In the sign of Baudelaire the first meeting with Angelo Trimarco, in the lecture halls of the University of Salerno, enchanted by the soft voice and grace that nourished the movement of hands that drew in the air the trajectories of thought and opened in the luminous name of the poet to the latitudes of the modern. Indeed no, perhaps I intercepted the depth and sweetness of his gaze even earlier, in the cozy rooms of the Paola Verrengia Gallery, he who, with dry elegance, unparalleledly recounted his encounter with the social art of Joseph Beuys, the epicenter of his iridescent Naples ad arte 1985-2000 (1999). Little does it matter, perhaps, if, as Roland Barthes wrote, “one can never talk about what one loves.”
The sequence of freeze-frames produced by the emotion over Trimarco’s passing is first and foremost the index of a most limpid reflection conducted with critical lucidity and civic passion in the territory of art, Dentro e fuori (1980) le istituzioni, as the title of a volume by Filiberto Menna, his beloved teacher, goes. A generous intellectual who made friendship a precious gift and a scholar who since the late 1960s – Trimarco in 1971 had taken over the teaching of History of Art Criticism at the University of Salerno, since 2012 he had been professor emeritus – wove together theoretical reflection and critical practice with rare intelligence and calibrated measure, looking among the first in Italy at the Surrealist horizon, of which Breton’s The Poetics of Breton (1969) and Alquiè’s Introduction to the Filosofia del Surrealismo /Philosophy of Surrealism (1970) are flagrant proofs, and at the same time interrogating the present of art, as testified by the exhibition-essay Ricognizione Cinque / Recognition Five (1968) that with a generational slant aligned, probing the intersections, five critics and five artists: Achille Bonito Oliva, Agostino Bonalumi – Maurizio Fagiolo, Marcolino Gandini – Germano Celant, Aldo Mondino – Renato Barilli, Gianni Ruffi – Alberto Boatto, Gilberto Zorio.
By following the upheavals of art and criticism, investigating in depth their shadowy areas, taking on the tools of anthropology – whose turn suggested by Joseph Kosuth, Artist as Anthropologist (1975) – and psychoanalysis along the “Freud avec Lacan” axis, of the sociology of art and iconology in a Warburgian key (Is Iconology Beyond Semiotics? the title of the talk given at the Conference on Theory and Practices of Art Criticism in Montecatini in 1978), Trimarco constructed a highly refined theoretical counter-discourse that found form in exemplary volumes for the Italian space in the 1970s: L’inconscio dell’opera. Sociologia e psicanalisi dell’arte / The Unconscious of the Work. Sociology and the Psychoanalysis of Art (1974), Itinerari freudiani. Sulla critica e la storiografia dell’arte / Freudian Itineraries. On criticism and the historiography of art (1979).
After the “vertigo of the theorist” that ploughed through the 1970s, he had been able at the beginning of the 1980s to record and diagnose, like a sharp seismograph, the gradual erosion of the functions of criticism and “the fading of theory,” in a decisive book La Parabola del teorico / The Parable of the Theorist (1982) [republished in 2014 – with an introduction by Stefania Zuliani -, in Arshake’s Critical Grounds series, edited by Antonello Tolve and Stefania Zuliani] which, together with the Mennian volume Critica della Critica / Criticism of Criticism (1980), constitutes an inescapable passage for understanding the trajectories of art and criticism at the intersection of modern and postmodern.
Stringing together art and philosophy, architecture and design, poetry and literature, continuing to frequent with intensity the Surrealist planet and its articulations (1984’s volume Surrealismo Diviso / Surrealism Divided), Trimarco with a porous gaze – as Gillo Dorfles observed in the introduction of a volume that from its title is a warning Il presente dell’arte / The Present of Art (1992) – went “always in search of categorizations of the profound thought that underlies all creativity.” A parable that at the start of the new millennium he rethought the fate of art in an unforgettable book, Opera d’arte totale / Work of Total Art (2001), which knots art and life in the mirror of Gesamtkunstwerk, where “life is a word that, though taken in the labyrinth of a thousand meanings, continues, however, to suggest a space irreducible to forms and a radical otherness.” In these same years, with a triptych of intersecting essays, Post-storia / Post-History.
Il Sistema dell’arte / The Art System (2004), Galassia. Avanguardia e postmodernità / Galaxy. Avant-Garde and Postmodernity (2006), Ornamento. Il sistema dell’arte nell’epoca della megalopoli / Ornament. The art system in the age of the megalopolis (2009), offered an original reinterpretation of the intertwining of postmodernity and globalization, drawing a cartography of the paths and imbalances, fractures and discontinuities of the art system (and criticism) in the time of Global Art History. And it is in this ever-changing framework that Trimarco has pointed to the question of dwelling, hospitality and the encounter with the other, as a precious place for art and criticism, a crucial core that “veering beyond the identity traits proper to the thought of modernity opens to otherness” (L’arte e l’abitare, 2001).
ll sistema dell’arte (2004), Galassia. Avanguardia e postmodernità (2006), Ornamento. Il sistema dell’arte nell’epoca della megalopoli (2009), ha offerto una rilettura originale dell’intreccio di postmodernità e globalizzazione, disegnando una cartografia dei percorsi e degli squilibri, delle fratture e delle discontinuità del sistema dell’arte (e della critica) nel tempo della Global Art History. Ed è in questo quadro in continua trasformazione che Trimarco ha indicato nella questione dell’abitare, nell’ospitalità e nell’incontro con l’altro, un luogo prezioso per l’arte e per la critica, un nucleo cruciale che «virando oltre i tratti identitari propri del pensiero della modernità apre all’alterità» (L’arte e l’abitare, 2001).
Configured along this conceptual axis is the artistic horizon of the new century, a mobile and restless field, marked by a double perspective that found form and breath in the volume Italia 1960/Oltre il 2000. Teoria e critica d’arte / Italy 1960/Over 2000. Theory and Art Criticism (2022): a reconstruction “of the plot by cuts and twists, lexicon and forms, figures and places,” of a segment of art criticism and theory in Italy and at the same time an inexhaustible device for the construction of the new. Thus criticism – in the luminous periplex drawn by Trimarco in more than half a century of theoretical reflection and fieldwork, uninterruptedly combining esprit de géométrie and esprit de finesse – “is neither disciplining nor deciphering a fundamental muteness, listening to a zone finally freed from all positivity, but a construction, which is not aimed at penetrating and excavating a dominant meaning and completeness, which has no goal or wholeness to reach, because it is polysense and plural, infinite and interminable” (Confluences. Art and Criticism at the End of the Century, 1990). And it is in this movement of infinite and interminable construction that the outcome of his enlightening thought and method is to be ceaselessly continued to be interrogated.
