Concetto Pozzati: Rhino Skin

Concetto Pozzati (Vò di Padova, 1935 – Bologna, 2017) was one of the most active protagonists of Italian artistic culture in the postwar period. As the son of the italian painter Mario Pozzati and nephew of the renowned advertising poster designer Severo Pozzati (known as Sepo), he earned the nickname "the corsair of painting" by the art critic Giuseppe Marchiori in the catalogue of the Galleria del Cavallino (Venice, 1967), for his ability to move across and bring into dialogue diverse artistic languages, from Surrealism and Informal Art to Pop Art. Although he was primarily known as an artist, Pozzati also trained as an architect and worked as a graphic designer, initially collaborating as an assistant to his friend, the painter Pirro Cuniberti, and later refining his skills in the large Parisian studio of his uncle Sepo.

At a time when American Pop Art was gaining international prominence through the serial reproduction of consumer objects, Pozzati offered a critical reinterpretation of the movement. He became an interpreter of the cultural trauma generated by this new visual paradigm, placing it at the center of his artistic inquiry. In Italy, his work was fully embedded in the climate of experimentation and cultural ferment that characterized the sixties-seventies, a period marked by expanding consumerism and an intense dialogue between art, industry, and communication.

It was within this context that the phenomenon of the artist’s gadget emerged, promoted by Biancoenero Edizioni d’Arte, a Roman publishing house founded by Gianfranco Giorgi Rossi and Silvia Barbellini Amidei. The couple, passionate about conceptual art, graphic design, and sculpture, collaborated with major artists and companies, including Alitalia, Duina, and Selenia. For Alitalia in particular, the commission was to conceive objects related to the themes of travel and flight, to be offered as exclusive gifts to VIP passengers. The publishing house therefore invited its artists and friends — among them Gianni Novak, Maurizio Mochetti, Maurizio Nannucci, Aldo Turchiaro, and, of course, Concetto Pozzati — to engage playfully with these themes and create something capable of leaving a positive memory while also being reproducible on a large scale (5000–6000 copies).

Within this framework, Pozzati created Rhino Skin in 1975: an elegant version of the traditional Game of the Goose, entirely hand-printed in seven-color silkscreen on cow leather and packaged in a cardboard tube complete with dice and playing pieces. The game's path becomes a veritable iconographic map of his artistic practice, with each square featuring recurring elements from his visual vocabulary. Among them is the pear (squares 21 and 37), one of his most recognizable motifs, which repeatedly appears as a flat, two-dimensional, isolated, and serialized image, transforming from an everyday object into a critical device for reflecting on the relationship between painting and reality. Alongside the pear appear other recurring elements, such as the tomato and the eye (squares 7 and 13), which Pozzati transforms into metaphysical emblems, apparently banal signs charged with ambiguity and critical tension. The foot depicted in square 61 derives from the painting Scuola libera del nudo (1973), while the telephone in square 8 anticipates themes that would become central in later works, such as Occupato.

A curious anecdote, recounted by Silvia Barbellini Amidei, concerns the distribution of the game at airports: the wording Rhino Skin on the packaging raised suspicions among customs officials, who feared it might contain actual rhinoceros hide intended for illegal trafficking.

For Pozzati, however, skin is not merely a material support but a central conceptual node within his artistic and material research. As he himself emphasized in his text Pelle 1974/75, skin represents the point at which the natural has already been completely transformed, tanned, treated, and rendered into a product. In this sense, rhinoceros skin that is not actually rhinoceros skin becomes an exemplary formulation of his poetics: an object that promises authenticity and exoticism but ultimately reveals itself as an artificial construction and a luxury commodity. Skin is no longer a living body but a worked surface, image and support at once.

At the same time, the rhinoceros enters Pozzati’s imagery as a hyper-iconic figure; it is an encyclopedic, almost stereotypical animal that he translates into repeated images accompanied by inscriptions and flat fields of color, both in Rhino Skin and in other works. The juxtaposition of the “natural” animal and skin as an industrial surface makes visible the process of naturalization that the artist investigates throughout his works and artistic encyclopedias. These pieces thus become a kind of critical handbook, an ironic inventory of the animal reduced to a commodity, while also offering a reflection on the role of language in shaping perception.

This dimension of image seriality fits into the rich Italian season of artist's multiples, which between the Sixties and Seventies saw high-caliber designers and artists such as Bruno Munari and Enzo Mari, engaged in the realization of accessible works reproducible in mass, with the intent to democratize art through logics and processes close to those of industrial design. This way, mechanical repetition becomes a tool for reflection on the very nature of the image and on its role in consumer society.

Pelle: conciata, trattata, fissata, maneggiata, trasformata, alterata, lavorata, morbida, colorata, addomesticata, citata, indicata, ricevuta, prodotta.

Ma io sono di… Pelle?
 

• Concetto Pozzati, Pelle 1974/75