FMR is a bi-monthly magazine published simultaneously in English, French, Italian and Spanish.

 

To preserve the magazine in your library, FMR offers its subscribers an elegant library case for the 6 annual issues.

 

Editorial for Issue 20

This issue of FMR begins with monument, Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, which everyone has seen but few – we might say almost nobody – has looked at.
I am drawn to this monumental and cannibalistic work because it is unconstrained by tense and mode: it is unclassifiable. It is supremely ambiguous, and grandiose. Here Géricault was unstinting with his genius. The work is there for all to see – or rather, look at.
Now at last it is brought back into the limelight by FMR’s “seeing eye”, itself made up of photographic views and words, but more especially of an idea of looking with a naked and enquiring gaze.
That is the idea behind this issue, which includes readings which act transversally on what seems best known and, by way of counterpoint, on what our culture has managed, with the arrogance of its historical definitions, to cause to fade.
There has been endless discussion of the baroque tendencies of the Postmodern, with all its fleas with littler fleas upon their backs to bite them, but Serge Roche, a man with a deep feeling for the true Baroque, through the medium of the mirror, is by now a virtual unknown. We endlessly rehearse the same old platitudes about the “famous twelve”, but we have probably never made the journey to Genoa, to have our eyes opened to the fact that Cambiaso was an international genius, active in a place which was at once peripheral and central. We blather on about art photographs, artist-photographers, blithely ignorant of the fact that, in Yokohama, almost unknown authors were inventing modern photography, and we continue to act as if nothing had happened. We talk of “made in Italy” thinking of twentieth-century design, and we have forgotten that for centuries Italian craftsmen, workers and masters, were creating things such as the inlaywork in the Mazzolini Giuseppucci pharmacy, a little gem tucked away in Fabriano, in that “minor” Italy teeming with masterpieces. Here we are in the world of the Neo-Gothic: Italy had had a Gothic of her own, and knew how to rethink it. For us, “made in Italy” is also the Villa Menafoglio Litta Panza, where Luigi Canonica and Piero Portaluppi worked, and, after them, Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin and James Turrell. “In art, you need a particular smell” wrote Viktor Sklovskij; the French expression is “pousser sa chaleur”. In Varese, with his Gesamtkunstwerk, his “total work of art”, Giuseppe Panza di Biumo has given a genuinely Italian flavour to the international Avantgarde.

Flaminio Gualdoni