Massimiliano Tommaso Rezza, ABM o della disciplina come soteriologia, 2022

The book is a tribute to the Italian virtuoso pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli. Called simply ABM by his fans, Michelangeli is the epitome of the anti-modern artist. For this pianist art has a civilizing power and its dissemination should be free. He himself practices this idea personally financing the education of the less wealthy students. In ABM ethic and aesthetics coincide. Beauty is both the “well achieved” and the “beneficial”. Art according to Michelangeli is vocational, it is not social climbing. ABM never responded to the rules and the social habits of sow-business, but on the contrary, he relied to his sole internal compass, to his sense of perfection, to discipline, which leads to ideal beauty.

Michelangeli, a solitary man, secluded, a fervid believer, dedicated his whole life to perfectioning the form which is a vehicle of sense and historical heritage. The book does not rely on the official portraiture of the artist of to his biography by photographs, but to the position and the shape that the photographic rectangle occupies on the page of the book. The lack of binding allows the viewer to look at the page both according to the sequence, and the order imposed by the book, and in its singularity, if it is extracted from the book. In the first case the images of two facing fourth parts create, accordingly, harmony or casual dissonance; in the second case the fourth part fully open reminds of a formal symmetry which remains undisturbed, closed. The book is an attempt to look for a logic of the forms and their evolution.