La terra, l’angelo
in Nanni Valentini, exh. cat., Palazzo Lazzarini, Pesaro, 23 July – 9 October 1988
‘Norio Shibata told me an old Japanese story which can still be found, about a community that moulded tableware and vases for its own survival from dry, sandy earth full of stones and permeated by ancient roots’. This is how Nanni Valentini began to repeat that distant and improbable story that the great Japanese ceramicist had told him, and which had also been the story of his life, bent in thirty years of work on the search for the secret forms, echoes and truths of the earth. So that community collected the ungrateful earth and deposited it in a large hollow they had made in the soil at the top of a hill. From there, a less impure part of that soil, washed by rain, flowed through holes made in the bottom of the hollow into another hollow below it; the stones and the larger particles remained separate from it. Successively the soil passed from the second hollow into a third, with other rain water to sift it. And ‘when the water had almost all evaporated, the earth was collected, formed into a paste and left to rest in a closed and moist place. Each year it was removed and made into a paste again, and this went on for many years until it was judged suitable to mould vases and receptacles for grain, oil, etc.
It is said that those objects were used to imprison the wind and to hear the resonances of the voice’. So the ritual, slowly extended in the seasons, not was only directed at the storage of grain and oil. The community knew that, not far from there, they would have been able to find a less recalcitrant soil, ‘but they also knew that the spirit of the place cannot, unlike words, be transported’.
Valentini knew it too. Down to the end, he continued to see the earth as a place impregnated with its own meanings, to be approached with prudence and hesitation; a miraculous place of ‘indifference’ and of ‘concealment’; a place where all forms are potentially hidden, at least those that count in the din of false or useless truths (but without being able to bother him, so distant were they from him) that seemed to him to fill our times.
Valentini was a man and sculptor of absolute intellectual chastity; moved, in how he handled sculpture, by an extremely firm rigour, an unshakable ethical fidelity towards his own work, towards the very concept of art. To collect earth, to touch it, to imprint a cautious and almost reticent mark on it; to protect it and deposit it in the kiln, waiting for the firing to transform it – this, and only this, is what really counted for him.
He denied his entire self in that both secular and sacral act; there came together there, as if ridding us of the razorblade of everyday affairs, all his true emotions, his rages and passions, his hopes, his readings – an exhausting number (‘I’ve bought 100 books’, he told Paolo Schiavocampo one day) – all with the hunger to discover, in the thought of others, a secret correspondence with what he was looking for, with what he had already found. Apart from this unexhausted quest for truth, everything else became for him ‘sentimental, that is, devoid of sentiment’. And it is perhaps in this absolute morality, able to conceal from him every other concern except that the joy of work, a morality that marked his whole life, but especially, with full awareness by now, his final period, that the ultimate reasons for the greatness of his work can be found.
Valentini never made a song and dance about the material that he always loved and touched: he never allowed himself for a moment – not even in the time of the splendid beginning of his career in the 1950s, in the luxuriant heyday of Informal Art – to become inebriated by its splendour nor to be scared by its terribleness. He did not impose on it the empathy of the worker in a forge; he wanted to grow not above it but with it, fostering its autonomous revelation (‘Rather than conceiving the material, Valentini set out to know it with love and humility’, Gualdoni has written). He did not make it gigantic or abyssal to discover romantically, before it, his own small and fragile existence – ‘I am not looking for the myth of the orphan, nor the tragedies of the earth’. For him, the material was a mother, and the earth identified with her; but the mother whose womb has been forgotten, to fix his own clear eyes on her wise ones, to scrutinise her ancient, serene thought.
The earth will reply ‘with her signs – glinting shadows, scratches, cracks, voids, glimpses, waits, visible signs then’. Visible, but only for who is willing to listen, lowering the volume of his own voice. That was all he needed (this desire, then, to give voice to the spirit of the places hidden in the earth; a desire declared fully and more than once from the early 1970s on, but already implicitly present, as a working method, in the previous decennium) to take a brief but firm distance from Fontana – though he considered him a master of thought, from his Nature wounded by the action that lacerates and offends, immodestly uncovers, shouts. La terra e i segni from 1978 – but preceded by many announcements; clods, in an infinite, almost invariable series, collected on the riverbank, in the ploughed field, in front of the house.
Each with its light and shade, with its own accidents of form, its own wrinkles and crevices to look through. It was a liminary work, from the radicality with which Valentini exhibited there the limitation imposed on his own intervention in the material, an almost programmatic point of departure for the future work that already fully indicated the limits and conditions on which it would be able to take place.
The desire for knowledge, ‘the gnoseological desire of the hand that caresses the clod, and of the gaze that traverses the furrow’ (Sanesi) was to lead him to ‘the risk of the imprint’ which Valentini now recognised as such; which he now limited (we are at the beginning of his final period) to the action of raising from the ground this clod rather than another, and to the act of consigning it to the kiln, which would give rise to another life, partly unknown and unexpected. ‘The gaze, memory, foresight’ are the modes of knowledge: the gaze that searches round about for the form that the earth conceals; the foresight of the magical, risky mutations wrought by the kiln and never completely foreseeable; and to guide the gaze, to justify the ‘imprint’ that first the hand and then the kiln will impose, the memory: a memory that for Valentini is not recalling times and roads that are only his own, not a backward-looking procedure, characterised by the consolation of melancholy, towards his own past, but a big, common return to the archetypes of existence, to the primary forms of life, there where after it has laid aside its veils one by one, knowledge is identified with truth.
It was a bold, almost blind return to the springs of being: Valentini knew that by now those signs, reticent but clearly impressed in nature, would no longer be able to accompany him, those ‘signs in and of the passage’ that he had so strictly enumerated, falling under their charm, in 1978; he knew that he would have to pursue other, more uncertain ghosts, those ‘invisible signs … jealously guarded in the earth’ that only the hand that touches, chooses, composes will be able to reveal.
In the earth, which is ‘empty space and thus open to the possible’ he now sank the risk of the imprint, only trusting in the ‘dream’ – in the awareness – ‘of having an umbilical cord that has never been severed’, and which still and always bound him to the earth. This is when the figures make their appearance: first the face; then the house; finally the angel. The face was a theme that he had already tried out in the early 1960s, and which returned now far richer in meaning. ‘A complex, primary form, enormously ambiguous in the intricacy of plasticity and appearance’, Gualdoni has written. It was swollen, full, protruding, blind idol and seer, mask of uncommunicated knowledge, armed and resolute in the face of doubt, perhaps. But elsewhere it is its opposite: handle, cavity, gorge, welcome; almost in retaliation against that proud object, it opens alongside it, specular, the emptiness that the hand has opened in the earth to produce that fullness. Valentini is saying in this way that that figure has always existed – only, concealed in a womb; and that it can continue to live as long as its place is beside it, and by virtue of that; in showing it, he justifies the act of appropriation.
The house is the place of man: it guards his fire. There are inscribed the signs of the earth from which it is born; is mirrored in the water; the sun and the moon gaze on it. In the long development of this theme, Valentini perhaps reached the peak of his extraordinary talent to produce stupor, emotion, warmth without a narrative; to say with little, and only through the form – the startled motion of a shadow, the light scratch on the surface of the grès, the joining of two elementary volumes – the rooting of thought in certain essential ganglions of consciousness.
Valentini constructed the house to shelter man there; but also to shelter sculpture there – that which sculpture had to be for him. So the house became a place, roomy and secret, in which to hold on to the signs generated by the earth; but it was also a ‘place of a poetry’, a secluded and jealous place of affects and thoughts – of that affect generated by a commonality of thought, which was for him the truest.
And finally, above the house passed the angel, leaving there its blue imprint. Perhaps the angel of history, as Benjamin interpreted Klee’s angel, his face turned toward the past, hurtling towards the future, ‘his eyes staring, his mouth open, his wings spread’. Or, as Valentini also said, the angel of Rilke, that not even lovers managed to invoke: ‘Vast angel… if I begged you, you would not come…¡. The angel who is gaze, smile, sudden wave…; joining of light, journey, throne, staircase…; who runs among the living and the dead, perhaps himself ignorant of his destiny’. ‘The whole room is filled with you’; and see, the House is bathed in blue, in the luminous shadow of a flight that has already passed. He was there, before, the angel: skinny column, eroded of its swelling, its blind face surrounded by the nimbus, bending down over the vase, as though to question that perfect form, and to reflect its own absence in it. He was there, he too had come from the earth; had been, shortly before, vortex, spiral, then hollowed face gazing upwards to know the light,. Perhaps, when he was born, he yearned for once to be a more solid presence – perhaps a figure.
But then the angel has abandoned this temptation; has been only a rush, flight, space, and a blue shadow that warms the house.
The hollow, the vortex, the threshold, the face, the angel, and last of all the goat: they are all images charged with an ancient symbolic weight, encountered with alarm, perhaps with terror, by Western culture. Valentini has given us back various of them: calm and near, trustworthy companions on the arduous and precious road of knowledge. One has grown from the other by necessity, all children of the same thought; often, one has cohabited with the other before finding its own autonomous physiognomy. And when, some time ago, Castagnoli underlined the profound strangeness of Valentini’s practice vis-à-vis every poetic of the fragment and the unfinished, he seemed to prefigure a truth that the very last of Nanni’s years would have demonstrated – not fully, because his journey was not over, but without a doubt splendidly: that his work lives and should be understood to grasp all of its greatness, and to receive all its joy, as a whole; 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.