VIdi the first exhibition of Tullio Garbari In Palazzo delle Albere, back in 1984, and I keep the catalog, edited by Giorgio Mascherpa with Gabriella Belli and Maria Garbari.
Thirty -five years later, as president of the Mart, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto, I proposed an exhibition, precisely of this painter, in the same place. I had no doubts in getting a new season of Palazzo delle Albere with an artist at all local and original, in his absolute autonomy from fashions and movements, such as Tullio Garbari.
Garbari is one of the great painters of Trentino, born in Pergine Valsuganadied in Paris in 1931, where he had gone with the hope, in vain, to meet the French philosopher Jacques Maritain, whose philosophical thought had deeply influenced him. The meeting will not take place, because Maritain was not in Paris, and why Garbari He will suddenly die from a cardiac arrest on October 8th, at just 39 years old.
Its originality marks the conjunction point between primitivism and modernitywithout indulgence for the avant -garde, in balance between the new reflections of Carlo Carrà on Giotto, the customsman Rousseau, Alberto Magri, Lorenzo Viani. All independent spirits, whose authenticity is literally original.
It is no coincidence that, With the word “primitive”, a world is indicated that is not only that of African art, which inspired Picasso, but also that of the origins of modern paintingbetween Cimabue, Giotto and Duccio di Buoninsegna. Primitative are, in this periodization, the painters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, whose nore and candor the work of Garbari reproduces, more by instinct than for reason.
Tullio Garbari: “La Sibilla Cumana” (1930 (Mart Rovereto, Autonomous Province of Trento – Superintendence for Cultural Heritage).
After the years of training, between Venice and Florence, Garbari has its formal lighting in Milan, thanks to the attendance with Carlo Carrà who started in 1910 (Remember works like The antigratious or The wheelchair). The leap in archaic culture takes place thanks to this meeting, even if the streets of the two painters will soon separate.
Indeed, Carrà’s primitivism is eminently a formal question, while that of Garbari has a profound sacredness which arises from the study of emotional and passionate expressiveness of archaic art, and above all of the popular one.
It is precisely in the dimension of the sacred that Garbari’s primitivism reaches unprecedented authenticitywhich transfigures in mystical vision not only the devotional iconography (San Sebastiano, Sant’Antonio, apocalyptic composition, Madonna della Pace), but also the simplicity of an ex vote subject like The miracle of the mule.
When the great artists reach such a high tuning tuning, then their research comes out of the borders of primitive painting, in which Garbari excels. Thus, almost dreamlike masterpieces are born, on the border with magical realism, such as The Sibilla di Terlago And The Cumana Sibilla.
Some ingenuity rurals seem to coincide, on the level of inspiration, with the subsequent painting, and full of disturbances, by Antonio Ligabue and Pietro Ghizzardi, two eccentric, outside the history as Garbari was. But Garbari is not a timeless painter. As Gino Severini observed: “The effort of simplification and internal purification that is found in Garbari’s work And its constant intention of putting a rich spiritual content in it leads it, so to speak, automatically towards one of the most noble and, at the same time, of the most current: that is, that of touch the intelligences of the crowd, at the same time that those of the so -called elite».
Now, many things have been said, and they will still say, by Tullio Garbari, and its originality and centrality and authenticity. But I don’t want to spare myself to amaze you, widening the field of affinities to another artist and another world, as if to indicate a necessity and an urgency of the times. In fact, at a distance, and without connection, A singular consonance between the work of Tullio Garbari and that of the great American painter, born a year before him, in 1891: Grant Woodauthor of the famous American Gothicmore meticulous but of identical amazement, which characterizes, as well as human presences, the landscape of the great painter, also dreamlike and enchanted.
In both cases, these are representations of absolute virginity. They approach works like Rest on the lawn to Spring in the country To find out. And if Grant Wood’s vision is called “regionalist”, that of Trentino Garbari can be said to be autonomistwithout comparison throughout the painting, and with spontaneous bribes with great differently primitive artists, such as Giotto and William Blake.
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