«Joy can destroy the system because, unlike the new revered deities answering to the names of Production and Consumption, it is limitation, it is inner rule, it is contentment with oneself and with simple things: not through mental misery, but through wisdom». With these words Enrico Baj, juggler of contemporaneity, directs the spectacle of his works, now components of a solo exhibition dedicated to him at Palazzo Reale in Milan, which can be visited until next February. Spectacle, play and laughter are the coordinates through which Baj operates the parodistic translation of his own time into artistic language. Explanatory panels similar to festoons, colourful and lively, accompany the public to immerse themselves in his poetics, of which the most incisive moments are placed chronologically in the large Sala delle Cariatidi. The choice of the exhibition setting is already iconic in itself, as it highlights the most relevant reflections of the mirror game proposed by Baj.
Enrico Baj, “Parata a sei”, 1964, oil and collage on fabric, 190 x 480 cm. Archivio Enrico Baj, Vergiate (VA), courtesy Palazzo Reale, Milano
Two major reflections come to life in this room. Firstly, the destruction of the bombs of the Second World War, of which the walls of the room retain the signs, is powerfully reflected in the first cycle of works on display, relating to nuclear painting, a painting that winks at the explosiveness of the world’s matter. In this phase Baj sees the artist as the only figure capable of grasping the world as a propeller of energy, of that nuclear energy whose extreme outcome was Hiroshima and Nagasaki. An unresolved dualism between the progress of science and political abuses, between the economic boom and its social drifts, gives rise to a riot of anxiety and excitement, held together by Baj’s logic of the absurd, alias pataphysics.
Enrico Baj, “I funerali dell’anarchico Pinelli”, 1972, set up in Milan, Palazzo Reale, 2012, photo by Andrea-Scuratti, courtesy Palazzo Reale, Milano
Advancing along the room, then, we come to the second reflection: the Baj-Picasso mirroring, clearly evident in I funerali dell’anarchico Pinelli. The work appears as a jigsaw puzzle of figures playing chaotically with the historical event depicted and many of the elements of this irreverent game are an explicit quotation from Guernica. The reflection between the two artists becomes more complex if we consider that in 1953 Picasso imposed as a necessary condition for the exhibition of his masterpiece in Milan that the Spanish canvas be placed in Sala delle Cariatidi, a detail that makes this room a privileged meeting place between two authors who wanted to narrate their own time, placing the filter of art – either in its most tragic nuance or in that of a more mocking irony – on that narration. Finally, the general layout of the Palazzo adds a final factor of refraction to this dynamic of correspondences: the door leading to Baj chez Baj seems to confront and spy inside Picasso the foreigner, on show in the adjacent museum section.
Enrico Baj, 1964, courtesy Palazzo Reale, Milano
The Milanese artist continues to weave his web of satirical denunciation with continuous experiments, but always aimed at contemporary bestiality. These include Meccano, which Jouffroy defined as an organism of ‘conscious caricatures of technology’. By reviving the playful aspect of mechanical constructions, the author reveals the illusory nature of the exploits of modern, childish and unconscious exploits hidden behind the slender finger of 20th century superhumanism. Baj thus embraces the puerile condition of pure amusement precisely because only ‘gaiety can destroy the system’. On this wave, his pataphysical world – made up of puzzles, constructions, ‘textile merry-go-rounds’ and houses of mirrors – takes the form of Furniture, secret drawers in which the childlike principle of amazement is kept, and finally of Mirrors, the works that at the end of the exhibition introduce the last missing player in the game of artistic translation of the world: the spectator.
Enrico Baj, “Specchio”, 1960, collage of mirrors on board and fabric, 90 x 110 cm. Archivio Enrico Baj, Vergiate (VA), courtesy Palazzo Reale, Milano
In the glass fragments reassembled on velvet and board, the visitor enters the painting and experiences his own double: he sees a reflected self trapped in the work as an integral part of it, and at the same time a self free from the intrigue of art thanks to the spectatorship that defines him, i.e. being an external and separate observer. The observer then becomes that Ultrabody that Baj painted years earlier and which represented the intrusion of a foreign body – with disturbing robotic features – within the order of the normal, revealing once again the conflicting nature of the age of dualisms. But it is in the translation of disturbance into an instrument of play that lies the ultimate value of Enrico Baj’s art in which, as André Breton wrote, «extreme inquietude is suddenly illuminated with joy». The true legacy of the pataphysical works, in fact, is nothing less than a new sense of joy: joy as a symptom of intelligence, that is, the ability to be in tune with a reality full of disagreements and contrasts, and not an indication of ingenuous dissonance from reality.
Info:
Baj chez Baj
08.10.2024 – 09.02.2025
Palazzo Reale, Milano
Piazza del Duomo, 12 – Milano (MI)
www.palazzorealemilano.it
Graduate in Philosophy from the University of Milan, where she currently lives, she specialized in aesthetics and contemporary criticism. Passionate of the art world and devoted to research, she believes in the potential of the interdisciplinary gaze, which intertwines critical thinking, typical of philosophical backgroud, and the communicative power of art to shape the evolving identity of its time.
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