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Q. what does being an artist
today mean for you. What does it mean to be an artist worlmultimediality and virtuality?What does quality in art mean
for you? Isn’t there conflict in the relationship between being an
artist, curator, writer and many other things?
As far as I’m concerned, it all stems from a choice. A choice that is
coherent with my vocation, my natural inclination, my instinct and
spirit. And in any case, it’s a choice that continues to mature, to hone
itself in time. I found myself having to deal with art very early in
life: my paternal grandfather was a sculptor and an excellent designer.
Then the vagaries of life led him to become a hatter. I remember that
one day, when I was only six, he said: “Come with me and we’ll go and
collect sculptures in the fields!” He was from Florence. Imagine my surprise – there I was, a little boy and my grandfather was
digging in the fields and pulling little sculptures out of the ground
instead of potatoes or truffles! Later he told me that that’s what they
did during the war. They would bury plaster casts under a load of manure
so that it ended up looking like bronze, and then they’d sell them off
as authentic ancient sculptures to the Nazis. Not bad, was it?
Especially considering the tragic nature of the period. And yet it was
as if that first encounter with something that could be defined as art
set something off inside me; something began to insinuate a certain
urgency, an urgency that leads us to want to unveil what our eyes can’t
see but exists none the less.
In any case, being an artist today I think has more than one meaning.
Above all you have to understand what being an artist means in terms of
social inclusion – or, if you prefer, in terms of non-inclusion. The
work of an artist is uncertain. You never know what’s going to happen. It
implies resistance, overcoming resistance, and not just affirming being
or existing. You see, I think it’s absurd when someone calls themselves
an artist if they haven’t already come to terms with their economic
being - sure, on the one hand there’s research, but on the other there
is the problem of shere survival. An artist absolutely has to face up to
and solve both of these problems and then condense them into the one
problem. It’s hard, obviously (and I found it really hard), extenuating,
but not impossible if you’re fired by a specific internal force and an
iron will and faith in what you’re doing. Perhaps this is the very heart
of the question – being able to be an artist for your whole life, trying
not to lose heart when you’re dealing with the difficulties that are
part and parcel of being an artist. This “profession” has its
frustrations, defeats, disappointments and many other things besides!
To be honest, though, painting is the most important thing for me.
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I
like it. I’m seduced by it. I am (or I presume I am) perfectly conscious
of the fact that I’m dealing with a discipline that has been alive for
thousands of years. I know that if I want to put together a good
painting, I have to continually come to terms with history, trying to
add or subtract something that has yet to be. Multimediality and the
virtual are ok if you’re rigorous and use them for specific purposes.
However, all too often artists use them because they don’t have any
ideas or because they lack courage – it’s just a fad. The end result is
obvious: cloying trash, the boredom of many of these exhibitions, the
gratuitousness of it all. Art, real art, is something entirely
different. It has to be done well, and that’s that. Technology, if you
want to use it for strictly artistic reasons, must be used with extreme
consciousness, silently. You cannot allow yourself to be prevaricated by
art; you have to subject it to your own will, deconstruct it and
redefine it, otherwise you end up in the army of thousands of techno
boys
who are a lot more like soul-less androids than artists. Then, ok,
everyone’s free to do what they want, as they see fit… but, well, let’s
say that things go a lot better with champagne than with coca cola.
They’re both characteristically bubbly, but I think we can all tell the
difference between the two!
It’s a question of quality, taste and vulgarity. And besides, if you’re
really thirsty there’s water – it costs less and is a lot more
transparent. Get my drift? Perhaps I’m a bit extreme, but I think of
quality in terms of satisfaction, gratification, specialization, style,
fascination, aura… Quality, when it’s there, means that whatever has got
it lasts in time and never bores. It’s obviously really difficult to put
together something that can be defined as “beautiful”. It's hard
conceptually, intellectually, ethically and aesthetically. But you’ve
got to try anyway if you want to work in this field, otherwise it’s just
a divertissement with no real purpose. And I’m not interested in this at
all.
I don’t really see that there are any conflicts inherent in being an
artist, curator and writer.
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They’re different, that’s all. If anything,
I’d say that they confer dynamism to my state of being. As you know,
since the very beginning of my artistic activity I’ve always privileged
research founded more on interdisciplinary and different expressive
languages so that I can synthetically offer a vision/configuration,
albeit a personal one, that is as exhaustive of the real as possible.
Consequently, I’ve always tried to bring my work into an open and direct
confrontation with situations linked to reality – whether my work is
based on figurative arts, writing or video-installation experiments. You
see, in the end I consider art an intellectually pure ascesis which is
none the less rooted in the experience we have derived from the real. An
ascesis where it’s the ideas and thoughts that hold together and animate
the movements of what you want to do and demonstrate (or that you have
to say and demonstrate). Perfection is only an abstract value, and
therefore only a defined style is able to translate an idea. Hence my
attempts to give form to a concentrated, mediated and demanding art that
does not lead to gnomic sententiousness. I want it to be the harbinger
of a holistic vision of the world. An art that uses its syntactical
relationships in order to force thought to emerge from its depths,
making its position clear in the intuitive evidence of revelatory truth.
My expressive urgency therefore derives from the need to re-affirm a
poiesis that is intimately ingrained within the essence of artistic
undertaking, the gaze within objects and things as well as an attention
for the presence (which is more than a condition) of man in the world.
So, in the same way, as a curator I have always wanted to priorities
organizing effort and work, collective work that, founded on a respect
for each unique individuality and expressive means, allows for a
positive flow of synergy. This promotes a decidedly poetic and civil
communication.
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Q. What do the “hand-made”
sign and the apparition of clefts mean in your work? Does painting have
to become an autonomous medium?
The research I’m undertaking and developing implies a close analysis
of the poetry of matter, of its, how can I put it?, spiritual geometry,
where the simplicity of beauty is expressed and made manifest along with
its complexity. This is an attempt to understand that the importance of
art also lies in the possibility of perceiving and therefore
representing what lies beyond the threshold of sensual information and
perceptions: what we sometimes perceive as ineffable and mysterious.
Consequently, the hand-made sign disappears in favor of an infinity of
signs where matter becomes the carrier (the cleavings /breaks/wounds),
each sign with its own story to tell. My role is simply to make these
signs, this (history and this poiesis visible. It’s not so much that
painting has to become an autonomous medium but rather that the artist,
the painter, has to go from being an artificer to a mediator, thus
assuming a more serious and discreet position in terms of what he’s
undertaking.
Q. Is matter therefore the
flow of a primordial energy as far as you’re concerned?
Let’s say that I deal with matter by thinking of it precisely in
those terms. Matter is vital flux, a flow of energy that is able to
perpetuate itself, or at least catalyze itself, into something definite
– in my own personal case this would be a work of art, a canvas.
Q. What are th“cleavings” as far as you’re concerned? Are they randomness being made
to conform to order – just as in physics fractals represent the greater
order of life? Do you think that the order of matter and the order of
the spirit might well reveal themselves to be the same? Could your work
be defined as the will to casually bring together these two entities:
matter and mind?
For me these clefts are the design within the entity of matter. It is
as if there were traces left behind by thoughts belonging to matter
itself. Their symmetry, their ordered randomness can be explained by
random-theory, the theory of fractals, Fibonacci’s mathematical
successions. An English critic (Tania Guy, from Time Out) once said that
they also represent the ideological fractures that derive from a
going-beyond of the post-modern cause. All things considered, I rather
like this definition. Anyway, as we all know, everything has its own
logic in the final analysis, but I don’t want to speculate too much on
my work as it’s through this work that I try to express what I couldn’t
otherwise express. If the order of matter is the same as the order of
the spirit, well, I don’t really think I know… I like to think it is, I
can actually think of it this way, imagine it to be so – but I don’t
have any absolute certainty. On the other hand, this is the ineffable
that I try to represent through art, which is always something that is
only partial. In any case, it’s true that my desire and attempts are
doubtless to link mind to matter and to promote a dialogue between the
two.
Q. What is the relationship
between the aesthetic “thing” and your work?
It’s fundamental. I would feel I was a traitor if I overlooked
aesthetics. Aesthetics is part of my cultural baggage, my whole
education. It’s the discipline that I’ve studied and that I’m most
fascinated by. I’m interested in beauty – no doubt about it! Actually,
it’s what defines the quality of anything at all – provided it is not
reduced to mere superficiality. Ethics and aesthetics become one and
the same thing. Transforming the useless into the useful.
Q. What is your relationship
with movement? What does videoart signify in terms of your experience as
an artist?
ou yourself said it. Testifying to movement, the action of matter,
the work of painting in painting.
Q. What should painting and
art be the mirror of do you think?
My paintings possess an ambiguous three-dimensional quality, an
insistence that turns them into objects that exist in space. The
exploration of the geometric poetics of nature can be seen in surfaces
that evoke vast landscapes – they are desolate, sometimes almost
archaeological. So why not say that they are internal landscapes – of
the soul, the spirit... The painting has to be posited as the fragment
of a whole. When I undertake a painting, letting paint and natural
pigments amalgamate and fracture under intense heat or letting them
assume the silken aspect of marble through the action of water, I am
setting off a process through which all signs of the “details” are
innervated – whatever my subjective sensation might be. By attempting to
reveal the reality that lies entirely within matter – and continually
acting as a mediator, and therefore an integral part of the process – I
go constantly deeper, and at the same time I try to express my
philosophical faith, and that is that work should become a part of
material reality in order to be able to express the universal. Nature,
qua pure matter, contains its own nemesis. Paintings exist as the
evidence of conceptual and intellectual intentions, respectively
destroyed and made concrete by the action of painting itself. In this
becoming-art, they become themselves the object of contemplation.
Q. For you, would the only
freedom therefore lie in the definition of “playful space”?
Let’s put it this way. I am standing in front of an empty canvas. I
assume this space is a laboratory for and of memory. Not my own memory,
but a genetic memory. This is how the work begins. I try to look back,
as far back as possible, because this is the only way, with a
consciousness of what has been, that has been allowed me in order to go
on (remember Benjamin’s Angel?). I concede that it is a game, but it has
to be dealt with seriously if you want to get something good and
positive out of it.
©World
Of Art magazine
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