Claudio Strinati – Dense and crowded, the front pages of Il Foglio become a work of art

The drawings that conrad-bercah (architect) has created in recent years using the front pages of Il Foglio as a medium have become famous. They provide support for an evocative sequence of architectural images, partly taken from real buildings and urban areas, partly the result of a complex reworking of models consecrated by tradition and reformulated by the cultured and refined artist according to an overall creative strategy that is strongly rooted in concrete and verifiable historical dialectics, but which is equally convincingly directed towards the dimension of symbolism and figurative metaphor.

These works have been exhibited repeatedly in recent years, also receiving prestigious awards, such as the prize awarded to him in 2021 at the MAXXI for the event “Cities as culture. Starting again from culture.”

And indeed, the dimension of travel, departure, and arrival has clearly marked conrad-bercah’s career thus far. We find him active in New York and Boston, Berlin, Rome, and Milan, always with projects of considerable impact and supported by a commitment to study and research whose fruits are clear and now well known to historiography.

Especially in Berlin, Bercah has carried out projects of considerable value such as the “bercahaus,” a multi-story building made entirely of wood and designed as a sort of evocation of late 19th-century German Romantic architecture, albeit reformulated in a quintessential way. At the same time, his stays in Germany have led him to emphasize another distinctive aspect of his work, that of the scholar, historian, and theorist, closely connected with the Warburghian tradition in search of those connections, mostly to be interpreted in a subliminal key, which nourish the history of images with a sense of continuity and fracture at the same time, which has little to do with the concepts of tradition and innovation, however dominant in any historical-artistic doctrinal exegesis worthy of the name.

In short, the drawings formulated on the pages of Il Foglio reflect precisely this intellectual and moral tension that animates the scholar and the creative artist, focusing explicitly and clearly on the infinite and inexhaustible theme of memory.

bercah, like a new Stephen Dedalus wandering the beach at Sandymount in Joyce’s Ulysses, is on the trail of all the things that have left a seemingly lost mark, but which are instead sedimented in a kind of collective memory that the artist investigates in a manner comparable to that of a Geiger counter detecting the presence of ionizing radiation, otherwise inaccessible to the cone.

The Geiger counter metaphor is mine, but the underlying thesis is precisely that theorized by the author himself when he talks about his work as a survey “of the time within time that many carry with them without knowing they have it.” Thus, the pages of Il Foglio are filled with a series of architectural drawings, created according to precise creative strategies. Together, they aim to act as a kind of bulwark, a fortress protecting the forms that present themselves to the observer as a warning to preserve the best that lies within each of us from an aesthetic point of view. A warning in the dual sense of admonition and remembrance. But admonition in what sense? And remembrance of what exactly?

The drawings are conceived as a series (and this simple observation alone provides a reliable answer), some of which have been exhibited in important exhibitions, including a truly remarkable one at the Casa dell’Architettura in Rome in 2022. Two of the so-called Atlases, each consisting of 24 drawings, were particularly emblematic. They are called La Mano del Tempo (The Hand of Time) and Il Dialogo estetico di Roma con se stessa (Rome’s Aesthetic Dialogue with Itself) and feature the facades of palaces and churches, detailed plans of prominent buildings, technical studies, and purely evocative images. All freehand, with an explicit stance against computer graphics. Bercah does not like it and does not want to use it, as if it took away that historical and even ancestral assumption that he wants to bring out powerfully, supported by a robust and infallible mark. And this aspect is also an essential part of the idea of a bulwark with which Bercah conducts his work.

The underlying thesis is the need for architectural thought to flow freely and explicitly, manifesting itself as such both to the most knowledgeable experts and to those who, by chance, have no specific experience but are nevertheless involved in those creative processes, even if only on an intuitive level. In bercah’s view, architecture is a benefit, an indispensable and precious tool that humanity needs. He is certainly not the first to argue this. Indeed, reading his writings and observing his drawings, one seems to hear the words of Leon Battista Alberti, the father of Renaissance architectural thought, which the author certainly does not repeat slavishly, but rather reformulates in a radical way and projects onto the hardships and torments of our current reality, a thousand miles away from the world of the fifteenth century.

The Atlases are a sort of manual of information and a call to reflect and understand.

bercah’s creative experiences thus underwent a powerful acceleration when the events that have accompanied us over the last decade took the form of threat and destruction. On the one hand, the pandemic and, on the other, the invasion of Ukraine were two gigantic phenomena that provoked in the architect the urgency to affirm his ethical and aesthetic values, peacefully invading the pages of a newspaper such as Il Foglio, using its intrinsic communicative energy that characterizes it as an indispensable support for his action. Il Foglio lends itself to this. It is dense and crowded, as if it had been designed according to the ancient principle of horror vacui, and for this very reason, bercah’s artistic elaboration exploits the vividness of the headlines, which often stand out solemnly in the dense and rigorous layout, as if they were architraves on which the architectural design rests, remaining magnificently supported.

The squaring of the pages of the Foglio may have suggested to bercah the idea of a “chess game with time,” another interpretive category with which the author himself describes a characteristic of his work.

The drawings are revelations and, in fact, strongly engage the observer, prompting them to undertake the task of exhaustively deciphering their meaning and purpose.This is because the images appear solid and determined, but the apparent fragility of the medium is equally clear, as if bercah’s creative intentions revealed a state of mind similar to and yet almost opposite to that of William Kentridge, who decided to lean more towards the definitive than the transitory. And so bercah’s drawings are, to all intents and purposes, sheets of architecture springing from an inspiration that, in other circumstances, the author himself has defined as Tolstoian. This brings us to the heart of the matter: war and peace. Born from this mental turmoil that has settled over many years, these drawings have now become even more relevant in expressing a desire for order, certainty, and the resulting aesthetic and existential satisfaction.

Of course, artists generally have no chance of resolving political or military conflicts. Nevertheless, they have every right to point out ways of thinking and feeling that lead consciences to assimilate something unexpected and beneficial in order to draw on the profound truths of things.

conrad-bercah continues to develop his figurative ideas, and Il Foglio is a suitable and welcome medium for this.