Spazio Focus, March 29 - October 7 2012
curated by Flavio Fergonzi

Why, in 1963, did Beppe Devalle - a young painter from Turin whose career was already successfully launched (he was represented by the Galleria Galatea, with the support of Luigi Carluccio) " abandon painting and his much loved references to Paul Klee and Arshile Gorky, to spend the following three years cutting pictures out of magazines so as to create collages like those we see on exhibition here today?
Today he tells us why: omens invited artists to approach the picture (a word that was forbidden during the Fifties, but that would return to the artistic agenda in full force during the Sixties) from a new perspective. The Almanacco Bompiani " published in late 1962 " had presented the latest novelties in American Pop Art, while his closeness to Michelangelo Pistoletto, the opening of Gian Enzo Sperone’s gallery in Turin, and news arriving from overseas, via Paris " through the gallery of Ileana Sonnabend " pushed him to interact with creative disciplines (like design, cartoon art, advertising and fashion photography) that up until then had been distant from the discipline of painting, but that would soon revolutionize its rules. The season of material as an expressive element unto itself seemed to have ended definitively, as had that of life drawing and Post-Picassian distortion: all this was swept away by the unusual eloquence of the photographic medium " at least for those who knew what to look for. We should remember that Devalle’s first collages came before the pivotal exhibition of the American pavilion at the Venice Biennial of 1964, and only a year and a half after Roy Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist turned to pop art.
For Italy this was not an insignificant change. Sections of movie posters were already being used by Mimmo Rotella " who, just as Robert Rauschenberg did, used them with the intent of emphasizing their material aspect ", and in particular, by Bepi Romagnoni, whose artistic taste still followed a pictorial approach to the development of the narrative which excluded the newest take on the cinema of those years: the close up that isolates and freezes the image. In contrast, Devalle was fascinated by the mechanical act of cutting out and the merciless result of combining images.
In these collages there are at least two other aspects to be taken into consideration.
The first " which is not immediately perceived on first impact ", is the long shadow cast by Surrealism, not so much in terms of content (the nightmares of Max Ernst, or worse still, those of Salvador Dalì are long gone), but rather in terms of the process: the discovery of elements that generate visual short circuits in images created by others. The second " for a generation that read “Domus” attentively, looking to design and technology with enchanted optimism " was the inevitability of the great modernist lesson of the Bauhaus. With his revolutionary collages of 1963,Devalle tested new compositional rules, emphasizing the implicit grid within which everything is positioned and, above all, learning how to heighten the tension between the margins of the cutout, the profiles of the photographed object within the cutout and the profile of the new organism (the various cutouts in combination) in relation to the white sheet of paper that hosts it.
The cutouts " or lexical material if you like " all came from English and American news magazines: Richard Hamilton, who Devalle would approach after his early gesture of annoyance towards American pop art, would offer him a reference model. The icons of thrilling modernity (flashy cars), international chic (Audrey Hepburn), or even the most consumer oriented kitsch (luxuries from airport duty free shops) coexist without much difficulty; what really mattered was eliminating any sense of the obvious "all that which falls under the direct visual experience of the painter ", as everything now came into view indirectly (principally through photography), thereby imposing new grammatical rules. It is not without reason that the subject of these works is often the landscape which hosts different “stories” and that " through cuts and repositioning " can be turned into architecture.
Initially, between 1963 and 1964, these collages were not thought of as preparatory studies for paintings, rather they represented the reaction to the need for a new subject " a need that painting could no longer fulfill. Devalle then understood that those photographic samples and juxtapositions, could constitute a sort of pact towards a new harmony: in other words, he understood how the subject could no longer be regulated by a set consecutio temporum, but rather " and also in painting " how it could now sustain visual and temporal shocks never imagined before. Hence, in the wake of the studies exhibited here, came the acrylic paintings of the 1966 Biennial, hung in the same fateful hall in which Michelangelo Pistoletto would hang his mirror paintings.