This exhibition presents a concise selection of works on paper by artist and composer Sylvano Bussotti, most of which are being shown for the first time. Two works were previously included in the 2020 Quadriennale di Roma, the first museum survey of Bussotti’s oeuvre, curated by Sarah Cosulich and Stefano Collicelli Cagol. 

 

Sylvano Bussotti was a prominent figure in the worlds of music and opera. It was only recently, however, that his body of work began to be interpreted and discussed as a multidsciplinary artistic practice. This allowed his practice, which manifests itself in a wide variety of outputs, to be understood as a whole: from deconstructed musical compositions to poetry, opera (encompassing score, direction, costumes, lighting, and sometimes even acting), drawing, painting, ballet, and film. 

 

The drawings presented in the exhibition at zaza’ should not be understood as an archival presentation of visual works from an artist who fundamentally expressed himself in other formats, but as the integral output of a totalizing creative mind. This is not just a question of queer hermeneutics, it is a factual reading of the source material: many of the characters presented in the drawings - mostly lovers of a young Bussotti - reappear very often in his poetry and opera, often even inserted in Bussotti inventive re-readings of historical texts. 

 

The complexity of Bussotti's multidisciplinary practice places him in a crucial place within the European intellectual avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s, alongside collaborators and peers such as Gilles Deleuze, Luciano Berio, Igor Stravinsky, Roland Barthes, John Cage, and Carmelo Bene. He participated actively in a cultural climate which sought to deconstruct the (artistic) languages - lexical, musical, visual - of modernism, adding a unique ‘camp’ register to the conversation. 

 

Deleuze and Guattari used one of Bussotti’s drawn scores as the only illustration to their monumental Milles Plateaux; Roland Barthes, who famously wrote about Cy Twombly, recognised Bussotti’s work as the gestural collapse of visual and auditory registers. In the intimate nudes exhibited here at zaza’, the calligraphic gesture of the music scores takes on a more erotic form: one where desire and memory transcend the pure graphism of the line. 

 

Importantly, most of these drawings predate the deconstructed scores for which Bussotti would later gain recognition in Europe. They were made in private, in his early twenties, when he was drawn to the art of miniatures and the delicacy of their lines and colours. These works remained preserved and unseen until the late 1980s when Bussotti began acknowledging these drawings as artworks intended for public display. 

Through visual art, Bussotti developed his sense of scale, composition, color, and narrative, projecting these ideas into his musical practice. His visual literacy reflects the influence of Kandinsky and Russian Constructivism, aligning with the broader network of avant-garde thought that shaped his work. 

A queer reframing of the modernist avant-gardes offers the most compelling lens through which to understand Bussoti’s oeuvre. This perspective brings together his drawings with his more complex time-based and performative works.