Matter Minding, or What the Work Wants: Aldo Tambellini’s Intermedia

American-Italian multimedia artist Aldo Tambellini (1930-2020) has long remained under the artworld’s radar, known only to a small circle of appassionatos of experimental film and early electronic media. Having commenced his artistic career as a painter, only later did Tambellini shift to sculpture and become absorbed by film. But his filmic rendezvous began with a direct treatment of film as a material to be manually altered, scratched, painted and drawn upon—subsequently affecting images recorded on a second hand 16mm film camera that he acquired from a friend. But the staggering range of his media included also abstract drawings, sound, poetry, and electronic arts such as television and video. This essay focuses on the olfactory, audible and haptic character of Tambellini's works that transform their experience into an expanded multimedia environment in which the performers, that is both the artwork and the beholder, are engulfed in blackness. A decision to use just one, non-chromatic, color is all but a purist one. Quite the opposite: black reveals the manifold potentiality of form, texture, sound and light generated by these media. It grants the elevated perceptual awareness a possibility to tap in the darkness with many beginnings and multiple ends.