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The MetaFormismo©

The point zero of Art’s History

The MetaFormismo©, absolutely new word for dictionaries all over the world, is a historical concept, conceived and theorized in 2010 by the author of this catalog, a historian of the Longhiana school, who after twenty-five years of studies and research has produced a sort of budget summary of the History of Art of the Twentieth Century.

It doesn’t report a current or an artistic movement, but it cites a precise historical period, the last of all the History of Art so far lived with explicit reference to the “non-figurative” art for which has been identified a unique reading key: the MetaForma© (through the shape).

Before closing millennia of Art’s History,the MetaFormismo© has been questioned about many of the artistic expressions of the Twentieth and of the first twenty years of this Twentyfirst Centuries, condemned to misunderstanding that not exhibits objectively recognizable figures, but only signs and colors to look for to understand the meaning with some difficulty.

The historian who conceived it has therefore proposed the need for a definitive clarification and this comes from the possibility of translating into convincing meanings those signs and colors that, if well observed, outlines shapes. Free and apparently disordered, these forms actually follow the lines of an architecture not built by the discipline of a school, but simply intuited by the artist who decided to rely on his subconscious, or that part of himself instinctively reactive to external motivations.

The MetaFormismo, then, revisits the whole line of the so-called Abstractionism which, born in Eastern Europe with the decisive artistic contribution of the Czech Frantisek Kupka (1871 - 1957) and of the Russian Vasilij Kandinskij (1866 - 1944), pillars of the “Abstract Art”, continued throughout the Twentieth Century, spreading all over the rest of Europe and beyond into the United States. Here it will even enter in the Cold War, within a CIA program that saw in the Abstract a useful tool for the affirmation of freedom of expression, equivalent to the freedom of thought against the totalitarianism of the communist regimes. This was precisely what Jackson Pollock meant when, through his famous action painting, continued to affirm and reaffirm the expressive supremacy of gestures.

To continue in the 2000s to label non-figurative art as “abstract” is a historical-critical operation that is no longer acceptable for three reasons: a) because the historical and artistic conditions that motivated both Kupka and Kandinskij to proceed in “abstraction” mode with regard to a realistic representation of the external world (primary aim of the art of all times) are lapsed; b) because throughout the Twentieth Century, “non-figurative” front took differentiated paths, variously named; c) because the contemporary creativity from the post-war period has managed to go beyond the color on the canvas by introducing fragments of various materials... like reality fragments.

Reality, therefore, no longer waits to be represented, but enters by right into the representation otherwise then not to represent itself, like in the past millennia of history, but to support with its own material presence the free flow of creative energies that is at the base of any “non-figurative” work.

Once understood that lines and colors in complete freedom — and not submitted to academic practices and even less organized to create, for example, the illusion of three-dimensionality, as the Renaissance has taught to generations of painters for centuries — they are able to let glimpse the shapes, it is necessary to focus on the image and try to identify those forms.

They are the reading guide of something that is not external like a landscape, a portrait, a still life, but something internal to the artist himself: his spiritual world that art permits to transmit, stimulating our vision to translate in sense the apparent nonsense.

This cognitive process is fully applicable to all the «non-figurative» arts starting from the first “abstract” work in history, he famous Amorfa by Kupka, and the esoteric geometries of Kandinsky. The range is incredibly varied as indicated by the genealogical tree of MetaFormismo©, also traced by the author.

But why does MetaFormismo© represent the last phase of Art History? It is very simple: Art can no longer say anything new because it has already said all that there was to say and it is not replicable if not in itself — that is, producing a series of copies from the past — and through new technologies which moreover, distance it more and more from its original principle.

So, there can no longer exist a History or an Art History to be written as it has happened up to now. Art and History, today, are only two absolute values to be preserved; this is why all the preservation structures able to protect their integrity predominate in cultural and social prestige, as well as economic.

Giulia Silato ©2019