Autobiography

Arcore, 9/1983

This compilation has been written not for me, but for whoever wants to busy himself with my work. As regards order, continuity and promotion, he has not found a friend in me but rather a tenacious opponent.

This way of behaving did not happen because I have been stubbornly pursuing an idea that has been definitive for me since 1960. For this idea I am greatly in debt to friends and artists such as Nicola Amoroso, Adelio Maronati, Claudio Olivieri, but above all to the lucid ideology of Paolo Schiavocampo.

I am aware of its modesty, of the limits of its extent and of its minimal contribution to the debate on sculpture. This idea has led me to periods of despotic anxiety, destructive inactivity, heavy silence and unforgivable acts of repression.

It is an idea that privileges difference, individuality, and thus a distance with a presumed originality, even if what I have always loved and predominantly experienced physically and spiritually have been social, political and ideological events. This idea has its aesthetic principle in the belief that poetry lives, today more than ever, in the interstices, however strait they may be.

I showed my musician father a tree illuminated at night; I told him that it looked like a figure with a head; he admired me but didn’t see it; he explained that it was my image. Ever since, even if he was not close to my ideas, he never failed to make incredible sacrifices to enable me to work.

After secondary school I dreamed of the arts high school in Florence: the entrance requirement was a 7 in Latin.

1944   After the war I resumed secondary education, where I failed.

1945   I started at the School of Art for Ceramic Decoration – 5 years. I would have preferred Urbino, but it was impossible for the family.

1945-49       I learned the Pesaro style of majolica decoration: design on paper, transfer and painting on porous enamel, a similar technique to fresco painting and wall painting in general. The subjects were copies of 15^th-century paintings. Painted in transparency. Towards the end the designs were my own creation.

The green copper on white produced a beautiful emerald green. It was interesting to make brushes with the hairs from ox’s ears mounted on simple reeds with twine and glue.

There was Prof. Andreani for these techniques: he had studied under Ferruccio Mengaroni and acquired experience in the workshops of Pesaro.

Prof. Melis – a Sardinian ceramicist – taught me in design the Sardinian art of hunting scenes and decorative motifs.

Prof. Borgiotti – architect – made me design more personal works.

Prof. Gallucci taught me to draw from life and above all grouped several students around his work as a painter. I abandoned this work of design and oil painting in 1955.

At Pesaro there were two realities: the ceramic workshops where the decoration was with popular and traditional scenes; and that of Gallucci and others based on the 20^th-century and receptive to Morandi, Semeghini, Tosi and De Pisis. This reality permeated my cultural climate: closed and limited, but that today I find not in memory but in values.

1949-53       I enrol at the Institute of Art in Faenza. The Pesaro school offered no openings except qualified work in the workshops. The diploma from Faenza gave access to teaching, which I only did in 1968. It was a teaching based on reproduction and mainly geometric decoration of objects from Faenza and on low-relief ornamental sculpture. This was the furthest possible from my Pesaro experience.

Biancini’s lessons led me to continue to paint on enamel and to create works myself. His lesson was the extreme freedom of working for a living. He made us work in his works, usually monuments, and that extremely skilled workshop practice, especially in working with clay and plaster, was one of the most positive things in Faenza. It was with him that I learnt to admire Arturo Martini and Donatello and to believe in my imagination. He took me to Assisi, where Felice Carena talked a lot about my designs, which moved me profoundly. One of the positive aspects was meeting school companions who came from all over Italy, the information that we had about the most important museum in Europe, and the arrival here of the first of Picasso’s ceramics in Italy. I finished the course with a thesis consisting of large designs of animals, especially horses, and scenes of social life such as processions, carnivals and markets. (I gave some of these designs to Prof. Biancini, who still has them.)

10/1951       In 1951-52 I fell ill and returned to Pesaro, missing the year. In this year I read a lot, especially about Russian writers. I illustrated a book by Gogol

4/1952         and during the convalescence I lived with my father in the Apennine mountains of the Marche. There I deepened my knowledge of classical music and began to love Cézanne and Van Gogh. I made many paintings and drawings of the Apennine mountains.

6/1952         I started to work a few hours in the workshop of Bruno Baratti. I rented a studio with Oscar Piattella, who is still a very close friend and colleague. I encountered the painting of Licini in the Venice Biennial and tried to find him but he wasn’t there: but there was his landscape which is still a subject of my work.

1953-55       After gaining my diploma, I carried on working with Bruno Baratti and in the studio, where I drew and painted. The school in Faenza made one used to a superficial reception (we all went through abstract and figurative experiences without thinking about their content). This was why, when I returned to Pesaro, I tended not to take these experiences seriously and resumed the teaching of Gallucci based on the reflection of objects and drawing from life.

10/1953       I enrolled in the Academy of Bologna with Mandelli and Guidi with a focus on classical figure drawing. The teaching of Guidi – very few lessons – and a lesson of Giorgio Morandi opened up my mind. In Bologna I met Ghermandi in the studio of Carlo Negri (a friend from the school in Faenza) and with him I approached Farulli and Moretti, who were abstract at the time. In Pesaro I formed a group with Giuliano Vangi, Loreno Sguanci and Oscar Piattella.

6/1954         I took part in the first exhibitions of painting and also showed a decorative plate at Faenza. Sassoferrato (Marche), S. Angelo in Vado (Marche), Ancona, Faenza – ceramics. A series of portraits, paintings of carts, drawings of stables and above all drawings of the port and the river – a place that is still very vivid in my memory – are from this period. I read Marangoni, writings of Arturo Martini, writings on Cézanne. I moved from Pesaro for important exhibitions. Among the most impressive were the exhibition of Fattori in Florence and that of Picasso in Milan.

1955   I began to experiment in Baratti’s studio with terracotta with slips and sgraffito. In painting I tried out an abstraction that followed the experiments of Santomaso Pirandello and Saetti.

10/1955       In October I went to Paris with Ulrico Schettini (now U. Montefiore) – a former companion from the school in Pesaro – to find us a studio there. We visited the studios of G. Bertini, L. Boyle, Arnal, Jorn and Cornell. I was struck by the ceramics of Jorn and Cornell made in Albisola, also because of their affinity with my experiments in Pesaro. While still in Paris I saw an exhibition of Burri, some paintings by Wols and Bissier, and a big exhibition of Germaine Richier. Richier’s technique of the negative was important for me. I used it to make large-scale low-reliefs in cement, a technique developed and taken to extreme consequences by Arnaldo Pomodoro. I returned from Paris full of ideas and projects. One of these was a work with perforated bricks that were broken and reassembled, which later won me a grant to study in Paris. In this period I was experimenting with sand, wax and tar.

San Marino exhibition: I received a mention with one of these works.

On 26/12/1955 I married in Genoa and met Emilio Scanavino during our honeymoon.

1956   I continued this experimentation with frequent trips to Rome, especially in the company of U. Montefiore. I met Giuseppe Marotta, E. Villa. Giuseppe Liverani from La Salita gallery kept some of my drawings. Through him I met Gastone Novelli.

5/1956         I went to Milan to see the Pomodoro brothers for a work that lasted a month. There I met Roberto Sanesi, Enrico Baj. Sanesi made me read his translation of the poet Dylan Thomas, a very important experience for me. I held long conversations about shared experiences with the Pomodoro brothers.

6/1956         I sent slip-cast and vitrified plates to Faenza, where I won the Faenza Award. On that occasion I met Guido Gambone and Albert Diattò.

8/1956         I won the Vicenza Award for ceramics with similar works. In this period I worked in terracotta, on paper with printing inks, and making increasingly abstract landscape drawings. Later I saw how this work was a desire to make contact not with things from the province but with what was more alive in Europe. Besides the clay tablets and drawings of roots, the other works suffered a separation from the inside that was too lacerated and rather undramatic.

1957-61       I continued to experiment and often went to Faenza to see A. Diattò, who taught me the technique of stoneware (grès). I met Luigi Massoni and was invited to the Milan Triennial with objects in sgraffito grès (vases and bowls). I went with Diattò and Marisa Tommaseo to Venice, where I met Luigi Nono and Tancredi. I became friends with Tancredi and we continued to meet at intervals down to his death.

6/1957         Diattò moved to Pesaro, where we worked and designed the studio that we opened in Milan in October.

7/1957         I exhibited three paintings in Ancona, done with the – informal – materials of sand and nitrate.

10/1957       With Tina, Tiziana and Marco (Tina’s brother) we moved to Milan. The Pomodoro brothers introduced me to the Milanese scene and it was through them that I met Lucio Fontana and Ettore Sottsass. I took drawings and paintings to the Ariete gallery and started to work in sgraffito ceramics and slip-cast majolica.

11/1957       I exhibited drawings and ceramics in the La Salita gallery with U. Montefiore, Pozzati, Novelli and others. I made friends with young artists from Florence – Masi, Baldi, Fallani, Guerrieri, etc. – and exhibited with them in the Numero gallery. I met the Pomodoro brothers every day, which broadened my knowledge of the artistic processes of the avantgarde. They were very active and creative at this time. So many artists frequented their studio. I organised an exhibition of Arnaldo in Turin, where I met Spazzapan.

1958   Tina, Marco and I began experimenting with grès. It was a very intense experience in which we had to completely rethink all our notions. Economic difficulties and the anxiety of friendship made this a more dramatic period, but it is still the most intense period of my entire activity.

4/1958         Lucio Fontana frequented our studio, assisting us with the acquisition of works and the advice of a master. I made sculptures, bowls, plates, vases and exhibited them with the presentation of L. Fontana in the Ariete gallery. They were works of low-fired terracotta with little glaze. The grès pastes gave these works a different sound. Our only buyers were: Fontana, an American, and E. Sottsass, who contributed a lot to the later sale of other objects.

6/1958         Lucio Fontana got me to exhibit in the International Exhibition of New York, where I won the first prize (Syracuse Museum). It was a large bowl with glazed interior and sgraffito exterior. These works also won an award in the Faenza competition. For economic reasons, I remained to run the studio on my own. Marisa Tommaseo, who frequented the studio and worked there, was not yet skilled enough. She was killed in a traffic accident in the following year.

I met Franco Meneguzzo, whose ceramics I already knew from the year before. Knowing him was important for me because he was facing the same problems as I was in painting and ceramics.

I spent part of my Paris study grant on fortnightly stays every month until February 1958. I often went there with Diattò, who introduced me to the composer Boulez, friends of Wols and many artists who were developing experiments with the sign and informal art in general. I visited the study of the ceramicist F. Del Pierre and he took me to visit several existentialist groups. I was very impressed by the painting of Braque.

10/1958       With Luigi Massoni, I began a group of works in series – nature series – with which we won the first prize for production. This marked the start of my break with drawing and painting. The experiments I was conducting grew more and more separate and above all felt the influence of the works of Giò Pomodoro. I read much Pavese, Vittorini and Calvino.

1959   My work in ceramics had now achieved recognition, especially abroad, and the nature series was stocked in the most prestigious shops in Italy (Gavina etc.). I frequented Bepi Romagnoni, whom I already knew from Rome. I met Paolo Schiavocampo and his wife Renata. The friendship that grew up between us was to be fundamental for my life. It was she who got me to read Jung and Nietzsche and above all the Presocratics, which were to be a model for me in my present explorations. The sculptures were far from production and my painting had come to a complete halt. The drawings were harsh with too many cultural echoes.

6/1959         I began painting again with large sheets of paper and paintings with white chalk. I exhibited two paintings in Rome in the Circolo Marchigiano. They were paintings with large letters and silver backgrounds with unconnected signs. Scanavino and the Pomodoro brothers liked them a lot, so they brought me Guido Ballo and later Grossetti in the studio and we organised an exhibition.

10/1959       I continued with both activities as I had done in Pesaro. Tancredi told me that I would have to choose because my drawings were empty.

12/1959       Through Grossetti I met the Existential Realism group. Tino Vaglieri and Bepi Romagnoni were the most active members. The meeting with T. Vaglieri disturbed me a great deal for its human content and sculptural experiment. I greatly valued G. Bellandi, with whom I formed a productive friendship based on appreciation. I met the poet Bosco, whose poetry made me understand how our fantasy was still trompe-l’oeil. I made large drawings on the motorway and underground in Milan. Fontana, who still frequented my studio, told me that there were too many naturalistic references. My studio was frequented almost daily by young artists like R. Pieracini, who lived there, Spagnulo, Bruno Bruni and Adelio Maronati.

1960   In the ceramics studio I continued the activity that had achieved recognition by now. I made a large work with Fontana, which for external reasons of the place had to be in stoneware. It was a beautiful experience because it enabled me to appreciate Fontana as a craftsman as well as an artist. He took me with him to Faenza, Rimini and Venice, and gave me a large vase which I gave afterwards to the museum in The Netherlands because Fontana had become ill.

I took part in the Milan Triennial with large vases and with a continuation of serial works with Luigi Massoni. They awarded me the gold medal. In this year the studio moved from viale Caldara to viale Misurata. Nearby were the homes of Tancredi, who often came to see me, and Claudio Olivieri.

I resumed painting; they were dense months that drove me to profound crises, and these led me to destroy all the white and metallic paintings. While I drew I thought about myself a lot, about these double activities that yielded such diverse but equally valid contents. In ceramics the meaning did not escape me, but in painting I had lost all confidence in the experimentation that I now considered to be empty and an end in itself. Meeting Chighine and the friendship and ideological experience of Schiavocampo helped me to overcome the crisis, transferring it to within the very act of being the painter. Then I found a sign that was not separate from the material and discovered that it had a most sculptural density. It was a start.

10/1960       I showed this experience at the Annunciata gallery with a presentation of Guido Ballo. It was about man – head, backs, landscapes; an inquiry into the sign but organised in a non-speculative space (Olivieri). This exhibition enable me to meet and to form a friendship with Livio Marzot and Claudio Olivieri. I still have a working relation with the latter. I also got to know Roberto Scuderi and deeply appreciated him (he died soon afterwards). My ceramic works also became more alive and problematic. I revisited the themes of painting in the plates, but never showed them. I was invited to the Premio Apollinare, which was won on that occasion by Bepi Romagnoni.

1961   I moved and went to live in via Veronesi at the Fiera in the house where Testori used to live. I got to know him (at the time I was greatly struck by his books and by him). Bellandi lived nearby and we often met. In January I visited A. Diattò in Provence, where I did many watercolours and read Camus. I visited Vallory, where I met many ceramicists. It was a life very different from life in Milan. With Diattò, who was among the most educated and lucid intellectuals I have known, I reflected a lot and convinced myself to go further into sculptural research and to abandon research on the object. The economic problems associated with this choice were serious and obliged me and Tina to separate.

In the meantime I made a synthesis of the experience of the objects, sent it to Faenza, and won the Faenza Prize. Ever since then I have no longer taken an interest in the object as research. Sottsass told me that an artist could have only a single idea of the object throughout his life. The object and its connection with sculpture embittered me considerably when a sculptor friend whom I told that his work was like mine replied that mine was only an object. The (ceramic) studio remained open only for a few operations. Tina and Tiziana returned to Pesaro and I took a studio in via Mortara with Paolo Schiavocampo to live and work there.

1960/1961    I went to teach in the Scuola Cova, where I remained only two months. I locked myself up in my studio until December. I made a few paintings but lots of drawings, mainly designs, cartoons and a lot of notes on clay (terracotta). This activity brought me close to Livio Marzot and Claudio Olivieri for its affinity of content. The preparation of these drawings was a research based on the reflection of the culture closest to us: the twentieth century, but also with the use of signs that we had experimented with in the previous experiences. They were drawings and studies on Sironi, Carrà, Martini, Viani.

Fontana did not like them much, but he acquired some rough sketches in terracotta that consisted of heads and backs inside geometrical shapes: a sort of figuration, but without the mistakes that the theme entailed. The studio in via Mortara was in a neighbourhood where a lot of people in my circle lived. There was an inn (osteria di via Magolfa), where I met Malo Brass, Vittorio Basaglia, Ivan Della Mea and a group led by Adelio Maronati. They were marvellous months of intense participation and concentration. The subsequent events prevented me from taking these studies further. For years they were just desires drawn or incised on terracotta. I did not pick up the thread again and try to take it further until 1973.

11/1961       I exhibited drawings and ceramics in Fano with the presentation of Volpini.

1962   On doctor’s advice for the collapse of my nervous system, I decided to rest for a period and went to Pesaro. I contributed to the foundation of the Laboratorio Pesaro, a ceramics laboratory, which became for me a series of mistakes and involved me in problems that were not of my own choosing. I stopped taking part in it after a few months, but the bond with friends like Pieraccini, Nicola Amoroso and later Pino Spagnulo tied me to that place, albeit for alternating periods, down to 1965. However, this did not prevent me, even if very slowly, from taking the thread I had begun further. They were always predominantly geometric settings with faces and figures. These motifs were close to the research of Adelio Maronati, and later to Pino Spagnulo.

9/1962         I returned to Milan, where I continued to work and to frequent L. Marzot and C. Olivieri, who had been joined by M. Cordioli and Riccardo Emma. We were linked by the research, which led us to project the exhibition that was held in April 1963 and in which Valentino Vago Ghinzani and Ferrari also took part.

1963   P. Spagnulo came to via Mortara in November 1962 and after a few months of work I was obliged to stop again because Schiavocampo left and his place was taken by two friends who came to live there. The transformation of the studio into a home lasted a few months. During this period C. Grossetti acquired my latest drawings and the economic situation once again obliged me to go to Laveno to resume the work in ceramics, but it went badly. We were evicted.

Nicola Amoroso died in the summer and I returned to Pesaro. In August I went to Sicily for a month for an impromptu show (in Trapani), where I painted four small paintings with figurative motifs with an idea very close to what I was looking for. They were appreciated by Franco Russoli and Franco Solmi. There I met Guccione and Ennio Calabria. I visited the ethnographic museum, where I took many notes that enabled me to work on a series of drawings and paintings (later lost), which continued the idea of a research with signs from folk art.

10/1963       With P. Spagnulo we took a studio in Corso S. Gottardo, where we were later joined by Nino Crociani. After the initial months of enthusiasm, this experience too proved to be disappointing for me, for economic reasons or for the working relations. In fact, the working time grew more and more occasional, and the crisis of confusion more and more distressing. I did not leave the studio immediately out of respect for my friend and perhaps also in the hope of not losing all the contacts.

1964   I travelled in Puglia for a work that I made with Spagnulo. In Puglia I drew many leaves with impressions of the landscape and of objects, especially ceramics. I was impressed by the local architecture and by the nature of the place. I was a few times in Milan and drew above all in the inns, the peripheral places. In Pesaro, where I spent most of the time, I experimented with etchings.

1965   The death of Tancredi left me with a very empty and confused feeling. It led me to leave Milan for good, though not before ensuring that in Pesaro Spagnulo could make preparations for the exhibition in the Grossetti gallery.

1966   I got organised in Pesaro and began to project the work differently. I gave up thinking about that research and devoted myself to the (technical) study of 15^th-century painting with P. Muratori. I made copies of panel paintings in the museum of Pesaro, I turned my focus on 18^th-century painting with the study of local painters. I made a journey by bicycle to the place where Lorrain had stopped and in Rome I painted a copy (a detail) of one of his famous paintings. I was interested in the stucco and popular sculpture of the Marche and Siena. These studies made me realise, as the visit to the ethnographic museum in Palermo had done, the nature of the sign that I was looking for, which was not only that of identity but of individuation and of its projection in a symbolic object: a relief painting or a painted sculpture. It is only my subjective interpretation to believe that Fontana had this problem too: a three-dimensional painting. That explains the return of the archetype of the object as symbolic process towards a referent that was in this case at the origin.

Today, now that this problem has become clearer for me, I think it is possible to conduct a research and make a sign going back to the linguistic origin where presentation and representation are one. The evolution of the signifier has removed the problem. Knowledge is therefore understood as a relation of simultaneity. There is only the sign that precedes and marks the object while it is representing itself.

I spent this entire period down to April 1967 in total isolation. Since 1963 I have no longer seen exhibitions or frequented places of ‘culture’.

4/1967         I made a series of drawings and sketches to transfer to the volume what I was making in two dimensions. I took these large works and showed them in Milan in the Grossetti gallery. It was not a success, either because I did not yet understand the material, or because the urgency that betrayed the content prevented a longer and more thought out development. Still, this does not invalidate the idea that was there, and the behaviour of my travelling companions, on that occasion, was by no means correct. That is why I have never been connected with any of them since then, except Claudio Olivieri, who proved to be more sincere. The climate in Milan at that time was engulfed by ideas that came from US culture.

In Pesaro I organised an exhibition of political manifestos and one of Hungarian graphic art with the local authority. I took part in seminars on cinema, where I met and exchanged ideas with Pasolini and Mecas and took an interest in the semiology of the cinema. I entered a competition and won a study grant for engraving in Poland. I had contacts with political groups in Sesto San Giovanni.

1968   In January I returned to Milan, where I engaged in political activity in the committees: Vietnam, the Third World. I learnt silk-screen printing, which I used to make a series of manifestos. I was a member of the group behind the ‘Manifestation of protest art’, the Triennial, Biennial, etc.

10/1968       Giuliano Vangi helped me to get into a school where I began my teaching activity. I studied Merleau-Ponty, P. Klee, Kandinsky, Albers, Itten. I collaborated with Attilio Marcolli and Paolo Minoli. I met Giorgio Soro, which whom I am still great friends. I began to study perception with him. I was interested most of all in the social situation of the periphery of Milan. I intervened on behalf of the earthquake victims of Rozzano, etc.

This interest absorbed me for around three years, but if the start was charged with tension, with time it became an ideological commitment that was an end in itself. This is why I gave up this activity in 1971. Today I can say that it has been among the most intense and positive experiences and I have not denied its human and social values. I believe that our culture still does not allow us live these principles except in ideology. I did not confuse this activity with poetic reflection because both presuppose a relation of wholeness.

10/1968       Tina and Marco returned to Milan and opened a lab to resume the ceramic activity, reworking the forms of the objects from the period 1958-1960. The lab was in Arcore.

1969   I went to teach at the Art Institute of Monza, where I met Silvestrini. I began research on colour and visual language in general in parallel with him.

1970   In this period I read Foucault, Derrida, Eco, Barthes.

1971   I made a series of didactic panels that would be useful to the later work in that they involved me in a method that was new for me. In the summer I was in Tuscany for a consultancy and made landscape drawings and a few paintings. The contact with this work encouraged me to begin working for myself again. While still in Tuscany, I had a relation with Lara Vinca Masini, who invited me to a debate and urged me to regain enthusiasm for the work.

1973   Tina and Marco had already begun working, so I was able to have a room where I could work for myself. The school helped me to sort my ideas and thereby to stabilise the relation that had been left at the beginning. So I began to experiment with clay pastes, many drawings on themes drawn from nature (big blue seas with birds, leaves, labyrinths, nets, walls, etc.). I tried to relive the abstractions from years earlier and took up the old projects from via Mortara again, the signs that had been my experiment in informality, the latest studies of semiology and teaching methods, and I looked without concern for the syntheses that would open a road to me. I studied Gaston Bachelard,  Empedocles, Heraclitus and Parmenides. Even if I was still very remote from all that was happening in the world of art, I remained impressed by the values on myth of Kounellis, the tautology of Fabro, and the materials of Eva Hess. I cannot say that I remained indifferent to some stimuli of Conceptual Art, but was more concerned to pursue that idea. I worked with papier mâché, soaked cardboard, wax, sand, cement, gauze, wood and terracotta. I experimented with the possibility of interventions in the landscape with photography. I privileged drawing and terracotta, with which I made a series of plates with imprints of trees, leaves. That was my first work. I made spheres, one of which was Nascita, which I showed in Milan. Another was Bocca, which I exhibited with other similar ones in Frankfurt.

1974   I made a work on the ‘birth of the seed’ and an imprint on clay that I showed at Cadorago in 1975. In parallel with these works I experimented with canvases and cardboard. At the school I met Paolo (Pietro) Coletta and Irma Blanck, to whom I showed the work and who gave me tips.

1975   I continued to take the work with canvases further and showed them at the Cologna Expo and the Casati gallery. Pino Spagnulo and Walter Valentini gave me a hand to return to the world of artistic workers. In Cologne I met Carla Pellegrini, with whom I formed a relation of collaboration and friendship that still holds. The transparent canvases that I showed in the Milano gallery in 1976 date from this period. The exhibition in the gallery Arte Struktura, where I showed a clod of earth and two drawings, also took place in 1975.

1976   In May I held the exhibition already mentioned, where the problem was that of establishing a purely tautological relation with the material. They were transparent canvases hung at a distance from the wall. In another room there were clay floor tiles. I am interested in tautology because it always synonymous with truth, the thing that I name. The distance of the canvases from the wall is a substance, I have called it a substance because the gaze is a substance. It is the search for the distance that I have decided to follow because an art that I have half-seen frightens me. I prefer to think of things through a modulation of the very light that illumines them rather than to believe that it is I who will inhabit that light. I do not want to be dazzled when death, madness and a different life approach me and envelop me.

I love the romantics, the heroes, the grand metaphors, Nietzsche, the poet suicides, I like to think that great men exist, that force is not only dominion and greatness not simple confidence. But I believe it is not cowardly if I prefer to be on a threshold where there is neither centre nor margin and the parabola, with its point in infinity, is far away. Leopardi, Montale, Luzi, Carrà, Morandi, Licini, Martini, Fancello, are the company I prefer.

There is so much space, there are so many words to say that poetry, like art, can find also them outside the clamour of the avantgarde, far from rhetorical exercises and suggestions of success. Every artist is given by definition a sign. I have often thought that art could participate in the meeting of ideas and that it should not respond only to itself. There are languages that are parallel to those of normal usage like the signs that precede the word or which exceed its grip. There are men who should be civil to be artists, others honest, others thieves, others infidels or saints, others nothing or everything: what counts is to make art if that is what you choose. The ceramicist’s word consequently bears an image to create another, diverse but with at least a difference. In a tautology, to make something with terracotta does not mean just firing clay. In fact, the peasant whom you ask what the earth is will tell you that it is what he ploughs, but he will never tell you what it is. Marking the earth is not enough to tell you what it is. But in working in clay I am interested in that reply. The discourse is more modest and simple than it may seem; Heidegger too had read the poets and they images, and so on, in a circle. To make something in terracotta is, for me, to precede things and words, to make with an image that of the soil that has not yet been given a name.

For Arturo Martini the earth was his hands that wanted to see, before thought, what a world of forms would have been like. I think that marble, bronze, matter in general was indifferent to him. The knot that detaches a being from the world that the Chinese artist makes with a piece of twine can only leave a trace if made in the soil. For Lucio Fontana earth was perhaps the best of all other surfaces to violate, to overturn, to distance like the artist of the 15^th century. For others who want to think about earth, it is a symbolic earth, the terrible great mother who devours her own signs, who is always present in torments because she is indifference, like the indifference that sparks off a war. Death is indifference.

I do not seek in soil how I can mark it or the images that its plasticity offers me, not its colours that evoke warmth, but I look for those signs that can be detached, that can leave it, and that I can parse. I prefer those images that only recall it to me in memory, a memory that tells me how much more drama there is in that detachment… So the problem is not that of the archetype, but that of life (or images) as birth.

The face that I made in grey paint in 1960 and the terracotta face inside geometric spaces that I modelled immediately afterwards were mute faces. What I am still looking for is a need to dialogue with this material, but what I or my faces pay to this need in exchange is silence because the earth is mute. These faces do not look at you, but look into the earth where they have left their word. I say this: that red earth is only that of Adam. It is up to others, like me, to find all the others because ignorance cannot hide itself, like the lie, in poetry. So the theme that leads me to continue the quest can be summed up as: what is there between the word and silence?

This exhibition helped me to understand and to reflect on the research that up to that moment was still heterogeneous. I decided to privilege terracotta. I made many designs with rough sketches and used them in the terracotta works that I glued onto panels and cardboard. For me they are the synoptic tables of a discourse planned for as many years, perhaps, as are left for me to work. It was a work of many months but which preserves me from the unpleasant, mistaken and embarrassing situations from which I had been unable to escape before through ingenuity and weakness.

In a group exhibition in Gubbio I gave a self-presentation in which I established the distance from ‘ceramicists’. In October I exhibited a project on signs of the earth in the Lo Spazio gallery in Brescia. After the signs, I have envisaged the images. And after these the narratives.

In Tokyo I showed a group of works, one of which was a homage to Fontana (a sort of broken fruit) that I had exhibited the year before in Faenza. I exhibited in Frechen, where I met Frank N., one of the most important scholars and collectors in Europe, who acquired some of my works. I exhibited in the Museo Bellerive in Lausanne and one of the works was a krater with the title The Grail, which for me has a significance of emotional participation in an (allegorical) symbol. Another work that I made was the first of a series entitled Tangent, because in its worldwide activity the wind that brushes the surface and the water that enters the earth are tangents: one produces a sound, the other the possibility of use.