importanti e i suoi lavori sono esposti all’Expo 67 di Montreal, alla Biennale di Parigi, al Museo Sperimentale d’Arte Contemporanea e alla Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna di Torino, al Museum of Modern Art di Copenaghen. Riceve la cattedra in Psicologia della Forma all’Accademia di Belle Arti dell’Aquila. I suoi ultimi lavori si legano sempre più alla ricerca in ambito performativo, confermando che la funzione di pittura e scultura sta virando verso espressività che hanno a che fare col teatro ed altre forme di comunicazione ‘visiva’. La rappresentazione come ‘altra arte’ gli permette di riunire tutto ciò a cui si è sempre dedicato: pittura, scultura, architettura, oggetti e ambiente, gesti e coordinamento, per raggiungere un’esperienza totale. Nel 1968 si occupa attivamente di teatro sperimentale col Piccolo di Milano, curando gli Interventi Plastico-Visuali dello spettacolo Visita alla prova dell’Isola purpurea di Bulgakov+Scabia; viene presentata l’azione Garone e Geremia s.p.a., con Gambone, Isgrò e Sacchi alla Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Bologna e Autospettacolo, in mostra a Carole (1969). Inizia l’uso degli “alfabeti”, la scena dello spettacolo è disseminata di enormi lettere/ suono/parola, vere performances, come l’operazione Oplà-Stick del 1969 (Passione secondo Paolo Scheggi, “azione-teatro”, presentata al Naviglio di Milano e ripetuta poi a Zagabria durante la manifestazione Nouvelle Tendance) e Oplà dalla galleria Flori per le strade di Firenze, con la presenza di lettere-personaggi. Dies Irae,
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Inquisizione secondo Paolo Scheggi e Franca Sacchi, viene presentato al Teatro Manzoni di Milano, al Teatro del Palazzo degli Estensi a Varese, allo Space Electronic di Firenze. In Marcia funebre o della geometria, processione secondo Paolo Scheggi, presentato in Piazza Duomo a Como per la manifestazione “Campo Urbano”, Scheggi presenta un funerale come opera d’arte – una celebrazione alla morte per sé e per tutte le cose ordinate geometricamente. Nell’anno successivo (quello dei progetti con Vincenzo Agnetti Il Trono per la galleria Manaart-market di Roma e Il Tempio), con 7 spazi recursivi autopunitivi per 7 spazi neutri prende spazio la sfera simbolico-politica; realizza La tomba della geometria per la mostra Amore mio a Montepulciano, La Piramide per la mostra Vitalità del negativo a Roma e nell’esposizione dell’Eurodomos di Milano dedica l’ambiente “Ondosa” alla nascita della figlia Cosima-Ondosa-Serenissima. L’ultima mostra-lavoro plastico del 1971 è al Naviglio Seiprofetiperseigeometrie che con Tomba della geometria verrà presentata alla XXXVI Biennale di Venezia nel 1972. Nei decenni successivi, tra le mostre postume si annoverano quella alla Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (Bologna, 1976), alla Sala d’Arme di Palazzo Vecchio (Firenze, 1983), alla Galleria del Naviglio (Milano, 1990), alla Galleria Niccoli (Parma, 2002) e nell’anno corrente alle Gallerie Colossi (Chiari), Il Ponte e Tornabuoni (Firenze, 2007).
PAOLO SCHEGGI: THE SPACE BEFORE THE DARKNESS Bruno Corà
The crescendo of exhibitions, studies and critical success that Paolo Scheggi’s works have been enjoying once again of late, after several years of silence, highlights above all what others already considered evident upon his sudden death thirtyfive years ago: Scheggi was an undisputed leading figure in the linguistic renewal of Italian and European art from the 1960s onwards. While this may be becoming increasingly clear to many, it was immediately so to my youthful eyes, due to the sensitive aura transmitted by the artist himself and his work, both ‘full of grace’, as the angel was to say. When I met him with the group of artists who got together in Milan and Rome – counting Castellani, Agnetti, Alviani, Colombo, Kounellis and Marotta – to bring to life the “Vitalità del negativo” (’70) exhibition promoted by the Incontri Internazionali d’Arte international art association in Rome, with whom my own activity was to begin at the same time, Scheggi stood apart from the rest. He was the youngest (if we don’t include Zorio and his peers Boetti, Paolini and Mochetti) and – in a certain sense – was the promising enfant prodige of the generation that had grown up alongside Fontana whose goal between ’59 and ’60 was to wipe out all thinking still marooned in the various expressions of European Art Informel. Not only was Scheggi befriended and admired by his travelling companions, but he also found complicity in his artistic adventures. At the same time as he was providing the Roman exhibition “Vitalità”, set up in the rooms of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Via Nazionale, with works such as Intersuperficie curvabianca (Curved White Intersurface, ’63), the black plastic laminate with bronze characters Della geometria (Of Geometry, ’70) and other works from ’62, ’68 and ’70 (amongst which the pyramid Della Metafisica (Of Metaphysics, ’70)), Scheggi was displaying Il Trono (The Throne – ’70) designed and created together with Vincenzo Agnetti, his associate for the occasion, at Nancy Marotta’s Mana art Market gallery in Via del Fiume in Rome. But before that memorable association between artists, Scheggi had already formed others, combining his work
with that of dramatists such as Giuliano Scabia, musicians such as Franca Sacchi, artists such as Getulio Alviani, directors such as Raffaele Maiello and critics such as Franco Quadri. He was always looking for and finding that extra something while conceiving his pictorial and plastic works. It was blatantly clear that his work would head in a direction as unforeseeable as it was sure: towards architecture, design, theatre, environment, and perhaps towards digital art. Indeed, his work anticipated and announced the mathematical, geometrical, verbo-visual and, in a wider sense, multimedia factors implicit in his eagerness to ‘totally project’ space.
The Dialectic Contradiction between Space and Object It is in close relation to that objective of integrally conceiving space that, in a page of his theoretical notes from 1964 written on occasion of the assignment received from the Lombard Regional College of Architects to create a committee to carry out research into “total planning”, we read: The concept (…) of “total planning” has its spiritual but not methodological roots in the series of transformation that architecture has undergone since the first decade of the century. From de Stijl to Bauhaus, from the Lombard group of ’35 to integrated planning, there has been an unbroken series of proposals whose common denominator has been teamwork between various different disciplines. Coordinated work where the planning terms and criteria are laid down beforehand.
If these are the premises for the work that Scheggi would do, starting from that assignment in partnership with the architects Mendini and Olivieri and continuing for several years thereafter, it is not asking too much to wonder how he had got, in just a few years from his debut, to such an advanced point of interconnection with the disciplines that aim to investigate spatiality in all its complexity. The surprising thing is that – almost at the same time as the early spatialist dabblings of the new ’60s Italian avant-garde and in particular as the work begun by Francesco Lo Savio with SpazioLuce (Space- Light) and, in different ways, by Enrico Castellani with Azimuth and, more different still, by Dadamaino – Scheggi was carrying out
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