Trasparenze
The four elements earth, water, air, fire still interest me. So do the gaze, memory, foresight. I like to manipulate the earth, to see it through a canvas, to bathe things in colour. I try to understand what is in the space between the visible and the tactile. Perhaps it is a desire to make fluid what has crystallised. Clay, canvas, paper are the supports I use.
In Spazi, exh. cat., Galleria Arte Struktura, Milan, November 1975
Nanni Valentini
Being able to see through things allows the passage not only of light but of ideas.
It was in Cologne in 1976 when the extraordinary gallery owner Carla Pellegrini came across a work by Nanni Valentini. That encounter prompted the invitation to hold an exhibition in her Galleria Milano, which took place soon afterwards.
Valentini’s Trasparenze, which Flaminio Gualdoni presents and interprets so well in his authoritative essay in this volume, evoke diverse reflections that go beyond the theme and problem of the nature of the object.
Valentini had to struggle to shake off what at the time was considered a minor profession, that of ceramist, even though many great artists have produced some of their masterpieces in ceramics, such as Fontana, with whom Valentini was closely associated, or Melotti, whose ceramics have only recently achieved full recognition as a top-level expression of his work.
The rigidity of the concept of painting and sculpture has in fact conditioned the way of reading and the freedom of interpretation of works like Valentini’s Trasparenze, which occupy the pinnacle of exegesis, corresponding to the intrinsic principle contained in their title.
For me, the Trasparenze have always given rise to a question, which finds a simple yet complex reply: this is how it is possible to construct a landscape!
The landscape is actually a result of our memory, of our experience, of our sensibility, and it is as such that we approach it. In the last resort, the landscape is all that surrounds us from our birth, in which we live, and which we reinforce with our experience, with our identity, because there is no doubt that the cultural context of the word ‘landscape’ is tied to the individual experience; it is a palimpsest that is activated by crossings, by successive passages, which calls for multiple transparency and veiling. The landscape is no longer only that experience, it is also the cluster of everyday facts that increasingly come to augment real moments with virtual ones. It is impossible to avoid citing this text by Valentini:
In the Central Appennines, where I was born, but also in many mountainous regions, the gaze is accompanied and guided by ruined towers. They are not there by chance, even if their presence may provoke journeys in memory, feelings of archaeological distances, like so many other images. Their fundamental function is to create an uninterrupted series for vision, in fact from every tower the preceding and the following one can be seen. When the air is dense with mist, there is a real substance between the towers that can be recorded and traversed by the senses, a genuine form of seeing. In this image I have seen the temptation to not miss the continuity; the desire to give a precise competence to the gaze, to respond to the waiting of the prophecy (image of the continuous). […] The material and expressive technique that I have preferred is ceramic, specifically terracotta. As the stone ties the tower to its setting, becoming itself a manifestation and rhythm of the place, so in my endeavour the clay becomes a trace and manifestation of a continuity. In fact, if we consider some aspects of its possible symbolic content, we find in Mother Earth the myth of the Son-Ancestor: ancestor as a being already born and preserved in the earth and only made manifest afterwards. We may consider clay as a trace of the continuity of the river; transported by the water, it is deposited in the meanders as a sediment to become the most filtered part of the earth. We can imagine clay as the central moment in a water-fire dialectic, as the material of a vase, as a material that links the centrifugal and the centripetal in a continuum. The Cretan vase on which an octopus is painted who is trying to grasp the horizon that rotates for ever around its own axis is perhaps the richest image. This line is broken by a scrap of iron (something noted); its trace is projected on a canvas as a sign (something drawn); it becomes a diagonal when it crosses a progression of layers of terracotta (something transformed); so it passes into the duality positive-negative, concave-convex; it is in the concave that the line is immersed in water (something coloured). The diametrical opposite of the water container is the Platonic tetrahedron that bears the trace of the water understood as a level. The line finally touches a convex spherical cap, becomes a tangent, and continues ad infinitum. The route that can be traversed on the two sides is what links my workshop with the place where my work will be shown. […] The other works are studies. They are intended to be extensions of the same theme: ‘the line’, which here takes the form of various horizons. The line is only present as such and becomes trace, sign and surface depending on the material it encounters. The line as temporality, the material as what is seen. The horizon cannot be fixed but seen with a mobile strategy of the gaze. The thinking that underlies my work makes me believe that even the void, like silence, cannot do without its own object, even if the latter is infinite, and art, like poetry, is a cosmos where archaeology is without memory and where things lose their meanings, and their sense is not transparent. A poet friend of mine says: There is no profundity in poetry. There is the tremendous insomnia of the surface.[1]
In fact, by its intrinsic subjectivity the landscape becomes surface and simply a word – a word that seizes what is around it; hence a phrase of Valentini becomes an essential point of reference for the reading of his works: image of the continuous.
The continuous that is not interrupted, a surface that is translated and transformed into an unlimited desire. The Trasparenze lead us to that need to create our own dimension, our own vision, our own landscape.
‘If I had the strength of Samson, I would place the Piazza di Spagna, with certain of its autumnal, soft and tender colours, on the red plazas of the Gianicolo at sunset’, said Rotella in 1960. He continued ‘we will make paintings with everything, with all the material of the world’.
A recent discovery has helped us to translate these suggestions scientifically: mirror neurons. These are a group of neurons responsible for the cerebral mechanisms that enable us to understand the actions of others as if we were performing them ourselves. We can say that they have opened up transparency.
This discovery has contributed to refocus attention on a notion from the twentieth century that identified primordial impulses expressed in two fundamental artistic styles: the empathetic that tries to imitate organic and vital form, and the abstract that takes shelter in the inert forms of minerals. At present we may wonder whether and how our empathetic tendency is being modified by the growing force of the abstract, inert model. Screen vision or that within a frame also destructures the concept of who observes and who sees. This anomaly has emerged increasingly in the last few years because of the increasing dominance of the screen in our lives, modifying our experience of the other. Transparency is a condition that allows luminous rays to pass through solids, and therefore the vision of objects/persons located beyond them.
So the reply that the Trasparenze had suggested to me comes back: this is how it is possible to construct a landscape.
This gives rise to another question: with the prospect of an indefinite rise in the media of socialising at a distance, should we perhaps start to speak of a specific historical period of empathy, which literature has already defined for some time as CME (Computer Mediated Empathy)? This fact also raises an aesthetic question in the etymological meaning of the term (from aisthesis, sensation, perception). Those channels of the senses – touch, scent, taste – that our cultural tradition in general and aesthetic in particular (assuming the term in the sense of the philosophical discipline) classify as ‘low’ are excluded. These channels are at the basis of the capacity to observe and to be able to develop an awareness of what we see. This aesthetic level has immediate repercussions on the political level, in the widest possible sense of the term, that related to living together in the community of the polis. Ceramics, what is made by hand, belong to this context. They are permeated by ‘low’ sensorial channels, by actions full of life, by the scents of materials, by the tactility necessary to make them. The artist’s words help us here:
Ceramics is traditionally connected with a semantic gravitation in the privileged field of hand-earth. However, I believe that I will not alarm anyone if through the meanings deriving from the history of this art, I have sought a different extension of it and I can also assure those who might see in them an exploration of the interstices of sculpture and painting that that was not my intention.
While remaining faithful to the strategy of the gaze and the practice of thinking in doing, I seek to correct oversights by securing some specific signs of the language of the earth.[2]
Confronting works like the Trasparenze today, almost fifty years after their appearance, even if in some respects in different terms from then, is always an act of great semantic and emotional value.
Another theme that these works transmit is the important determinant of the reflection on light and how for Valentini light challenges the certainties of the material. The Trasparenze lead to an almost mystical presentation, a fundamental idea of art in relation to this theme. In the typescript probably used for the press release on the exhibition, Valentini wrote:
This work is the result of an inquiry into the thickness of the gaze.
This thickness is understood as a perceptive phenomenon and as the story of an attention. The painted canvas becomes transparent and having no perimeter other than its own, assumes the quality of a piece of gauze.
Even if the works deliberately retreat from establishing an image, the gauze becomes a lamina (by the phenomenon of laminas through the interference of light). The monochrome colour too takes up the fact of the ‘diffusion’ and ‘dispersion’ of the luminous ray.
The figures are derived from visual archetypes.
The materials used: jute (sack), rope, wire and blues, epoxy resins, tempera, pigments and paper.
These words remind me of a figure of the past who is not remembered enough today, Leon Battista Alberti:
It was Leon Battista Alberti, architect, writer, painter and poet of the fifteenth century, who first spoke of light that falls on a curved surface to form a scale between what we call the two primary colours, black and white, as a continuous progression from light to dark with all its moral and mystical connotations. In a certain sense, his intuition was determinant for Italian architecture in general and for Italian painting in particular, which associated, for example, the Italian conceptualisation of colour in painting with a range of tones that was both natural and speculative at the same time. And not only as a technical means, but also as a way of relating to human aspiration and spiritual value.[3]
The Trasparenze enter and exit from us.
With this passage/landscape the artist has constructed the space of the work and the space within the work.
This is how the geometry of his career appears.
With his work, Valentini has left us an ocular testimony: truth, as just truth, does not exist exclusively by virtue of a methodology, it is not contained in one and should not precede the knowledge of reality. That penumbra in which it immerses the paintings/sculptures can become a quality of the works themselves, inverting, one might say, the sphere of influence: it will no longer be the conditions of the external atmosphere, with its changing light, to determine the work, but the work itself will impose its distinguishable presence to itself generate an atmosphere. The work of the Trasparenze cannot be thought as an astute and rapid shift from one medium to another, which – according to a modernist reading that assigns to each medium an area of competence and well-defined limits – passes to a new medium to resolve the problems left unresolved by the previous one. The linguistic strategy deployed by Valentini in his works is astounding, as though he had grasped that – for these works – there was no appropriate language available at the time, so he had to invent one. A second language like – according to Roland Barthes – that of Loyola to speak about the divine calling, that of the Marquis De Sade to speak about erotic pleasure, that of Charles Fourier to speak about social harmony. The Trasparenze act as superimposed filters that detach themselves from the surface, from the compartments of the tradition of the work of art, and with the experience of internal eclipse, of luminous variations in temperature, open up research on space-light to the relation with cosmic space. The open chain, like the Lacanian concept of lack of the other, of the lacuna of the trauma of language that cannot be filled, of the impossibility of closing the chain of meanings, runs through these works without any break in continuity. It is a concept-pattern, an embedded idea. In reading the Trasparenze, I was inevitably led to recall another tremendous but little remembered figure, Francesco Lo Savio, and how apt are the following words from his writings:
The idea of using a three-dimensional space to realise an equipotent experience, internally as a problem of formal expression, externally as a problem of the social relation, conditions the development of my work under an aspect of visual discontinuity, both in the choice of means and in the form of the result.
Francesco Lo Savio, Spazio_Luce, 1972
Light for me is not a consequence of the image, but the sum of diverse images in continuously changing motion. The idea of light […] would be nothing if it were not the direct participation in the emanation of life in its essential dynamic.
Francesco Lo Savio, 1960
[1] Negli Appennini Centrali…In Birth of the work. Five italian artists in U.S.A., exh. cat., Harbor Art Gallery, University of Massachusetts, Boston 1979.
[2] Per questa mostra…In Nanni Valentini, exh. cat., Galleria Lo Spazio, Brescia, December 1976.
[3] Jon Thompson, Light and Space. Time and Matter’’, in Alex Sainsbury (ed.), Francesco Lo Savio. Work 1959 and 1960, London, 2001, p. 7.