The personal room Turcato filled at the 1972 Venice Biennale was a burst of colour within an unconventional installation. Much of the work on view was made specifically for the Biennale and anticipated the artist’s future experimentation with form, framing, sculpturality, scale and colour. The Secci Gallery has selected to recreate this exhibition, which marked a turning point in the artist’s career.

It was here that Turcato exhibited his first Oceaniche, after a trip to Kenya in 1970. Fascinated by the vibrant colours of local fishers’ handcrafted canoes, the artist (incidentally 15 years before Gilberto Zorio’s canoe series from the 1980s), reproduced the shapes and patterns from memory cutting out the canvas to resemble surfboards. In giving them a 3cm quasi three dimensional depth, a bold verticality (between 280 and 320 cm) and by hanging them on a diagonal, the Oceaniche appear to glide along the wall as if on water. Turcato had already been exploring the idea of reshaping the canvas from the mid-1960s. In his seminal conversation with Carla Lonzi in 1967, he had declared the need to overcome right angles:

In the meantime, I want to absolutely go beyond […] the rectangle of the work, the squareness of the square…For me, the quadrangular dimension is a misconception, because…all that comes from the golden section, ends up locking you into a certain geometrism […] is it the edge, which is, above all, a nuisance…ultimately, it’s a deadlock […].

Pre-dating Jacques Derrida’s preoccupation with the traditional straight edge of the frame developed in his essay ‘Parergon’ in the Truth in painting (1978), Turcato transformed the canvas into something mouldable that could be cut into other shapes rather than stretched over rectangular frames, thus deepening his approach to form.

The Oceaniche, which anticipated his longilinear sculptural series Le libertà, embody the artist’s desire to smooth out the sharp edges and unseat the idea that the ‘square is an exact shape’. They also speak of Turcato’s relationship to ideas of nomadism and primordialism. These themes, part of the cultural Zeitgeist of the late 1960s, emerged in the wake of the hippie movement, the Vietnam War, the worker and student protests. Anticapitalist ideals of alternative communities who sought a communion with nature inspired the Western imaginary, advocating a return to simple, primordial, living.

This watershed moment has been connected to the work of conceptual artists such as Mario Merz, Eliseo Mattiacci or Emilio Prini, but not to Turcato who belonged to an older generation. This is in spite of the fact that one of Turcato’s great friends was the artist, poet and critic Emilio Villa, whose legendary trip with Mario Diacono to the Caves of Lascaux in 1961 influenced the Italian artistic community. Turcato’s relationship to nomadism has often been analysed with reference to his peculiar personality and wonderlust, with Flaminio Gualdoni writing, for example, that ‘Turcato was a true nomad, of ancient race’. Reflecting a time in which exposure to other cultures and prehistory, as described by Emilio villa in his essay L’arte dell’uomo primordiale (c. 1961), had swept over artistic and intellectual circles, Turcato’s painterly expression and use of vibrant colours weave in contemporary form with an ancient primordiality.

The ‘Other’ as the unknown and the unknowable, when considering it within a Lacanian notion of feminine sexuality, is also about the absence of mediation between the subject and the Other, between man and woman, between the desire of the subject and the desire of the Other. The Other becomes an elsewhere, a lack, in which the subject can disappear and be lost into a sort of infinity of desire. Turcato’s approach to eroticism has been alluded to by various critics, such as Gualdoni:

Turcato practices art as art and, punctiform, discontinuous, unstable, not uniform, follows the pulsating non-rectilinear flow of an erotic charge stubbornly focused on itself […].

The Oceaniche appear phallic in their overall shape, and yet they evoke a femininity in energetic Matissian colour fields, of which some feature pubic hair scribbles at the juncture of the vulva-like shapes. The entangling of the masculine and the feminine symbols in a single work seems to question the Lacanian idea that the two can never meet and are only ever mediated through desire. The artist would develop similar shapes in his drawings from this period entitled, for example, Elegia or Apparizioni, reproducing elongated diamonds that appear folded around darker or different coloured centres, at times defined by the shapes of women’s legs. The artist was interested in the women’s liberation movement and commented with Lonzi on its evolution. He noted, in particular, the event of the miniskirt and its assocation to freedom:

On the other hand, the young women who wear miniskirts, you can no longer imagine romantic love, like Francesca Bertini, or something like that, it’s absurd isn’t it? The erotic movement will be much more free, much more natural. After all, the Romans, the Greeks were in this situation…it is the first shudder, that arrived in that sense…against Christianity, Catholicism in particular…

La passeggiata, a triptych of women’s legs in which three trapezoidal canvases intersect with each other, has a pop-like erotic appeal, in its defined chromatic fields of fluorescent orange and pale lilac, not dissimilar to the more explicit Tom Wesselman or Allen Jones, while also forming an abstract shape when seen from a distance. The idea of female sexuality echoes throughout the exhibition in Il tunnel, for example, which could recall a Lacanian feminine ‘hole’. A large-scale schematic vortex of bright red, yellow, different hues of blue as well as grey and white, Il tunnel is also a hypnotic, psychaedelic portal into another universe, an exploration of a Spatialist concept of infinity as understood by Lucio Fontana, with whom Turcato was photographed at the Venice Biennale in 1966 near his Superfici lunari (Fig. 1). Those moonscapes in the background, made of foam rubber, prefigured his works of spacecrafts and extraterrestrial life exhibited at the 1972 Biennale: Cosmico – Marziano BipBip and Cosmico (Composizione).

Turcato followed the development of the space race closely, watching, according to a personal account from his brother-in-law, Ettore Caruso, a televised conversation in 1962 between John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Wernher Von Braun, the chief architect of Saturn V that would propel the Apollo spacecraft to the moon in 1969.

Marziano BipBip, painted in electric colours is, both in title and form, a direct representation of the artist’s fascination with the cosmos and its mythical representation as informed by Cold War politics. The shape of the work, an anthropomorphised long rectangle with two antennae, one silver and the other poppy red poking out of its citrus yellow and lavender purple body, is that of a Martian as imagined in popular sci-fi films, novels and comics of the time. Like the Oceaniche, it was hung at an angle, a form of space debris. Its shape and colours are repeated with slight variations in Cosmico (Composizione), which was hung on the following wall.

Both works entitled Cosmico imitate spacecrafts, with two rectangular solar arrays held together by a thin metal structure and frame. These ‘wings’ are separated by an empty space, corresponding to where a satellite’s antenna might be positioned in the middle. On either side of this gap thin strips of colour are painted like the rays of a spectrum. Turcato’s careful attention to the structure of satellites is combined with ‘his obsession to create a colour that cannot be found on the spectrum’. The Cosmico works reveal the extent to which the artist was inspired by space engineering and the physics that informed, for example, the development of solar cells for powering spacecraft, while the slices of colour seem to imitate the astronauts’ view of a Lunar Earth rise. Turcato’s use of iridescent materials, which lend his canvases a glowing superlunary quality, appears to reach towards his desire to ‘invent a colour’.

One of Turcato’s most peculiar works in the exhibition is the alien-looking protrusions in Le spine di Cristo e della Maddalena. Two trunk-like shapes in yellow and pale pink are crowned by a halo of long spikes. The funnels bulge out from an oval plywood plank with different-coloured eyes, as if on stalks, probing the space of the room from an unusual height off the ground. A playful photograph shows Turcato posing beneath his UFO-like creation, in imitation of a beatific gesture, arms open and hands receptive to the heavens (Fig. 2). The work’s title and thorns evoke an abstracted image of Christian suffering as well as the relationship between Christ and Magdalene, celestial bodies orbiting together. Turcato’s ironic mysticism was also informed by his need to make objects ‘a little bit fantastic, a little poetic, big or small objects, or structures even […].

The gravitational effect and what Gualdoni termed the ‘pure psychological sensuality’ of these works needs to be experienced in person. Contesting a Cartesian model of vision in which to ‘know’ is to ‘see’, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s words resonate with Turcato’s tactile recreation of the universe in this room: ‘I do not see [a space] according to its exterior envelope; I live in it from the inside; I am immersed in it. After all, the world is all around me, not in front of me.’ This philosophy of embodied perception, of being in space, or indeed outerspace, comes to life when interacting with these vibrant works as their pulsating colours destabilize the dualism of the active viewer and the passive viewed. The thorns on the Spine di Cristo can be read both as a desecration of the Christian iconography and as a conceptualisation of the extraterrestrial. Turcato’s vision, at once mystical and ironic, remains an invitation into the psychological possibilities of cosmic infinity.

(Text by Martina Caruso)