria Bandini Emotional Design'. In more than twenty years of intense activity, he has collaborated with numerous national and international companies in various project areas (product and brand design, retail, art direction, styling), winning important awards: - Selection Compasso d'Oro ADI - publication on the ADI Design Index - 2006 - Three times winner, in different categories, of the P.O.P. Award (Points of Sale and Services) - 2006/2007 - Winner Italian Advertising Award - 2005/2006 - Winner Young & Design Award Fiera Milano - 2001 Parallel to his design and consulting activities, Francesco has always drawn on the expressive freedom of art also for the realisation of installation works whose constant objective has been the emotional sharing of the project, the place, and the product. His installations were exhibited at the Milan Triennale Museum during the Milan Design Week 2011 and 2012. In recent years, Francis has dedicated himself to assiduous research around concepts concerning the 'Person' to which he attaches strong communicative relevance: the 'I', the unconscious, the social.