“What is the way to the abode of light?
And where does darkness reside?
Can you take them to their places?
Do you know the paths to their dwellings?
Surely you know, for you were already born!
You have lived so many years!”
(Giobbe 38, 19-21)
The relationship with nature… The Pre-Socratics had a concept of unchangeability, of immobility: they did not explain how things became, but they felt the need to explain the things that became, that “were behind it”.[1]
Empedocles—not in the sense of magic—of this magic of fire, but of the fire that belongs to this magic….
The relationship with nature … Leopardi talks about the moon, then he talks about nature … in short, it is god …[2]
A while ago, in ’58, I found a first essay on the Pre-socratics and Socrates, then reading on, I got to Plato as well. However, what is in the Timaeus, in the Phaedo, there is all geometry, there is already a universe.
Whereas, in the Pre-socratics, the universe is still nature, that is, it is not language that tells what it has known. It is not language that knows in that it has a structure that it can receive, but a naturalistic relationship (man—nature); it is the essence, the fire that is the principle.
That thing about principles …[3] what unites, what unties like science today.[4]
Extraordinary fact of the Pre-socratics is just to put their room in order, day by day[5]; some with the four principles, some by bringing everyone back to numbers. In short, with a concept of order, they make this mental operation their own.
However, the first one who made order in the cosmos, as a systematic rule, is the one who defined chaos (after all, order comes with Plato … order is the word), with Polyclitus there was a willingness to put order, while Empedocles established the four elements; earth, water, fire and air as they disintegrate and aggregate: love and hate, the whirlwind …[6]
Matter is about transformation, I don’t like what I can do, but what I can’t do with matter, what it hides … I’m more connected to it from a Western point of view.
You have matter: a field, which doesn’t allow you to do certain things, then you do them anyway, so you have a relationship of knowledge.
For me art is knowledge not presence.
I start from matter (I don’t arrive) … but I use the poorest ones, basically the stupidest ones.[7]
I am amazed by Japanese potters, but I am not as good as them. The skill of matter—either there’s too much of it or there’s not enough, and then when you’re in the middle of it, you’re either too little or not enough.
The balance point is magic because you have to tie contradictions, dichotomies, things you can’t put together.
When you make a form and you put it inside the oven, you’re dealing with a sublimation relationship, you’re not free to choose what you want, but you’re forced to respond–it’s kind of a ball and chain that you either have or you don’t, you can’t do anything about it.
That then in the oven you cannot put your hands is a real thing, so the magic is certainly not in the fact that you use fire, but rather that you rely on it.
The earth has to be cooked in the fire by necessity[8], and when it cooks there is the magic of the hands … the magic is what is behind the hand, you let go with it.
I want to be master of my hands, in my head; in short, the speech you operate with hands not with fire, hands take you to the bottom, instead the head I don’t know where it takes me.
What I don’t know (understood in the Indian way) is that I get a kind of fever, my hands go on their own… if I don’t rely on what I don’t know, I don’t have magic anymore… so I have to put together what I know and what I don’t know… that is magic.
Because the relationship with matter is alchemical, it is purely mental, it is never physical.
Days ago I saw in the newspaper an article about the work of an artist friend … but he doesn’t make the work…I don’t care if it is beautiful or ugly, but he doesn’t make it.
The final product is something else precisely in the Renaissance sense, so much art is the historical continuation of the relationship of Renaissance man…the artist is no longer the craftsman, but the one who gives the idea…no longer the technician, the craftsman, but Plato’s demiurge.
Even numbers are matter[9] if you use them to know the world or to explain it….
This thing here is not so much magical as ritual, it becomes a religion, a mysticism, which is contrary to the relationship of knowledge.
I have to make sure that I don’t go toward things with images, that is, I have to isolate this distance.
Our obsessions, our images, in order to have a real relationship with objects, find this shoreline that makes phenomena transparent … and this is the most philosophical part … the relationship with objects is established by a culture …
I don’t have this relationship.
There is a beautiful word that identifies well what objects are: object is a thing you can deliver… with sign…[10] if you don’t have your sign you can’t even… in short, you give yourself with a sign.
Every artist is given by definition a sign.
There are languages parallel to those in normal use as well as signs that precede the word or overtake it.
In the earth I do not look for how I can mark it or the images that its plasticity offers me, nor its colors that evoke warmth, but I look for those signs that can come out of it, and that it is possible for me to grasp.[11]
The earth when it is born I imitate it, when I make a mark on the wall, it is not made from here to there, but as if it were behind,
I prefer those images that only in memory remind me of it, a memory that tells me how much more dramatic there is in that detachment … so the problem is not that of the archetype, but that of life (or images) as birth.
My work has always been a constant fluctuation between painting and ceramics–you could say between appearance and certainty.
Now I have the strength to make “another,” just an otherness of the object: When I make a vase, there may be a moment when this vase is born or it passes away, in short, a moment that is not yet a vase.
When I thought of the drift[12], I had in mind the Stations of the Cross; however, it bugs me that a Stations of the Cross is immediately perceived as a sacred subject, as a ritual, in its Jewish relationship.
Fossati once said something very beautiful, that I almost have to participate in a mythology of objects (in the relationship in which myth means what is behind the horizon) … not Marilyn Monroe, not these allegorical myths; not the myths that have a root in symbolic archetypes.
Myth is man’s recourse to imagination and is the most primitive way of organizing his room.
The richness of language expressed in myth is precisely due to the use of fantasy; the reference to the real datum is precisely due to the conciseness with which metaphor is given.
It’s been three years since I bought Hamlet’s Mill[13]—a beautiful book because it is about a myth that is not Greek, not Jewish (in the Christian sense), nor purely Danish (i.e., Nordic), but it is the only myth that belongs to the whole world.
Then, you see the same thing remade by all peoples, over time … you see these are the great insights … to see a myth as a thought.
When you make a tree, you make a center, meaning you already have the archetype.
But I guess I am not a coward if I prefer to stand in a threshold where there is no center nor margin and the parabola with its point at infinity, is far away.
Between the finite and the infinite is the fact of matter making and unmaking … the moment you speak it means you have tied a knot in the silence.[14]
When the silence has already caught you, it has already taken you … in short you are screwed … I am not for shouting for gestures, in fact these are things I hate deeply, narcissistic … these hedonisms. I mean what I’m interested in is the memory of the scream. Celine says that music is the memory of the cry.
The earth is the memory of the first sign.
Severini wrote a book about stillness that is against art (art is a thing about becoming).
I think of the first cry in the memory of a newborn child, it’s a poetic moment, it’s a metaphysical relationship—in short, the cry of birth is not the cry of death.
I am in controversy with those people who say Arturo Martini made pottery; I say he made terracotta.
The fact is that there are materials that are better suited to a personality.
Martini uses the material as he wants; I like his terracottas much better than his marbles.
He was more interested in figures than Leoncillo who was closer to the material (ceramics).
Because of this analogy he finds[15] … the artist like Vico’s behemoth … he goes ahead and speaks and reasons in images and proceeds by very elementary things … elementary images.
In Martini, there is this terrible restlessness and this wondering, this being at once inside without strategies (whether he then does the Etruscan or the style of the XIII century is contingent on his work).
It is very important what is unseen versus what is seen (while, in Fontana, there is this fact of the unknown).
The unknown is always the unknown, even if you go back, for example, the tradition of the 15th century, it’s a kind of realism, it’s a metaphysical, non-magical, anti-idealist underwear.
However, in both Fontana and Arturo Martini, there is a relationship that we don’t have today, or if we do, we have to approach it with that sense.
Fontana let go of the earth by intuition; I don’t think this is his relationship.
Lucio’s content is not this freshness that he has, but a metaphysical relationship—of the West, of the other, of the after, of the hole; here is a spatial relationship, certainly not of another kind.
I was very good friends with him (he just told me in the last years that he was fine with me because I didn’t talk to him about the work); I never asked him for anything; we were just completely different. We just worked together; then, he also bought me jobs—he was helping young people a lot.
I used to visit him, when I was staying in Milan, everybody knew I was very friendly with him, and they would ask me to come along with him.
Fontana’s lesson first of all is moral rather than sign.
He couldn’t hear about Henry Moore, about Marino Marini … however, he was right.
He would say, “Well … I mean … I am things that I could not do, in the sense of a direct relationship with one’s work.”
He was fighting against the sculptors of talent, that is, the sculptors of subjectivity like Marino Marini.
Fontana had a relationship with the material of great freedom, with simplicity, going beyond this unknown, this “hole,” he made people see through a glimmer (then, he did other things, too—we made a neon cube together in Pesaro).
Melotti is much more of a ceramist: In himself, he knows much more about the material than Fontana.[16]
For Lucio, the earth, it was perhaps the best of many others to violate, to turn upside down, to push away like the artist of the 1400s.
For others who want to think the earth … the earth is symbolic; it is the terrible great mother that devours its own signs; it is always present in anguish because it is indifference (death is indifference).
My bet is craftsmanship…it’s one way rather than another…it’s not that I’m able to do it; it’s two different things…getting into folk art is one thing, being folk is another thing.
The avant-gardes did not interest me because they were destined precisely for physical death.
They do, however, represent a point of validity in history which are these things of openness, but not openness to discourse, openness to meaning.
So many things in the avant-garde have been misused because, when you start something, it’s not how you then make it, but the first idea, I mean—kind of, like sketches are, an opening to meaning.
Regarding the relationship of naturalism versus the avant-garde, abstractionism and figuration, one could give the example of the first Carrà who is not a naturalist, and the second one who is a borderline.
The art of naturalism is also subjective; it is subjectivism taken to the extreme.
It was the poetics of the sign … I in the 1960s said I had nothing to do with these things anymore, and I started to re-study.
The symbol calls to you a whole hidden part, so it becomes magical when it unites two distant things—one can be seen, the other cannot.
It does not have to live outside, but inside; you have to live it;, then it becomes an archetype, a myth of the thing you do.
Otherwise, which is worse, naturalism becomes allegorical; in fact, there are people who explain the thing to you—they say, I did this, and then this—in short, they make allegory.
The figure, when it does not become naturalistic, is always symbolic.
In Jacopo della Quercia[17], these figures have a great human weight, they are antinaturalistic, they are really abstractions.
It is not the Byzantine or Gothic abstraction, at a certain point behind that thing, there is a world: Behind Wiligelmo’s Adam who has a belly, there is finally a man who has a belly, after centuries in which he was flat, empty.
The belly is not naturalistic, but it becomes a symbolic fact, a great abstraction—it is not decoration.
Talking about the East we talk about decoration, and it can become naturalistic, in short just decorative, an embellishment.
Instead, there it’s really the thought, it’s the will not to make the image—the icon is the image, but the image of the law.
I’m making a homunculus… here Claudio Olivieri[18] came and he clarified well: It is a presence that besides being heavy, it is a shadow outside of us.
If one wants to make Narcissus and then puts the title “Narcissus” on it … it is not symbolic … instead, if you make something, you think of Narcissus, that is the symbol of the self; there it does not escape (so it matters when the self disappears).
Rodin is just the last gesture sculptor of this subjectivity; I admire him very much; but I don’t like him at all. Just some of his nudes where basically there is a principle of disease.
Classicism is a relationship between the subjective and the objective; it is the subject going through a language of forms, of norms.
Gothic art is an art that has taken up classicism so is no longer abstract art.
The Romanesque, the ‘400 of the Oak, is a particular moment for sculpture; in short, they are moments when there is still everything to be said and nothing has been said, and a moment later great rationality springs forth.
Il rapporto è sempre comunque costantemente antinaturale, perché quando l’uomo inizia a mettere davanti la natura, non c’è un rapporto naturale… gli animali non si mettono davanti alla natura dovendosela spiegare, perché loro sono la natura.
Nel romanico c’è anche la sintesi del cristianesimo che è anticlassico, con il concetto di creazione, che è anche il concetto di ciclo che c’è nello spazio.
Il mondo classico invece, non è creato né da dio né dagli uomini… è solo imprestato.
Quando questa sintesi è venuta fuori, c’è stato proprio un concetto di gravità e non di peso (Jacopo della Quercia).
Io negli anni ’60 ho avuto una crisi perché non sapevo che strada prendere, allora ho fatto questo volto con questa casa, poi anche dei disegni, dei bozzetti… poi dopo ho chiuso.
È il periodo in cui ho conosciuto Claudio Olivieri, Livio Marzot e mi sembrava giusto, non il ritorno, ma studiare un po’. Era l’esperienza del gruppo del Salone Annunciata, dei volti, delle strutture degli anni ’60.
La pittura la conosco, però cercavo sempre il rilievo e questo mi dava fastidio, adesso non succede più… è in scultura che cerco il piano.
Ho molta difficoltà plasticamente, e a scuola ero negato, invece per il disegno sono stato sempre abile.
Mainolfi, ogni tanto mi viene a trovare con amici suoi di Torino, che fanno degli esperimenti con le lave.
But, Mainolfi’s terracotta is plastic; it’s not earth; then he has an incredible flair and ability to knead, to turn … in short, there’s a reading relationship.
In ’61 I wanted to stop “making”, and I sent to Faenza the best pieces (the white bowl, etc.), just all the objects.
In ’62, ’63 I had tidied up a bit and in ten years (in ’62 I was in my 30s), the only good thing was to make a jug, a bowl, a small sculpture and drawings; that’s it!
That amazes me because, in the ’60s I had designed all the things I do now, these themes of face, home, body. Now I can experience them more internally; I sensed them then, but they were purely individual choices, with the figuration of that period, I had nothing to do.
I can’t understand what they know how far they go; when they give you something, they also give you the end; they know and they always have to verify.
Me, on the other hand, just from my own ignorance, I don’t know what I did (I know maybe 30 percent). I intuit, but I don’t even know what the work answers me (it’s a pure illusion to become aware of that reality). I never look forward to a friend coming to ask him if it works, and these are the anxieties one chooses to have.
I never draw the reality of the thing; a lot of drawings I do to study, some are these shapes that come out of the ground, then it’s also a space problem, in the sense that, when I go up to the farmhouse, I have a lot of space with a lot of paper, and then I do until I solve the problem… I don’t solve it inside…
When I see someone who likes the drawing done well, I think: You have to make a drawing and then tear it up; you have to make it as good as you can, otherwise what do you tear up?
There is one thing to make clear: Modern art is a completely theoretical art, a very mental thing…I’m not interested in thinking a thing, but how you think, it’s an order of thinking just about the way you think.
It’s not that there was merely a fashion of the moment, and I started to make—I made so many drawings, so many paintings; this came about almost as a consequence.
The homunculus doesn’t come to me because unfortunately I know what the human body looks like, the shoulder joint—I can’t forget that—innocence is a point of arrival, not a point of departure.
To be a man today is to be you.
I started from a drawing by Sironi … I saw the need to work for a moment on the shadow, and maybe just on the relationship that man has with his shadow.
For example, I made the face, I made the mannequin of De Chirico… I filled blocks and blocks of drawing for this man. It has to be empty, that is just a completely invented thing, not a man (dumb like that, with a heavy head working the countryside, down on the earth that has reached the transparency of history, it doesn’t exist anymore).
Now, I’m making these terracottas of three big houses: One is where you live there (it’s not a picture, you don’t assume it from the outside), one you see. The other is a broken thing where there are objects, that is the body of the house without the space.
What is the house?
Nothing but the plastic of the concave; instead all the plastic that has been made so far in sculpture is nothing but convexity.
It is important what is behind me because in the 1960s I used to make these things here, then afterwards others who were close to me made them and I had a verification of it… in short… this is my part of presumption.
In all ancient structures, there is the house: from the Etruscans to that, to the other, that is the problem of the house…
I took a peasant house and studied it geometrically: with its relationships, the light, where it comes in, etc…. it is the mother, it is Plato’s cave… his is the shadow of representation.
To make the house requires a certain kind of courage… if sculpture has been so far that fullness that is dilated, the point that expands in space (this here is Vico, isn’t it?!), the malign point that opens and extends with that distension that is a force, the relationship with ceramics (understood in an oriental way) is the opposite; it is this space that… slips until it finds its own energy.
The last relationship that interests me very much now is this work with Nanni Cagnone on space.
At Pac, the only moment on space was the column…the space was what was already there before I intervened…you come, you go into the space, you don’t create it.
Nanni Cagnone said that in “Drift” there was a problem with space in the sense that it was not really there, it was empty, it was a naturalistic space. The column, on the other hand, no, it was a historical moment … what it tells is only the space because it receives.
For example, the capital is what is not architecture, the Doric capital is formed on a golden section in which a parabola is built.
Constructing a parabola in a golden section is an incredible speculation… these are the things I’m crazy about, I mean it’s the very linguistic facts, these things I need to work with, not to say…
[1] Nanni as a primitive intelligence that stands to these philosophers, so the sense of philosophy is closely related to real life with a direct grasp that is precisely of the artistic kind. In our days, situations are organized on the basis of the real, which are materialized into a tangible product (not necessarily that the tangible is also the concrete). Common point is the absence of spirituality.
[2] Think in sequence of Licini’s Leopardi looking at the moon.
[3] “Fire, water, earth, air, exist by nature and by chance. These elements then, moved at random by their respective tendencies, gradually by a certain affinity, came to meet and associate. (Hot with cold, soft with hard, and all natural qualities by necessity of chance mingled with opposite qualities.) Art, which appeared later, and which is based on these same combinatorial processes, the work of mortals, itself mortal, later realized certain games, which far from possessing truth in themselves, are rather images, which have only affinity with the arts themselves” (Plato, Laws).
[4] This thing of seeing nature and then not seeing the landscape, of being interested in man, but then not seeing the portrait.
[5] Valentini’s work is about putting one’s mental room in order with a direct reference to one’s principles.
[6] To look to the pre-Socratics is to reset everything: because cold, because hot, because light; to refer only to real elements.
[7] The term poor matter, which may seem improper because it refers to and consolidated by the experience of a group of artists (recently presented in a retrospective in Turin, Celant—Einaudi, 1985), is in fact evidence of how much of choice and one’s own presence survives in the speed of dialogue. By mental reduction, dust is integrated with water: Mud is the poor and technologically stupid, unintelligent matter, for this “place of departure”; more poetically, the abode of all beginning.
[8] The combinatorial principles of soft with hard, of cold (inert) with hot (active), of natural qualities expressed in Plato’s laws, stand thus particularly to the earth almost as a forward flight of pre-Socratic thought. Perhaps the moment of greatest physical tension in Nanni’s work is this becoming unconscious. The yielding softness in which one can leave one’s imprint is followed by the whole long moment when the material congeals until it is consolidated with fire, and it is precisely here that it happens that one can no longer put one’s hands to it. Often an almost Nordic dryness of “withdrawal” is present in works that cannot counteract, maintain the tough softness in which they manipulate.
[9] Greek research in geometry is remarkable precisely because of the importance given to the logical development of the subject and the study of theoretical problems. The axiomatic arrangement isolates a few fundamental concepts and principles that can be considered the key to the logical grounding and structuring of the whole subject. Cf. Edward Stabler, The Mathematical Thought, Turin, Boringhieri 1978.
[10] As R. Sanesi writes in the Galleria Milano catalog, Milan 1980: “he constructs matter (earth) and draws from it objects, already in themselves ‘signs’ as well as objects, which bear the seal of his intervention.”
[11] N.B. Water, earth, fire are still so primitive that they contain a whole series of germs and things that can still come out without the need to show themselves.
[12] Cf. P.G. Castagnoli, Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea catalog, Milan, 1984 (with testimonies by U. Galimberti, F. Leonetti, G. Soro).
[13] Cf. G. De Santillana, Hamlet’s Mill—essay on myth and the structure of time, edited by A. Passi, Adelphi, 1983.
[14] As in a poem by Margherita Guidacci, already a reading track for content in the publication of her first solo exhibition in Milan: “Not visions dismay man – but the shadow that moves / At the bottom of solitary mirrors or in the grave waters of waiting. / Not the gesture or the cry – but in the desert of the heart / The slow vibrations of a memorable silence.” G. Ballo, Works of G. B. Valentini, Salone Annunciata, Milan, 1960.
[15] That quid of mental (and not as in Martini “nervous”) energy that passes in his work is unlikely to make it so that there will be a “Valentinism” tomorrow. Not so with Martini, precisely from a mental and not a craft point of view.
[16] Nanni cannot hold the pottery, while Melotti mirrors his face in it a thousand times, precisely because pottery has two kinds of color: color as make-up and color as abstraction. Nanni with earth and metal oxides does not give any “effect” (as in painting), but gives the color of position.
[17] During this dialogue, we expressly refer to the works of the major portal of S. Petronio (in Bologna), executed by Jacopo.
[18] From a telephone interview with C. Olivieri: “The relationship with Nanni is always something magical … when he talks to us it is always an evocation of images. We talked about this homunculus and I was very awkward at first, not so much because it could be a call to the figurative (for him the figurative-abstract discourse does not exist), but precisely because of this evocation of the terrestrial.”