Nanni Valentini. L’inno della perla
exh. cat., Libreria Giulia, Rome, March 1985
I wonder whether what we see in looking at ancient sculptures is not a conceptual creature that can no longer be extricated from its historical versions, from the discourse on sculpture – even whether a ‘tradition’ has not taken the place of every sense of creation. What moved the Greek and Roman viewers, or the medieval pilgrims, what senses became mediator of the memory, what covered the caress of the gaze?
How could the same material express opposite forces? The elevating Greek form exorcising dark demons and the Roman gravitas, the arrival of the earthly burden, the sorrowful weighing down that was to change the very idea of destiny? These questions arise when I look again at sculpture like the ancient remains of Baiae, Wiligelmo or the months in Ferrara, or the persistent memory of Praxiteles in Olympia and his perennial nucleus that loses energy, infinitely, in the light.
That today sculpture, on the ever paler traces of the styles, offers us its eclectic agonies has not prevented me from noticing the need to look at it.
But what is there in our looking at it? How to touch what we see? As I walk among the forms laid out on the floor in the studio of Valentini, I venture on paths that elude the sudden imbalance of all the dull correspondences, of all the already thought ideas, of the precious critical props that here, unexpectedly, are of no use.
In their slow but vertiginous peeling themselves from their horizontal position, they determine an empty nucleus, now internal, now tangential or peripheral, to confirm an aggregation that evades the temptation to determine itself a priori, as though will and material were waiting for their own combination in the coagulation of the action and of the fire. Valentini hosts the process in which the earth becomes sign, its own exhausted substance, and converts its threatening inertia, imprinting there the perturbable mobility of the transfer.
And from the earth we see the re-emergence of the ancient mineral presages, the chromatic vocations of the earthy pastes, the spectra of incandescences.