Much to the consternation of the Poles and their star astronomer Copernicus, because of Galileo, the Italians have long been credited with the discovery of the idea of outer space. This national fascination with astronomy, as well as with other branches of science, has found its way into Italian art over the centuries and particularly in the 20th century, with such schools of aesthetics and ideas as Futurism—and the far lesser-known Spazialismo. The largely long-forgotten painter Edmondo Bacci (1913–1978), a mainstay of Spazialismo, is being re-examined in a one-person retrospective at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection that will run through September 18, 2023. While his work is visually resonant with many contemporaneous artists such as Miró, Pollock, Frankenthaler, and a host of Italians such as Virgilio Guidi and Alberto Burri, it is far more exciting to examine Bacci’s work from the perspective of experimentations into the spatial capabilities of two-dimensional painting. As such, he has strange and exciting bedfellows in artists as diverse as Lee Bontecou and Glenn Brown, John Latham and Jack Whitten.
In his essay “Edmondo Bacci,”, based on the idea that light and color are fundamentally equivalent to matter and energy.” We see this in a mature work such as , painted in 1953, a colorful yet brooding canvas in which billows of cadmium reds, fuschias, and fleshy pinks hang over an impenetrable and amorphous structure of deep blacks and occasional blinding whites. The space as defined by this painting is convoluted and seems to recede off into pale silhouettes of endless iterations of these dark structural elements. , also from 1953, is similar in format; however, it moderates the overall dour sensibility, focusing a bit more on brightness and color—the dark void receding to the outer periphery of the painting, no longer taking center stage. This structuring of the paintings as facets of color in a flowing and moveable void places an emphasis on those in-between spaces, connecting Bacci’s explorations to a general fascination with Einstein’s bendable responsive fabric of space.
