Restany – Bianzan

Bianzan: the writing of thought

Pierre Restany

Bianzan’s work cannot be approached according to traditional criteria of aesthetic judgement: that would be the most definitive nonsense. The artist warns us against interpretations that are too superficial or argumentations of convenience. This work draws its inspiration from the deepest roots of memory and environment: family, place and the rhythm of a permanent paradox; it feeds on the same substance of which the reality it rejects is made. Sublimation for Bianzan is a tangible phenomenon, centered on the immediate consciousness of the being. The artist tells us how much her family members and places helped to create everyday fantasy of her childhood: her great-grandfather an archeologist and historian in Carnia and his cousin a geologist and explorer in Africa… The Friulian land, set on the border between the Slavic, Germanic and Latin worlds; a land of passages, invasions, exoduses and mighty natural phenomena. Earthquakes complete the vandalism of the invading hordes. At any price one must transcend this violence and, in the 1950s-60s, the young Bianzan will find a basis of spiritual peace in the incessant reading.

Initially it will be Dante, Florence and the Renaissance, then the America of Alan Poe, but also Faulkner and Kerouac, the fascination of Russian literature and the digital emergence, Klee, Kandisky that will transport Bianzan into the kaleidoscope of an enchanted world.on the edge of aberration which is that daily anguish of existence that Samuel Beckett brought to paroxysm. Then travels follow travels, but the young artist, in the attempt to understand the bonds that unite the being to the cosmos and to nature, fixes the center her wandering in the land of her birth. A land of forests and mountains, this one extending to Austria and Yugoslavia, to Vienna and Munich.For her avid spirit the nature of things intimately mingles with the nature of men,ions in the land of his birth. Land of forests and mountains, this one extending into Austria and Yugoslavia, into Vienna and Munich. For the the fauna and flora with the verses of Goethe and Rilke.

As the artist strives to get to the heart of things, she senses the excruciating vertigo of a familiar, but nevertheless fleeting, elusive, universe. Bianzan identifies herself in Musil’s hero, a man without character. A man without character since the cosmic forces constantly call him back to the order of the necessary modesty. Man is but a tiny fragment of the universal cosmology, but this nothingness is a thinking nothingness, and it is in the freedom of thought that the artist chooses to assume totally the privilege of the dream. Thus both the atmosphere and the language of her art are simultaneously structured. Thought flows into the imaginary: Bianzan describes the following episodes of her path.

The linearity of her style ends up evoking the microscopic, and therefore primordial, bond that unites all natural elements. The subjects of her painting witnesses the stratifications of her memory: tempera and acrylic alternate rendering, through the infinitive passages of color, the complexity of feelings. It would be unfair to attribute to the artist forms that are more allusive than precisely defined. This embryonic vision of the universe renders well the acute perception of a continuous becoming. Hers is a painting of an ambitious being out of an excess of love for man. To assume this gaze constantly fixed on the infinite one must be endowed with immense reserves of intelligence and love: intelligence of nature and love for beings. The means the artist uses are those elaborated through an intuitive search charged with illuminating coincidences.

Bianzan’s intent is in perpetual cosmic osmosis; her fluid space ignores both chance and time since the indeterminate is the current dimension of her imagination that manifests itself through the permanent present of an organic fantasy. This fantastic-organic alchemy has its own human dimension that radically differentiates Bianzan from the Surrealist tradition. For the artist nothing is gratuitous, nothing is inhuman, beyond the measure of man, and that is why one can trust her imagination. Bianzan paints to write the infinite message of the human condition. Bianzan, who has been able to rise to the universal power of cosmic vision, never denies her roots: it is they that give her way of living and seeing the most authentic of tones, that of a continuous writing of thought.

Paris 1992

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