Gianni Colombo in Ugo Mulas’s Photographs: Body and Behaviour

Abstract

Among the photographic sequences dedicated by Ugo Mulas to the artists of his time, those focusing on Gianni Colombo’s works occupy a critically fundamental position: not only for their frequency and quantity, but also and above all for the recurring and never passive presence of figures, starting with Colombo himself, who appears in these images with an unusual insistence: above all, not casually or purely for a portrait, but according to deeply significant performative coordinates. The article analyzes these images in detail, which I have been studying and so far only partially published, particularly in the monograph Gianni Colombo. The Body and the Space 1959-1980 (2015). In these photographs, Colombo's works and environments emerge, thanks to Mulas’s photographic vision, in their very nature of real “behavioural activators”, deconstructing the vision beyond the individuality of the experience, thanks to the presence of one or more bodies that act, also in relation and reciprocal participation with one another. The analysis is articulated around the centrality of the notion of “behaviour”, both for Mulas’s photographic vision and for Colombo’s artistic one: not only in fact the reflection on “behaviour” recurs in many writings by both, but is also explicit in their creative practice as a key through which to reinvent the image.