Drawing parallel: Of resemblance between Pakistani, Italian arts

Italian art critic says some Pakistani artists following ‘Arte Povera’ movement.

ISLAMABAD:

The current Pakistani art scene, with its mix of everyday subjects and use of simple materials, bears some resemblance with a modern Italian art movement of the ‘60s, according to an art historian.

Lavinia Filippi, a contemporary Italian art critic and historian, said she has noticed some Pakistani artists using “simple and everyday-life materials as a rejection to consumerism,” much like the artists of the Italian “Arte Povera” movement.

Filippi was giving a presentation on Arte Povera or “Poor Art,” at the National College of the Arts Rawalpindi campus on Thursday. Arte Povera movement began in Italy in the late ‘60s and went on to become one of the most influential avant-garde art movements in Europe.

The presentation was organised by the NCA with the support from the Italian embassy.



Filippi explained the ‘Arte Povera’ was a radical and reactionary movement in which artists tried to challenge established structures, using materials from everyday life to focus on nature and denouncing artificiality.

She said the Arte Povera artists used materials such as rocks, leaves, clothing, paper and industrial scraps. Drawing a parallel with Pakistani art, Filippi cited the example of Imran Hunzai, an instructor and painter at the NCA, who recently exhibited his works made out of recycled electronic materials at Satrang gallery in Islamabad.

The term ‘Arte Povera’ was coined by Italian art critic Germano Celant, Filippi said. She quoted Celant to explain the theory behind the movement as an attempt at “reducing at lowest terms, impoverishing the signs to reduce them to their own archetype.”

She said the art movement not only marked a reaction against modernist abstract paintings in Europe of the 1950s, but also the American minimalism. Important artists of the movement included Michelangelo Pistoletto and Jannis Kounellis.

Filippi said some of the movement’s most memorable work comes from the contrast of unprocessed materials with references to the most recent consumer culture. She said more than a movement with a well-defined poetic identity it was a way of thinking.

“In Arte Povera, we can find not only an artistic theory about life, but also a reflection on the human condition,” Filippi, who currently lives in Islamabad, said.

She said Arte Povera artists strived for a “freedom of the object” to give art a multiplicity of meanings and take it beyond the borders of the object itself.

Filippi, who is married to the Italian embassy’s First Secretary Federico Bianchi, said she was trying to learn more about the contemporary Pakistani art scene through interviews and visiting studios of established and emerging local artists.

“[Being in Pakistan has given me] the opportunity to discover a very vibrant and exciting contemporary art scene,” she said.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 14^th, 2014.