The Subtle Abstraction of Gabriele Landi Article by Federico Giannini, published on Finestre sull’Arte il 02/03/2025 https://www.finestresullarte.info/opere-e-artisti/astrattismo-lieve-di-gabriele-landi  Gabriele Landi (Schaerbeek, 1971) is one of the leading names in contemporary Italian geometric abstraction. His original work is defined by purity, elegance, and levity: a constant in Landi’s output is the conception of the artwork as a form of protection for the image.  For some time now, Gabriele Landi has been making cardboard or aluminum sculptures that always start from thin, light, simple sheets. They have inaugurated a new direction in his work—a refined, constant exploration, always aimed at the boundaries of geometric abstraction. These sculptures do not have a collective name. Their creator, however, prefers to call them “sculptural objects,” because the process that gives life to these works is far from traditional canons: the forms are born first from the cuts Landi applies to the sheets, and then from the folds, evolutions, reversals, and distortions that the sheets undergo under his hand. The form does not descend from the artist’s thought: it is the result of a continuous torsion, an encounter between the artist and the material that inevitably becomes a clash, a contention, and then again, a dialogue, a collaboration. At first glance, Gabriele Landi’s sculptural objects might bring to mind the “portable sculptures” of Bruno Munari, which they approach mainly through external, formal affinities, but with which they also share, at least to a certain degree, their nature as objects “with an aesthetic function,” as Munari would have put it. “The sculpture is presented folded in an envelope. You open the envelope and take out the sculpture. Place the sculpture on a horizontal surface (it slides on inclined planes) and before turning off the light, observe how it illuminates the various protruding or receding parts, the solid and the empty parts. Turn it over, its appearance changes, your practical thoughts will slowly become aesthetic (the speed depends on you), you will no longer ask yourself ‘what is that thing,’ and you will fall asleep happy.” To a certain degree, as mentioned, because Landi’s sculptural objects escape his intentionality; they are the response of the deaf material to the artist’s solicitations (who, however, does not feel frustration at his inability to tame it—quite the opposite: he ends up working with the material). But that’s not all: he sees his objects as a kind of metaphor for the dualism between nature and culture, the relationship that the human being weaves with everything around them—an ideal reference to the challenge that, in every era, humanity poses to nature, which ultimately highlights the fragile condition of the human being. The lightness of Gabriele Landi’s sculptures, moreover, evokes this sense of contention and, at the same time, of fragility, of insecurity (Solide incertezze [Solid Uncertainties] was precisely the title of the exhibition in which the Ligurian artist first displayed his “sculptural objects”). Perhaps, however, talking about “lightness” (leggerezza) is inappropriate, since the noun is irremediably ambiguous. Certainly: countless critics and scholars have linked him to Munari’s work, highlighting the ease, delicacy, and irony of his pieces. Munari’s leggerezza is the same lightness as a butterfly’s flight, the snow that whitens a mountaintop, or the breeze that cools the coastline at the end of a summer day. Yet, it is true that this noun has been immoderately abused: Beniamino Placido was already tired of it in 1996. “For God’s sake, stop it”: he began an article that year. “We can’t take any more of this mania for ‘leggerezza,’ for the ‘light.’” And he blamed it all on Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Lezioni americane), responsible for unleashing excessive talk of leggerezza, and over-quoting leggerezza for every occasion. Calvino (if only he hadn’t said it!) spoke of “lightness of pensiveness.” And all his light followers took it so literally that they established the abolition of the complement of specification. Still Calvino’s fault, though: “pensiveness” refers to an etymology that is the exact opposite of “leggerezza.” And the oxymoron is the heaviest rhetorical figure there is. Lightness then becomes a condemnation where it masks the absence of pensiveness, where it intervenes to extinguish any attempt to go deep, when it dampens gravitas, when it becomes a blanket that obscures complexity. In a word: when it becomes superficiality. For Gabriele Landi’s works, one might instead speak of levity (levità). A less ambiguous noun. Leggerezza (lightness) has to do with weight; levità (levity) has to do with intensity. Levity is a touch cloaked in grace: the ear of wheat that bows to the midday sun is “all light and levity of grace,” wrote D’Annunzio. Levity is refinement that does not lose its substance: the colors of Federico Barocci’s Madonna delle Nuvole are at once subtle and severe, wrote Andrea Emiliani. Levity is thought dressed in delicacy. It is not difficult to find the right term to describe the poetry of Gabriele Landi’s works, because he himself comes to the rescue. in 2021, a solo exhibition was held in the eighteenth-century spaces of Vôtre, in Carrara, which he titled Lieve svanire (Subtle Fading), changing a vowel from the lyric of a Marlene Kuntz song (for them, it was lieve svenire – subtle fainting). The music video for the song featured ears of wheat, clouds, fog, soap bubbles, and Cristiano Godano scattering feathers in the air. In the eighteenth-century rooms of Vôtre were the fruits of Gabriele Landi’s work, continuing the tradition of Italian geometric abstraction of the late twentieth century, such as that of Dadamaino (one might think, specifically, of works without optical or kinetic implications: an artist Landi himself, moreover, lists among his references), Nangeroni, Mario Nigro, and Pino Pinelli, and then continued with the works of subsequent generations of artists who opened up those experiences to welcome suggestions that crossed national borders from outside (Giuliano Dal Molin and certain works by Alfredo Pirri come to mind, above all). Wooden sculptures painted, Landi’s works feature pure geometric forms that bring Italian geometric abstraction into dialogue with the Russian avant-gardes of the early twentieth century (the work To Russia with love clearly shows its Suprematist and Constructivist sources from the title), or new forms born from the encounter of pure forms, circles and triangles on which threads and strips are grafted, increasing the sculptural dimension of two-dimensional polygons, always with pure colors, and painted on the back with intense tones to make the works glow, to illuminate them with a light that is only switched on through the medium of color, to make the forms float above halos of pink and orange, so strong as to generate doubt in some exhibition visitors that the works were backlit. No artificial light, in reality: it is the power of color, it is the “reverberation of painting,” as was written for Alfredo Pirri who experimented with similar methods, the desire of painting to leave the confines of the work and expand beyond the material. The titles of Gabriele Landi’s works are evocative, echoing situations and dimensions to be grasped beyond the appearance of the forms, starting from the forms themselves: In bilico (In Balance), Pittura non eloquente (Inelegant Painting), Un giorno greve (A Heavy Day), Trappola (Trap), Colpevole (Guilty), Dove sei? (Where are you?), Soliloquio (Soliloquy), Sintomo scialbo (Faded Symptom), Stratagemma della rottura (Strategy of Rupture). Reading suggestions: the burden of deciphering them, of going beyond the surface, falls, as is obvious, to the viewer. It will be worth coming back to this point later. That “lieve svanire” (subtle fading) in the title intended to gather under one umbrella everything that characterized Gabriele Landi’s most ‘pure’ endeavors, one might say: “the levity of certain situations,” he said on the occasion of that exhibition, “determined mainly by the chromatic tones, in close agreement with the forms that contain them, and on the other hand, the progressive fading, again through color but not through its chromatics this time: through its consistency, of a series of mysterious presences that persist in my paintings.” A color, inspired as always by the chromatics of the sky (blues and pinks prevail), so subtle as to become almost evanescent. What then is this levity that permeates all of Gabriele Landi’s works, including the most recent? It is, first of all, a characteristic of the object that never fully reveals itself, never shows itself all at once, never assertively imposes itself on the observer. It is, rather, an elegant, discrete, delicate, aerial, subtle presence. It is the condition of the work that shuns invasiveness, drives away arrogance, avoids the cage of meaning—at least in the sense that belongs to much of the public, who are often led to confuse meaning with narration (today, many, too many believe they are looking for a meaning when they are simply looking to be told a story). Gabriele Landi’s levity, on the contrary, is the ability of the work to envelop meaning—a meaning that is never univocal—with its delicacy, its purity, and its mystery. It is also a game, a subtle provocation, the charm of a work that does not seek to strike the observer directly, but seeks, first, to be an aesthetic object à la Munari, an object whose meaning resides in its form, in its appearance and the substance that the appearance suggests, and secondly, an object that opens up gaps to entirely unexpected meanings. It is the polite face of solid thought, of an art that renews a tradition. It is also, one might think, an absence of methodicalness, despite the rigor of the forms suggesting the opposite. Visiting Gabriele Landi’s studio, a large room in Ressora, a busy commercial suburb between Sarzana and La Spezia, is useful for realizing how his works are born: Landi rarely works on only one project at a time; many of his works are conceived and grow simultaneously, are suspended and then resumed, threads that seemed dormant suddenly awaken and reappear with a certain constancy. The result of the curiosity of an artist dedicated to continuous investigation, the space where the works are born is the most concrete image of this incessant urge to experiment. It is the studio of a true artist who lives amidst the rigorous disorder of his ideas. It is the forge where Landi piles his aluminum sheets, his rolls of paper, where he stacks the boards from which his sculptures will be born, where one also comes across curious tools that Landi makes himself to facilitate his work: for example, there are some rulers (about two meters high) with various proportions that he uses for his carved papers. It is a laboratory in the broad sense, since for some years it was the headquarters for the Aurelia Sud project, with which Landi invited several colleagues to confront the sign of the premises (once, what is now his studio was a commercial activity): the invited participants created a work of art that for some months occupied the place of the sign, offering the traffic of the Aurelia road that runs alongside the studio a view of an always new work. A project that can be considered, in some ways, a product of the critical activity that Landi has long conducted with his project Parola d’artista (Artist’s Word), with which he continues to carry out a precious, original, constant work of dissemination, bringing the public closer to the artists Landi has been interviewing for his pages for years. And then the studio is also a testing ground for exhibitions, since the dimensions of the walls allow Gabriele Landi to imagine how his works might look hung inside a gallery or a museum. It happens then, when he is working in view of an exhibition, to visit him and already see a kind of preview of what the public will see during the official occasion. In recent months, for example, the studio walls were crammed with carved papers. It is these papers that give substance to the most recent streak of his production. Three large papers, each over five meters high, were the centerpiece of the exhibition Alle montagne (To the Mountains), Gabriele Landi’s solo show at the MudaC in Carrara in the summer of 2024, with a title that evoked Il testamento del capitano (The Captain’s Testament), the famous Alpine troops song, to sing a tribute to the mountains of Carrara. Three monumental papers, the three largest works he has ever created, occupying a large wall in the Apuan museum, executed with patient carvings that Landi operated on the surface of the paper for seven months, unprecedented expressions of a research that, with this challenging work, explored new areas of that borderland between painting and sculpture in which Gabriele Landi’s art has continued to move since the early moments of his career. The process is apparently simple, regular: the carvings are all squares (in that case one centimeter by one, but the dimensions of the cut vary according to the size of the sheets), and they follow a pattern that is not, however, predetermined. It is a continuous flow, a writing, a slow, patient, meticulous weave of signs, indebted to the research of Dadamaino (this time, those close to kinetic art), the fragments of infinity of Enrico Castellani, and the non-verbal scripts of Irma Blank. A fabric of openings and closures capable of evoking the orography of the Apuan Alps with a pattern made of proliferations, accumulations, thinning out, progressions, voids and solids, steep climbs and impetuous descents, regular sections and disordered masses, rarefied presences and masses of strong, vigorous, volumetric consistency. The result is a fascinating, articulated, three-dimensional landscape, although firmly anchored to the second dimension—an imaginative cartography with signs and openings capable of becoming valleys, peaks, quarries, screes; the potential of the paper pushed to the point of making it assume the consistency of the mountain without evoking its physical concreteness. It happens when Landi has a landscape he knows in mind, but it also happens if the paper has to reconstruct the map of a place where the artist has never been: Antarctica, for example, at the center of a large sheet intended to reproduce a kind of imaginary landscape, an interior mapping of the frozen continent that the artist can only cross with his imagination, or with that extraordinary means that, to recall Munari again, allows us to imagine something that already exists but is not currently accessible. This too is levity: not so much reproducing the landscape, whether it is the Apuan landscape or that of Antarctica, and perhaps not even capturing its essence, but rather touching what that landscape is capable of arousing, echoing Georg Simmel in his Essays on Landscape (“the landscape contains […], even in its immediate reality, an element akin to art, a trait of self-sufficiency and untouchability, with which it frees us inwardly, relieves our tensions, transports us beyond the limits of a momentary destiny”). Here: Gabriele Landi’s art, when it intends to evoke a landscape with a carved paper (but also a sky, a constellation, even the page of a notebook), manages to capture the ineffable, to capture the impalpability of the landscape solely through abstraction. Color, in all this, takes on the contours of a force that holds everything together and brings every jolt, every emotion, every feeling back to the purity of abstraction. Blues and pinks, as mentioned, are the predominant shades: the choice stems from a fascination with the skies of Giambattista Tiepolo. A sweet obsession expressed in the attempt to grasp its nuances, evoke its vertigo, recall a cloud, a patch of clear sky, the flight of an angel. A paper to be painted before his eyes, the image of the ceilings of Ca’ Rezzonico in Venice in his mind: “The wonder immediately captivated me,” says Landi, recalling Tiepolo’s skies. “Seeing a quadriga of horses, rampant, pulling a chariot governed by Apollo a few meters above my head is a real spectacle. Seated on the sun god’s chariot is a noble-born maiden, and all around are winged putti and a myriad of other characters, propelled upwards by vaporous clouds: the whole thing stands out against a sky streaked with pink, blue, and yellow. The bodies of the characters are wrapped in shimmering fabrics, and some of them brandish flags and insignia, waving them in the air. Following the zigzag of the broken lines, which construct the skeleton of this marvelous scenic machine, I too climb upwards. I almost feel like I can touch the clouds, the fabrics: I climb higher and here is the chariot, the putti, in an exhilarating crescendo, and then even higher, captivated by the compulsive and fast rhythm of the brushstrokes, bouncing between the flashes of light.” Color, in Gabriele Landi’s work, is the means through which the work dialogues with space. Wolfram Ullrich, who is among the pioneers of German geometric abstraction, would say that color, however free it may be, still needs a material support to contain it: from this observation comes his search for a pure color that is, however, enhanced by the steel edges of his works to allow its expansion beyond the limits imposed by the support, because a contrasting edge allows the color to move according to the viewpoint assumed by the observer. Landi, however, uses other means to achieve this dialogue between painting and space through color: the refractions in the wooden sculptures, the play of light and shadow in the sculptural objects, the very openings in the carved papers. Color is also a means used to protect the work, in some way, although it is not the only tool Landi adopts for this ‘conservative’ purpose, let’s call it that. His idea is that the public should not be involved only from a visual point of view: the invitation, he explains to me, is “to look closely at what is in front of you, and perhaps also discover something that at a first glance, and perhaps even at a second, and for the more distracted at a third, sometimes escapes. There is always something that is not noticed at a first glance: sometimes these are deviant situations, that is, capable of highlighting something different from the type of language used to create that specific work.” Concealing, for Gabriele Landi, is not just an aesthetic expedient: it is a way to preserve images from contemporary greedy visual excesses through a process of subtraction and concealment. It is in this way that the image can regain value: through the effect of estrangement it provokes in the observer. Always with a subtle touch. ——————————————————————————————–