Some Letters Rejected to the Sender, 1987

Gianfranco Baruchello   Master Artists

Gianfranco Baruchello born August 29, 19241 in Livorno (Italy) is an Italian artist, painter, poet and filmmaker.

Partner of Marcel Duchamp, very close to Gilles Deleuze and Jean-François Lyotard, Baruchello was part of the post-modern artistic avant-garde.

Coming from the ancient Judeo-Livorno community, Baruchello is the son of a lawyer who was also president of the Unione Industriale di Livorno (Union of Industrialists of Livorno) and professor at the University of Pisa.

After the Second World War, Baruchello finished his law with a thesis in economics. In 1947, he worked for the chemical company Delfini Bombrini Parodi, which specialized in explosives. From 1949, encouraged by his father, he invested in Delfini, taking the head of the research and development department for the biochemical part. But tired, Baruchello definitely left the industrial environment in 1959, to devote himself entirely to art, especially painting.

In 1960, moved to Paris, he met the artist Roberto Matta and three years later, the poet and critic Alain Jouffroy, both encouraged him. In 1963, while in New York, he became close to Marcel Duchamp, who familiarized him with the avant-garde scene and even made him a sort of disciple. The following year, he met John Cage. Pop Art and American Abstract Expressionism are a revelation for Baruchello. It was then that he began to take an interest in animated images, to want to make films. He teamed up with the Italian director Alberto Grifi and composed with him Verifica incerta, an image and sound montage made essentially of bits of film (footage) from fiction and current affairs films of the 1950s, recovered from projectionist booths; however, less than a minute into the film, Duchamp can be seen smoking a cigar (and longer at around 13:55).

Baruchello's fields of artistic experimentation are wide and their impact on the post-modern movement obvious.

Let us first remember the creation in 1967 of a fictitious company named Artiflex whose "baseline" was: "Artiflex sells everything". Acting as an operator with his wife Elena, Baruchello placed an ad in various financial magazines to solicit readers to send them a sample request. For three years, Baruchello sent subscribers small parcels containing various miscellaneous objects (candle swaddled in a sheet of newspaper, pages torn from Mao's books, tufts of hair, cans of tuna, etc.). In June 1968, at the Tartaruga gallery (Rome), a performance of a new kind took place: in a room called "Finanziaria Artiflex" (Artiflex Finances) there was a table with a cash register behind which sat a "saleswoman". . It offered Plexiglas boxes filled with 5 lira coins but sold individually for 10 liras! The next day, the space had become an "Artiflex waiting room" made up of seats and small tables. This performance undoubtedly constitutes the first manifestation of the relational aesthetic type2. Indeed, Artiflex, as an evolving work of art, can be judged according to the interhuman relations that it represents, produces or arouses. At least, such was the will of Baruchello and his wife.

In 1973, Baruchello moved to the countryside, in central Italy, 6 km north of Rome, and founded the "Cornelia Agricola SpA", a real independent farm, which carried out all kinds of activities, from growing vegetables, fruit trees, and raising sheep. The experience lasts until 1983, and inspires a series of paintings.