Gianfranco Baruchello, the Italian conceptual artist known for his drawings and paintings of symbols, systems and words, has died. A friend and mentee of Marcel Duchamp, who he had met in Paris in the early 1960s, Baruchello said that ‘Every new work I make functions as a tool, a device to understand and test if my language is still working’. The result of these experiments were opaque but nonetheless beguiling works of simple mark making. In Exit from the Great Accolade (1963) for example, a white-washed square canvas possesses a crowd of yellow and red blobs of paint to the far right side, facing just a slightest suggestion of a figure in the middle of the composition.
Baruchello also cited John Cage, whom he met and exhibited with in New York, as an inspiration, sharing a mutual belief that the barest of gestures could carry great meaning. Nonetheless throughout the 1980s and ’90s, his work became marginally more formally complex – sometimes extending into pictorial sculpture – with more of the canvas filled with similarly opaque symbols. Monogramma Paradise (1985) has the suggestion of a map, complete with key; La Course, au pays d’harmonie (1992) might be construed as an architectural plan.
Self taught (having studied law), after his travels through the artworld hotspots of the twentieth century, from the 1970s Baruchello set himself up in an abandoned villa outside of Rome, mixing studio time with the life of a crop and livestock farmer.
