Symbols of passage
in Keramikos 15, Milan, June 1990
I have already spoken of an evocation of the night, of the Darkness of the Darkness, in Nanni Valentini (‘Una materia per Eraclito’, Gran Bazaar 58, Oct.-Nov. 1987), of a eulogy of the shadow and water. I know that, along with a few fellow companions, I am adrift from the dominant, official criticism of the work of Valentini and I think, for all, of the fine essay by Fabrizio D’Amico to introduce the posthumous exhibition held in Pesaro in 1988, which ends: ‘[…] his work lives and should be understood […] as a long, luminous journey towards the deepest regions of our genesis and of our psyche, without the apparitions of chaos and the shadows having ever been able to envelop and disturb him’.
Moreover, Valentini passed on to us that lack of perturbation, rendering trustworthy and serene those symbol-images that, as D’Amico admits, have always been considered troubling.
The hollow, the vortex, the threshold, the face, the angel, the goat (but the house, the angel, blue seen as the climax of a trajectory, as smile, light, joy) in the legitimate and intelligent reading by D’Amico, are first the signs, then the figures, of a work in positive evolution.
I could try another list from the works of Nanni, of the titles and themes: the earth, the clods, the krater, the bowl, the labyrinth, the triangle, the tripod, the arc, the portal, the mask-face, the moon, the houses of the waters and the scorpion, the shadows, the octopus, the pearl, the goat, the drifting, the centre, the vortex, the face, the passing of the angel…
Nanni did not life the word ‘symbol’ to be used in reference to his works, but it seems to me unescapable and absolutely central. Valentini preferred to speak of signs, but I know he was alluding to the Delphic sybil beside her tripod who does not speak and hides, but uses signs.
So symbols, often, of the depths, of the chthonian element, of sleep, femininity, but also bivalence, polarity and passage.
Symbols that presuppose a synoptic gaze, on the lookout to catch the multiple meanings, to begin to untie a knot, several knots, of ineffability, to capture their character, constitutive of pluridimensionality, to listen to the resonances, undergo their unifying force, towards a primordial idea of the world.
Nanni worked on the labyrinth, to be plunged into the earth, as the first stage (or second, because perhaps the first had already been provided by a birch tree, a natural, pre-existing axial symbol) of the work Le Soglie [the thresholds] (1979-1980). A labyrinth that envisaged an exit, or game of chess, the start of a circular journey that may lead to a centre or to an infinite moving away.
The labyrinth of Le Soglie (the only one that Nanni Valentini realised) is composed of two simpler figures that often recur in his works: spirals, double opposite spirals. On the one hand, they tend to evolve and grow with infinite tangents and developments, to change following a symbolic and formal obsession of Valentini that links him, even if at a different level of awareness, with the perhaps better known predilection of Merz for the Fibonacci series. On the other hand, they tend in centripetal volutes to physical and mental concentration, to descent, to a journey that is no longer worldly but beyond the world. One of the two spirals is convex, the other concave: symbols of the solstices and of the gates of death-life and life-death. As Gilbert Durand has said, the permanence of being is secured in the confusion of change. Nanni loved more another saying of Heraclitus, his principal authority, that he incised, carved, in the work Le Soglie: ‘I rest by changing’.
Then Nanni placed on the ground a bowl, a krater, a cup, as an object cut out of the cosmic egg, a water receptacle, and once again the centre of a spiral, as is shown by the pieces in grès, of different, programmatically increasing thickness, that are attached at the edge and between them. He placed a triangle, with an iron fixed in the centre. For Mircea Eliade, iron may have fallen from the celestial vault, or been extracted from the bowels of the earth: either way, a sign of beyond. It is an ambivalent, transcendent and diabolical sign of the relation between a strong, male god and the great mother earth.
And the iron leads to the sign of the tripod and its symbolism: ‘A burning tripod will make you understand / That you have reached the bottom of the abyss […]. Formation, transformation / Eternal game of the eternal thought…’, as in Goethe’s Faust. And going back to the Delphic mysteries, the tripod appears as the characteristic accessory of Apolline divination; a cult and accessories based on the relation, the passage, on the ‘hinge’ between worlds and dimensions, on the fissure, mania, and the mortal desire for a continuous questioning. But the iconogram of the tripod also evokes alchemical symbolism and the field of Jungian reflection. Think of the Tripus Aureus of Meier, where the divine tripod becomes a fundamental (but, precisely, symbolic) accessory of a direct transformation to create a winged serpent, and Joseph Henderson’s interpretation: ‘[…] if the serpent is equivalent to the earth and the bird to the air, the union between serpent and bird transforms […] a pair of opposite poles […] into a pair of complementary opposites […] realising the unity implicit in this symbol […]’.
The tripartite, equilateral triangle described above gives birth to a rectangular triangle, symbol of the earth. It is the key work in Le Soglie: the transformation of the equilateral triangle into the rectangular triangle, which also stands for man, and is translated, according to Boethius in his version of Platonic thought, into loss of balance. It is the key work from the text that Nanni wanted to inscribe on it: ‘It is a pleasure to souls to become moist…’.
It is true that on another occasion Nanni wrote that he wanted to arrive at a reflection on the earth ‘no longer mixed up in triads, but with a possible transparency’. But here, in this work, he inscribes the words of Darkness: pleasure-death (according to the hermeneutic of Giorgio Colli). The disturbing and alarming oxymoron should still be understood in a cyclical vision of existence, of man and soul that are immortal-mortal, mortal-immortal; of a matter-universe where ‘Fire lives the death of earth, and air lives the death of fire; water lives the death of air, earth that of water’. And ‘The death of earth is to become water, the death of water to become air, and fire that of air, and so on’ (Heraclitus Fragment 76).
This work of Nanni is, once again, a symbol of passage, of the extreme, mortal passage, from which rebirth and regeneration begin.
Finally arc, arch, doors, Le Soglie. ‘The passage of the door’, according to Julius Evola, with the double sense of exiting and entering, of an end and a beginning, also incarnates the idea of a death and a birth, of a ‘rebirth’. The two doors, in the work Le Soglie, also recall the two doors of the zodiac, which, according to Guénon, are the entrance and the exit of the ‘cosmic cave’.
Or Janua Coeli and Janua Inferni. That it is a question of obscure or positive forces is confirmed and summed up in them, the meaning of the whole work: an existential ‘journey’ of knowledge that makes use of symbols as supports.
The symbolic, non-rational imagination of Nanni Valentini, particularly explicit in the installation Le Soglie, is not a forced interpretation. On the occasion of the exhibition, Nanni wanted to cite Gaston Bachelard as an accomplice and companion: ‘Images are not concepts. They are not isolated in their meaning. They tend to exceed their meaning. So the imagination is multifunctional. We can feel in the action between images very numerous materials of the earth, an ambivalent synthesis…’. Bachelard’s phrase is the key to the entire work of Nanni Valentini. The earth-material as matrix, the furnace as symbol of the womb, are manifested through ambivalent, ambiguous signs, symbols, archetypes, primary phantasms.
Tradition and the unconscious coexist in the work of Nanni. Taken as a whole, the relative symbolism seems to be a product of the superterrestrial and the infraterrestrial. Consider the splendid, disturbing series of Volti that springs, for Nanni, from the night with all its ambivalences. It springs from the dream of Endymion, loved by the Moon who, to preserve him from death, granted him eternal sleep in a cavern on Mount Latmos in Greece. The masks of Nanni are, at the same time, those of the sacred drama of the Mysteries, not ‘individualities’ but ‘types’ of a superior cosmic reality and ghostly structures, contours, forms of fixation of a lower psychic modality.
The same applies to the Angels. Nanni Valentini’s Angelo is certainly that of the beloved Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘the creature in which appears already realised the transformation of the visible into invisible…’, but also, perhaps for me, that angel-vampire of the beautiful posthumous novel of Furio Jesi, L’ultima notte [the last night], who lies on the moist and brown earth as an unspent deposit of force on the loose soil, a primordial protozoon, ‘bare lump of life’, in which runs the flow of uninterrupted generations.
The most important statue of Angelo that Nanni Valentini has left us is a relic of earth, concave, a womb again, in which the visibility of the invisible remains. The Statue of Nanni, who quoted Arturo Martini: ‘Statuary and idolatry was born to placate the allusive, pressing fears of the earth, the sea and the sky, and fixed the unknown phantoms in distinct images with particular attributes’.
Nanni’s Statua, happy in contemplation of its own shadow, like that of De Chirico as a writer in Meditations of a painter in the chapter The desire of the statue. We are now bound to declare: the extraordinary symbolic intensity in the work of Nanni Valentini was aimed at rendering sculpture complex, intense and ambivalent. His discretion in referring to suggestions and fascinations was dictated by an awareness of the inadequacy of a purely symbolic interpretation of his work, of an extrinsic method of interpretation that, like all such methods (including the psychoanalysis of art) risks speaking about an elsewhere instead of assessing the work and understanding its extreme formal tension, the secret.
Perhaps the criticism has misused a citation from Simmel: ‘The secret of form lies in the fact that it is boundary: it is the thing itself and, at the same time, the cessation of the thing, the circumscribed territory in which the Being and the No-Longer-Being of the thing are one’. Nanni tried to translate in the material this phrase from the Metaphysics of Death, in an exceptionally dense ambivalence of form – a formal ambiguity that was not only perceptual, sensorial and superficial, but also profound, primordial and constitutive. Nanni is the most dazzling example of a work on earth, in ceramics, that becomes a revision of plasticity and space, rendering – in opposition to Martini – sculpture a living language again.
It is formed from an enormous, even though disorganised, culture of arduous readings illuminated by intuition that do not impose themselves on, accompany, explain or justify the work, but become form, work. And form-death. Fabrizio D’Amico was right to speak of a reassuring message of Nanni Valentini. Yes, the shadows, the beloved night were never able to envelop and disturb him.
Because the passage of the soul in the night, waters, shadows, gives meaning to life, and from the dreaming, fertile darkness a new life germinates.