Remo Bianco, plastic and the trauma of the post-war Italian artist

This article examines how Italian artist Remo Bianco (1922–88) used plastic to manage the traumatic transition from Fascism to the post-war period. It contends that the post-war optimism and enthusiasm associated with plastic that is evident in the art of Bianco’s compatriots (Alberto Burri, Carla Accardi, Piero Gilardi and Gino Marotta) masks a dark undercurrent of the past, one expunged from later narratives of Italian art, but which can be found in Bianco’s works. Beginning by examining plastic as material, signifier and artistic medium, the article analyses plastic’s development and adoption by artists in Italy from Fascism to the post-war period. Unlike his contemporaries, such as Piero Manzoni and Yves Klein, who created sculptural works that engaged with the live human body, or Christo, who packaged objects for their contents to be guessed, Bianco used plastic to wrap and encase objects and humans so as to anxiously yet methodically sort, organize, seal off and safeguard people and things. While Bianco’s use of plastic refers to broader repressed cultural anxieties, his art also expressed personal concerns associated with his troubled sexuality, from disturbed relationships with women to his closeted homosexuality, which he blamed on his rigid upbringing under Fascism. As this article demonstrates, this interweaving of art, history and autobiography fuelled Bianco’s idiosyncratic use of plastic, resulting in a sense of detachment overshadowed by the avant-garde art of his time.