In Estra, cultural magazine published every four months, edited by Ugo Carrega, no. 5, October-January 1982
Even if to tone down a tension-object with words means contaminating the possible silence, it is also true that, as the word is totalising, it can avoid the misunderstanding that converts form into simulacrum.
The wall of feathers and wax of the oracle, with the questions and replies, has now gone from the silent earth.
But I prefer to still believe that there are words that can traverse the boundaries of contiguities, Words-sound, Words-air, Words-dimensions, Words that live between the convexity and concavity of a vase, Words that press behind a wall, Words that cross a clod of earth, Words that demand their space in the clay tablet…
I expound here some phrases that have preceded the exhibition of some of my works:
The four elements earth, water, air, fire interest me still. So do the gaze, memory, foresight.
I like to manipulate the earth, to see through a canvas, to bathe things in colour.
I try to understand what is in the interstice between the visible and the tactile.
Perhaps it is a desire to make what has crystallised fluid. Clay, canvas, paper are the supports I use.
(Galleria Arte Struktura, Milan – 26/11/1975)
The fear of the labyrinth renders the ‘process’ vertical and the ‘grail’ makes its form heard.
The fixed axis of the lathe ritualises a birth where the navel is without memory.
The rite makes the word-sign ritual and, conversely, the flection becomes inflection, opacity, code of insomnia.
The sign cannot recall the amazement of Empedocles.
The rhythm of the earth is too long, the gull’s wing becomes ash-crystal.
The material in the memory becomes memory and prehensile only to the gaze,
accessible only to the concept.
In their possibility things can live in forbidden places and outside reassuring signs.
(III Simposio Internazionale, Bassano del Grappa – 8/9/1978)
For Alessio,…
They are signs, still signs in and of the countryside, glinting shadows, scratches, cracks, voids, glimpses, waits, visible signs then.
Those invisible ones that we are looking for are still jealously sheltered in the earth, but their foreshadowing already traverses them, they are behind the walls, beneath the skin, between the folds of the fabrics, hidden in a memory without a code, preserved by the spirit of time with all successive signs.
They are visible in loss, they refuse the straight line. You will tell me that poetry is not fear but amazement, it is surprise when it becomes astonishment, it is that thing for which we have chosen the earth.
Even without the experience of language, the thing has remained implicit, the desire for it still intact.
The fountain of the hills of Marostica has not stolen any girl’s virginity.
Jacob cannot see the ladder in your garden; beneath its stones lives a population of spectres.
I believe that each of these spectres leaves us secret alphabets to decipher, and perhaps if we put a stone to our ear, we could risk hearing the trace of your sound.
Still in pursuit of the earth, the philosopher says:
‘That into which the work sets itself back and which it causes to come forth in this setting back of itself we call the earth. Earth is that which comes forth and shelters.
Earth, self-dependent, is effortless and untiring. Upon the earth and in it, historical man grounds his dwelling in the world. In setting up a world, the work sets forth the earth. This setting forth must be thought here in the strict sense of the word. The work moves the earth itself into the Open of a world and keeps it there. The work lets the earth be an earth.’ (Heidegger)
Accept these works, they are projects for still possible desires.
(Galerie Rota, Heilbronn, May 1979)
The vase and the octopus
In Nanni Valentini, il vaso e il polipo, exh. cat. (with text by M. Meneguzzo), Galleria Vera Biondi, Florence, February 1982
Ever since working with clay I have always recalled the idea that the ancient philosopher expressed on nature: ‘The substance of the things that have the principle of movement within them’.
So the earth too has invited man to choose, with the idea of a convexity, vessels that would be useful to him.
But the form that emerged like that has claimed its own presence; and those objects were decorated with rhythmic patterns, animals, stories, flowers, leaves until an ingenuous artist represented an octopus on the vase. Even if inside there was the story of the hero who had become spirit, the vase was entangled in those tentacles, its handle banished and lost (even if it was replaced by the serpent as a link with the world). But the myth has vindicated itself by petrifying the monster on its surface (Adam’s stone?).
My friend tells me that the geometries of the hand are a property of the vase, that the leaf was its measure, the octopus its comprehension, that it can participate symmetrically in emptiness as a container of echoes and breath, and in fullness as a vessel to contain food and seeds; just as its surface participates externally in the field of tangents and internally in the field of centrality (the poet is placed in the middle of this continuum).
The octopus, on the other hand, follows its destiny beyond itself; it is searching for the face. The monster, the selfsame, the words without hills, sea, sun, are all reflected in that little spirit image. But the earth cannot assimilate it to the silence of the poet (pierced by the word) because its silence is that of the seed. There is neither the horizon of difference nor the material for simulacra in it, but the lost handle of the vase can be found there.
That is why the vase, the octopus, the earth desire to return separately.
I have tried to harmonise the tone of this presentation with a gaze without expectations that might modify this time.
I dedicate this work to the ceramicist Alfonso Leoni.
Written in 1980, published posthumously in ‘Nanni Valentini’, Riga 3, Velate 1992.
If the earth is the ‘earth’
her memory is timeless.
It is she who has swallowed
the walls of wax and feathers of the oracle,
she is dry, cold, yellow and silent.
The signs of the seed, of the line of the long shadow,
of water, of the hollow, adapt to her.
Her memory is the tablet
of Ebla that speaks, as beyond the horizon,
insomnia still dwells.
I prefer the earth of the philosopher,
‘the earth of the evening’.