Nanni Valentini: material for Pythagoras
In Materia come realtà, exh. cat., Pinacoteca e Musei Comunali, Macerata, December 1979
In his way, Nanni Valentini is a strange and interesting personality. Instead of escaping into a metaphorical, symbolic empyrean, his creativity prefers a denotative language by which he arrives at a personal aesthetico-philosophical approach to the problem of communication. His intention to produce an object determined by a line of formal purity that avoids any possible conceptualisation grants him acute observations that practically concern the objectivisation of sculptural space. His works are presented to the viewer exactly for what they are, a meeting between material and imaginative intelligence that permits an emotional cognizance of the emerging information relating to the quality, quantity, colour and form of the artistic event, closing in this way the circularity of a discourse that obeys criteria of intellectual coherence and certain rational demands.
Even when in 1956 and 1957 he created images in which the essential nature of the sign showed how much the artist was still psychologically tied to figurative though not represented modules, it is possible to trace that speculative direction. A rapid perusal of those drawings by the viewer, however, does not adequately bring out the hidden qualities in the incisiveness of his line, but is confined to underlining the emotive intensity. The loose and flowing rhythm seems to develop progressively and at times to be condensed in the more determined effort to synthesise the values that, through the alternations and contrapositions of the groups of signs, end up persuasively suggesting a modest but substantial poetry that, without resorting to technical artifice, grounds its own concreteness in the character of the lines and the spontaneity with which they are traced.
I recall a tempera from 1957, exhibited, I think, at the Marche Prize that year, which struck me for the simplicity of the design and especially for the chthonian complexity of its language. This had been made autonomous through a clearly self-reflexive distancing of the work from its ideological archetype. In fact, the artist had captured there a clearly identifiable chromatic and formal event, translated by the nervous dynamic of the brushstrokes, laden with the acute density of stylistically illogical contrasts, used mostly analogically, in a poetic field. The artist engages in an intense search for a communication that without repetitions combines his heart and intellect with unusual partners, represented by the colour, support, and the objective structure of the composition. He thereby enhances the results of the universal experience of the natural, making them efficacious in themselves because ordered according to a self-sufficient panorama of forms.
The approval won at the XVI National Ceramics Contest in Faenza, where he was awarded the Giorgio Ugolini prize, convinced him of the opportunity to organise a personal show of ceramics and drawings in Palazzo Mosca, Pesaro. It met with great public and critical acclaim for the concreteness of the works, pervaded by the human awareness of an everydayness, felt as a sequence of poetically experienced real events. They avoided romantic visions, which were alien to his temperament and to his specific cultural background.
He exhibited bowls and vases there, solid and dense, familiar and humble objects, made of clay shaped and made pregnant with meaning, thanks to the fertile intelligence of the glazes. Finally free of figurative influence, they suggested connotations that imprinted on the support not only the marks of the passage of time, but also those of the imagination, filtered by the indelible presence of the material.
Without veiling, the terracotta was placed directly in a mental space different from that of the viewer, refusing any kind of mimesis and evoking suggestions that the atmospheric transparency rendered shifting by means of a shared stabilising force: the light. Even the drawings were presented as free agents, almost as though recalling the adamantine serenity of the action that articulates the passage of thoughts in the given space. However, if one considers the works shown in Pesaro as a whole, along with the multiple echoes arising from memory, they become surrounded by an almost magical aura. Charged with primal force, it is able to arouse secret feelings and the pleasure of arriving at a tactile knowledge of the crafted objects to allow the vital and hidden assonances to flow from them.
The material connotations of the various works exude often vigorous informal resonances of a continuum, directly torn from that present on which a specific earthly dimension insists, predisposed, sought and guided through a mixture of the intelligently modelled paste to provoke highly interesting reactions of pigmentation and forms, always activated by the validity of an unrepeatable experience. Mysterious signs live scattered and as if in suspension within the operational field, offering a spatial situation without flattening, able to produce a profundity in which even a shadow of light can conceal itself. It facilitates a further transfer of material to other material, from terracotta to an indefinable ancestral ectoplasm, despairing in its almost human fragility. The luminous values on the treated surfaces become mobile dialectical occasions, halted in the stupor of death or stimulated by a recognisable vital principle in the object as demonstration of an ontological truth, but not for this becoming more capable of resolution. The complementarity between abstraction and naturalism ends up in the effective reality of the crafted object itself, thought as the non-illusory awareness of a form, at the same time seductive and useful.
In short, the studies and inquiries of the 1950s seem to exalt an uncommon sensory capacity explicitly aimed at grasping the impalpable moods of an intensely reminiscent solitude full of images. A graphic process conducted to determine the juxtaposition of parallel rhythms with zones of intersection, organised to give a prismatic prominence to a harmonious perspective, triggers the development of geometrical automatisms according to planes that are more intellectual than real. The continuous fluctuation between symmetry and asymmetry is one of the few constants in Valentini’s production. Through those aesthetic rules, he insistently proposes truths tied to psychological explanations. The clear combination of art and nature (taking the latter in the cultural, not realistic, sense of the product) makes it possible to face the incipient dominance of the technological component in contemporary society. As a consequence, the reference to the activity of painting or modelling provides a necessary informative occasion to avoid speculative interpretations of any kind. In 1960 two important and significant solo shows by Valentini were presented in Fano and Milan. He exhibited drawings, ceramics and tempera paintings in the former, only tempera paintings in the latter. In the presentation for the catalogue in Fano, Valerio Volpini demonstrated how the ceramics exemplified ‘the recapitulation of ancient, time-hallowed motifs, taken up again and linked to a present-day activity, which we might call refined, but that is not just technical preciousness’, while in spite of the ‘violent signs of the painting’ the ‘rigorous’ paintings display a ‘stupendous architectonic sureness’. On the other hand, in his presentation for the solo show in the Salone dell’Annunciata, Guido Ballo spoke of ‘clear painterly notes’, a sign ‘developed expressively to outstrip any calligraphic satisfaction’, while ‘the colour tends towards ever more intense structures, with subtle tonalities and broad cadences that in a new way recall, among other things, certain rhythms of the primitivi’ of central Italy.
In fact, while maintaining the absence of any kind of figuration, works in tempera like Continuità, or drawings like Linea orizzontale [horizontal line] and Paesaggio [landscape], construct an illusory universe where the judicious use of zones of light and shade suggests naturalism, often simulating an unintended but explicit three-dimensionality. The works on display thus contained an almost traditional sonority of nature, even if the contrapuntal tonalism used in the compositions went hand in hand with an entirely mental aspiration for a spatio-temporal continuum that, without allowing the viewer the eye of innocence, attains that introspective and intersubjective communication, the presumed aim of art in general and visual art in particular. A poem by Margherita Guidacci, included in the Annunciata catalogue, provides a perfect commentary on the substance of Nanni Valentini’s inquiries: ‘Not visions upset man – but the shadow that moves / on the bottom of solitary mirrors or in the heavy waters of expectation. / Not the action or the cry – but in the desert of the heart / the slow vibrations of an inexorable silence’.
A large oil painting from 1961 (1.50 x 1.70 m) cleared the ground of erroneous psychological interpretations. While evoking the presence of gestural, material memories of an informal origin, at the base of the chromatic flux it established a continuity of research tackling the very roots of existence, formulating an enormous problematic arc. That made it possible to embrace a field of motivations whose conjunctions point to subterranean links with the world of the unconscious. The relational opening to the sociologico-existential level made hypothetical indirect structurings perceptible, designed to establish contact with ambiguous and instrumentalised emotional and notional situations. The operational ambiguity of the artist re-emerged in March-April 1963 in the group exhibition Una scelta 1963 [a selection 1963] in the Salone dell’Annunciata in Milan. It also included Massimo Cavalli, Riccardo Emma, Renzo Ferrari, Alberto Ghinzani, Livio Marzot, Claudio Olivieri and Valentino Vago. Valentini presented numerous works there, including Teste [heads], with their authoritatively objective polarity, while their emblematic character lay in the direction of new irrational-perceptual premises, able to assume a role evocative of a covertly symbolic expressionism. Gillo Dorfles hit the nail on the head in Artificio e nature [artifice and nature], when he declared the impossibility of talking about ‘naturalness’ and the ‘innocent eye’ today, unless by extending ‘the limits assigned to the signs of nature and to the possibility of man among such signs’. Nanni Valentini unconsciously followed that line in his ceramic activity rather than in his painting. The formal aspects of such a discourse were manifested at the level of language, having their origin directly in things, as the result of researches that revealed mastery of the craft and a refined technical sensibility in the process of transforming the clays. The drawings and tempera paintings from 1965, on the other hand, are pages of different inspiration, even arriving at a conversational tone that corresponded to a particular disposition of the artist’s awareness, the authentic background to every theoretical and practical activity of the spirit. The prevalence of the aesthetic fact seemed to accentuate the dilatory dynamic of painting and drawing in a gradual dramatic intensification of the rhythms that proceed in a crescendo from left to right. The compositions reveal an almost structural analysis of the ensemble that expresses a selective process of values, powered by synthesis and heightened by colour, in the triangles, squares, trapezoids and parallelepipeds. The clarification provided by the solo exhibition in the Salone dell’Annunciata in 1966 pointed to a relation-opposition between the artist and his creation, between geometrically inspired abstractism and informal inspiration that explained the substantial change in the inquiry. Clinging to daily life, which was a fortunate starting point for his activity, the artist passed from terracottas in which the decorative aspect sometimes prevailed over content to much more complex and pregnant works, less through the setting of the chromatic or formal calibrations, than for their richness of content. The transformation of the preceding poetic did not refuse those works that had justified the research until then, but showed how that period had come to an end and another, more prolific and interesting one, was opening. In the works exhibited, spatiality took on a precise instrumental valency, as solid as concrete material and as impalpable as an episode of the imagination. They were a sign of the times, the harmony of a fabric that was no longer monocellular, but developed through aggregation and immersed in a qualifying plurality, that was very eloquent at the lyrical and sentimental level. The material immanence of the objects continued a simple melodic line, where a slight refinement of harmony could be detected and the conjunction of the unfinished, rediscovered as a provocative component with an extraordinary propensity to yield intellectual results open to any conclusion.
Marco Valsecchi has observed that ‘the particularly restless imagination of Nanni Valentini tests rather bizarre, fragmented and at times laborious solutions of forms that reveal’ expressionist interests. Gualtieri Schönenberger noted a ‘contrast between definite structure and free sign’ and the monumental patency of his ‘painterly objects’, maintaining that ‘their unusual development, articulation and refusal of the limits of a frame’ demonstrates how one can be an avantgarde artist ‘while still using modes and themes in the air, without apparent breaks’. Objectively, the painterly works and those in ceramics are profoundly linked to the cultural roots of a rural society, where spaces only seem to be organised by the limpid geometry of the square fields, barely marked by the passage of the seasons and bound by the horizon of the hills. On the other hand, the artist combines these ancestral derivations with an intense study of the possibilities of communication and of the research results in the field of art, stratified in time and by now considered fixed points of national and Western culture. In the following year, 1967, Nanni Valentini was once again at the Salone dell’Annunciata with works executed in the last few months. The exhibition met with the usual success, but it still did not fully satisfy his expectations and aspirations, perhaps because that solo show did not yet represent an overcoming of the issues in which he found himself, but was simply the occasion to analyse a situation and to derive themes of rupture and in-depth analysis from it. In reality, the search for innovative structures was a constant for him, thirsty as he was for the need to pinpoint a specific area where the multiplication of the same element, clay, would not inflate the relation between artist and material of secondary, seductive signs that posed a threat to the earthly opacity of the formless material. The uniform equivalence of certain structural researches fascinated him, but at the same time signalled the risks of the lack of normative criteria, limiting the informative possibilities of the objects through the absence of explicitly referential interpretative eventualities.
A new event took place in 1968: the start of his activity as a teacher. This marked the beginning of a period that has not stopped since and which reveals to the artist the need to create nexuses of particular interest not only with his own pupils, but also with the totality. The force of communication became predominant, and with it the conviction that without some kind of perceptual activity there was no point in making art and illustrating through the consequent event his own expectations, motivations, emotions and those infinitesimal tremblings that legitimise a teleological and direct action. In short, to provide information about the solutions to the problems of life that could be considered possible. Moreover, he wanted to take his technical researches further, prevalently aimed at discovering not only the function of colour in the reading of any work, but also of its complex utilisation in making ceramics. He was to work on this question for more than four years, but the first results could already be glimpsed in 1969. In the Galleria II Segnapassi, Pesaro, he presented his objects, his tempera paintings and his drawings that clearly outlined the new direction of his research. Though not exhaustive of his aspirations, it denoted a substantial complexity of viewpoints, in spite of the formal simplicity of the works exhibited.
On that occasion the critic was obliged to confirm that ‘his forms are the fruit of careful and precious research, (…) the best expression of a poetic world, rich in simplicity and colour’. Three years of reflection, meditation and attempts to understand the intimate and expressive urgencies were sufficient to kindle afresh the desire to tell with the eloquence of his own instruments the personal artistic adventure, aimed at cognizance of the natural, real and everyday world.
In 1975 he presented his ceramics at the Termoli Prize and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Lausanne, followed by the International Ceramics Exhibition The Cunichi Shimbun in Tokyo, Japan, and the Europäische Keramik der Gegenwärt in Frechen, Germany. Gaia International even devoted a cover to him. Finally, in May 1976, he showed in the Milan Gallery in the city of that name the result of his long researches and immediately achieved a notable success. He received similar recognition on the occasion of another solo show, this time in the Galleria Lo Spazio, Brescia. Tommaso Trini ‘referred’ to the ‘screened visibility of a Lo Savio delightfully opening onto the delicate landscapes of Melotti’, of course for its sensibility, not its iconography, and stressed how Valentini tried ‘to recreate the minimal and mental equivalent of the perception of the landscape, and therefore of reality’. From the ‘impoverished’ Muro [wall] to the ‘neo-magical’ Cerchio [circle] and the ‘refractions of the sign, diagonal to washes condensed with greater diversity in the lattice-like space’, he noted ‘a praxis aimed at reappraising visual perception in the poetic context of ambiguity’. On the other hand, the sculptor, draughtsman and ceramicist Paolo Schiavocampo argued that, in the works exhibited, ‘space became a cognitive field and the hypotheses offered an almost absolute degree of reality. Planes, line, colour and projections were in the service of a unitary perception’, which was disciplined by the need for ‘representation, the more coercive and simplifying it is, the greater the possibility of transmitting it’. In this respect, I deem it necessary to underline the simplicity and efficacy of Valentini’s plastic production shown in Milan and Brescia. Muro (2 x 2 m), Struttura n. 1 (130 x 130 cm), Scala [stairway] (140 x 190 cm), Cerchio, Struttura n. 2 (120 x 120 cm) and the other works (the transparent canvases hanging from the wall are interesting) presented a new man, able to entrust his message to the re-elaboration of shared formal experiences, recuperated in their latent values, those primordial cultural valences sufficient to effect an opening towards those notions assimilated and stored in the unconscious and to transform into poetry images that had so far been seen only as content. The plastic configuration takes on shape in a condensed becoming, growing internally and articulating the rhythm of a situation that does not accept satisfaction, but is transformed into a page of life lived and savoured in its hardness, marked by time and history.
Of particular interest is the discourse opened at the Gubbio Biennial, when he replaced ‘audio-consequential language with visual language’. Valentini himself wrote ‘I have chosen the earth as material’, and continued recalling that ‘the ceramicist uses the essence of the earth, clay; in conquering air, the modelling steals from it a place for the fluid material, water, to then accept the Empedocles complex, fire’. He was explicitly referring to the four elements of alchemy, by means of which Nanni Valentini would like to glean from the material ‘the sense of eternity, the slow passage of life’. I think the works exhibited particularly displayed concern about an infinite search for truth that sustains the action and convinces the artist of the rightness of pursuing such an exalted inquiry into such a humble substance. The stoneware paste, composed of various clays and colour, absorbed by them through baths of metallic salts, is transmuted through a merely artisanal process into a thought out and spiritual inquiry in direct experimentation on the values of existence, searching for the divine immanent in the material, in the hope of discovering what is that impalpable substance hidden ‘in the interspace between the visible and the tactile’. For the artist, ‘the semantic gravitation in the privileged relation between hand and earth’ betrayed the intention to grasp ‘some specific signs of language’; in other words, through an isomorphic symbolism, perceptual qualities inherent in the very visual form are exalted, resulting in a codified formula that meets the need for a direct communication without intermediaries. The later exhibitions illustrate the ever more insistent meaning of the physical images, perceptively linked to the intense desire to destabilise representation through the use of collective symbols, whose purely selective vitality appears capable of concentrating attention on that particular aspect of the world. For Nanni Valentini, modelling clay automatically explains the physical awareness of the form and volumes reducible within the confines of metaphor to leave to one side any aspiration toward transcendence. The participation in the prize for ceramics in Faenza and the solo show held in the Galleria Lo Spazio, Brescia, in October confirm the almost biological sense of continuity of his production. In representing reality, Earth, Bricks, Walls, Clods, it expresses an ancient awareness, using, as Nanni Cagnone has put it, ‘woven words that are hatched to create figures, destiny of the thing thought, dialogue of plenitude and void’.
In taking up a general discourse, Herbert Read has declared that reality is ‘a conquest of our senses, a map that gradually takes shape as an exploration of our feelings, tracing the contour of the sensations, measuring the distances and altitudes of experience’. That implies a continuous mutability of the degree of cognizance of a given fact, though always relative to the level of awareness not only of who looks and perceives, but also of who produces that specific type of message. Reality appears, therefore, as a kind of mental function that measures the extent of communication.
In returning to the terracottas of Nanni Valentini, after this premise, it is possible to understand how his imagination verifies by means of simple facts the intensity of states of mind and the direct experience of those facts, set at the level of development of an intellectual process whose acute and incisive terms measure an apparently static but allusive and provocative condition of the object. Those situations, created by firing clay, and those plastic constructions seem to be the protagonists of a time and a space, perceived as coactive agents of a present capable of moving into the future to the point of enveloping it, delineating a phenomenological field in which only the existential hic et nunc counts.
The ontological meditations of Heidegger to which Sartre refers, the apodeictic Husserlian truth cited above, and the British and US neopositivist currents lead to a valorisation of the symbolic structures, whose intentionalities prove to lie at the basis of the phenomenon, providing statistical certainties in contradiction to the indetermination and relativity of perception characteristic of our day. So the find that the artist offers the viewer as a paragon with which to confront oneself in order to rediscover one’s own identity, reveals an eternal present, a mentally produced archaeological find and an emotional suggestion able to open the doors of the collective memory, the artistic object that seems capable of drawing from the depths the awareness of a moment. The analysis of the instant, in its temporal multiple locations, reinforces the conviction of existence, demonstrating how the artistic event is nothing but the material representation of a personal anxiety, destined in intention to arrest time.
Nanni Valentini’s terracottas shown in 1978 in Japan at the Exhibition of Ceramic Arts in Tokyo and in the one-man show in the Galleria del Falconiere in Falconara Marittima, spoke of a human dimension that is unusual in its material consistency, through which ‘the use of the forma finalis of art, on the one hand, and the inflation and ephemerality of inventive freedom, on the other, are co-existent, non-contradictory aspects’. Above all the exhibition in Falconara revealed the nature of his investigation with the purpose of ‘discovering incandescent cracks in the ice of objectivity’ and to create multiple images, ready to communicate, transmute and grow. The plasticity of the works presented on that occasion was strangely ductile, mentally able to overcome its own weight, a yielding material split in strips, fractures and grafts in the sense of a direct, almost sanguineous pulse of a human and carnal feeling, I would call it two-faced, turned towards existence and things, towards relative mental figures and their metaphysical presence.
The declared desire to remain attached to the earth, indisputable protagonist of the artistic adventure, thanks to a sudden specularity between particular and absolute, between fixity and sensation, finds itself immersed in a flux and reflux of emotions that overwhelms the fragment in a piercing of meanings that are often painful in their identification with what exists and is human. The fluid proposal of a naturalness, understood sometimes as physical reality and at other times as the physical support of a different spiritual situation, points the place of the project ‘towards a cosmology of the private’ that can be detected right from the most explicitly aniconic manifestations. That is why the found objects, the fragments, the terracottas, the walls, the bricks shift from being nagging symbols (the fracture and the fall) to liberating ones (the organic value of the image). In short, the exact meaning is revealed of his search for ‘a navel-larva’ to open ‘the door to the cavern of Plato to listen to the echoes of the labyrinth’. All the sought places (from that of the project to that of the gaze, from that of air to that of earth, from that of transformation to that of measure, to that of tension) find their reason of truth, an irrational collocation in the atmosphere and in time.
On other occasions Nanni Valentini declares that ‘images are not concepts’, that ‘they are not isolated in their meaning’, but tend to bypass it to ‘rummage through the material’, to discover the ‘intimacies of the material’. Terra-numero and Terra-bagnato, presented in Studio Casati, Merate in April 1979, tone down the operation of the imagination and absolve it of the duty to create once more a climate in which the poetic motivation cannot be suspected of gratuity. On the other hand, Una materia per Pitagora [material for Pythagoras] exhibited in the Gallery Uxa, Novara, in the previous January-February, likewise marks the rhythm of existence in the layers of the material, granting broad narrative margins to the projection of the images. The same can be said of the collective show in the Boston University Art Gallery, in which he participated with an interesting project and one rich in content: Il filo e la tangente [the thread and the tangent]. In December 1979, the theme of the exhibition in the Pinacoteca Civica of Macerata, carefully chosen by the artist, was of an architectonic and environmental kind, born from a patient wandering through the streets of the walled town, characterised by the warm colour of the baked clay. On that occasion, nothing more than Mattone [brick] responded to Nanni Valentini’s intention to tell his own adventure in Macerata and to give poetry to a common building material that was usually regarded as a simple element incapable of aesthetic aspirations. Superposed, smashed, scorched, blackened, rectangular, barely roundish, the finds in terracotta created by the artist represent a portion of minimal, unwritten history that goes beyond a typology of artistic categories, as if on the borderline between plastic and conceptual event, rich in resonances, tied to the urban landscape, and in contradictions, tied to the inside of the technical discourse to find those suggestions capable of rejecting the resistance of the artisanal fact to the point of allowing the extraordinary beauty of the material resources emerge. This attempt to reconcile the technique with an immediacy of content and especially with the call to narrate and link the images in a logico-discursive chain reduces the event (assembling two or more bricks of a given colour and shape) to a referring hypothesis, revealing a linguistically legitimate poetic and moral motivation, but above all one tied to the compositional design.
One is therefore confronted by a passage from one conception to another of existence, from the autonomy of a reality that it believes it controls to the awareness of a reality undergone, against which it necessary to act in order to feel alive in a world where no other margins of hope are visible beyond a reconsideration of life, its values and its prospects. V. Volpini, Presentation in the catalogue accompanying the solo exhibition by Nanni Valentini, Galleria d’Arte, Fano, February 1960.
G. Ballo, Presentazione in exh. cat. of the solo exhibition of Nanni Valentini, Salone Annunciata, Milan 22 October – 4 November 1960.
M. Guidacci, XVII, from Meditazioni e sentenze, in exh. cat. of the solo exhibition of Nanni Valentini, Salone Annunciata, Milan 22 October – 4 November 1960.
G. Dorfles, Artificio e natura, Turin 1975.
M. Valsecchi, Le mostre, in Il Giorno, Milan. Cutting from the newspaper of 1966, no date, kept in the Valentini Archive, Arcore.
G. Schönenberger, G.B. Valentini, in D’Ars Agency, Milan, November 1966.
N. Sisti, Valentini: un artista inquieto, in Il Resto del Carlino, Bologna, 14 November 1962.
N. Valentini, Muro 1976, in Gala International, December 1976.
T. Trini, Nanni Valentini, in Corriere della Sera, Milan, 7 June 1976.
M.N. Varga, i filtri di Nanni Valentini, in Gaia International, Milan, October 1976.
P. Schiavocampo, Nanni Valentini: sempre alla ricerca di uno spazio più ampio, in Casa e giardino, Milan, October 1976.
N. Valentini, N. Valentini, in exh. cat. for the Gubbio Biennial, Gubbio 1976.
N. Valentini, declaration included in the exh. cat. for the group exhibition by Alberto Caregnato, Romano Santucci, Nanni Valentini and Claudio Zanini, Arte Struktura, Milan, 26 November 1975.
N. Valentini, Autopresentazione, in exh. cat. of the solo exhibition, Galleria Lo Spazio, Brescia, 18 December 1976.
N. Cagnone, Presentazione in exh. cat. of the solo exhibition, Galleria Lo Spazio, Brescia, 22 October 1977.
H. Read, / simboli dell’ignoto, Bari 1977, p. 89.
M. Calvesi, Le due Avanguardie, Rome 1966, p. 461.
G. Angelucci, Presentazione in exh. cat. of the solo exhibition of Nanni Valentini, Galleria del Falconiere, Falconara Marittima, 1978.
N. Valentini, Dichiarazione in exh. cat. of the solo exhibition of Nanni Valentini, Galleria del Falconiere, Falconara Marittima, 1978. N. Valentini, Autopresentazione in exh. cat. of the solo exhibition, Studio Casati, Merate, April 1979