“I privileged drawing and terracotta, with which I made a series of plates with imprints of trees, leaves. That was my first work.
In “Nanni Valentini”, Silvana Editoriale, Milan 2005
It was 1973, and in his characteristically austere way Nanni Valentini was recalling what he considered the dawn of his maturity. He already had a lot behind him, in fact, an entire, different life as an artist.
The training with Angelo Biancini and Bruno Baratti, between Faenza and Pesaro, marked the beginning, within the proud and in its way aristocratic community of ceramicists.
It was the 1950s, the wind of the integration of the arts that blew from the Milan Triennial, with as its guru Gio Ponti with his Domus, finally opened up international horizons to Italian applied research, which had until then been in the grip of a cautious and respectful traditionalism to a sickening degree. For the young Valentini, what mattered in this climate was the calling into question of the banal notion of decoration and of traditional form as an inescapable paradigm. Now experimentation was allowed and a duty, forcing artisanal pride to abandon the certainties of its own practice and to accept itself for what it is, a purely technical arsenal, the channel for possibilities, but no guarantee of quality in itself.
It should be noted immediately that the fundamentals of the craft were never denied or deemed irrelevant as technical foundations: elsewhere, in painting, the new movements and the incipient Neo-Dada tendencies made scorn for the operation and the notice of default of bon ton in execution a possible mark of value, and in any case a mark of belonging to the avantgarde.
The community of ceramicists was different. In fact, more than any other grouping, they perceived the heritage of the ‘sacred craftsman’, the obligation to possess knowledge of the process, to which was added at this moment conceptual flexibility in the dialogue with the emerging design, and the transmission of artistic charisma that experiments like those of Lucio Fontana and Fausto Melotti, however controversial, were bringing about.
The ceramicists realised that they could play an important part in the strategies of the new, at least in its more informed and cultural problematical points, precisely by virtue of – and not in spite of – the richness of their own disciplinary identity. Valentini counted on this in projecting an attaining maturity ‘from the inside’ as an emblem of the modern ceramicist: a technically irreproachable craftsman/artist who was at the same time open to (or rather, searching for) contaminations with the more lively fringes of the new debate on art. This was the awareness on which he grafted the multiple suggestions he was looking for.
These were the times of an ingenuous but intense writing activity, the first symptom of a craving for books and reading material that was to characterise his whole life, and which would lead him to practice the page, writing, as an expressive form that was in the end inseparable from the sculpture – the very opposite of the rhetoric of the ‘artist’s writing’.
They were above all the times of the search for points to chart his own position vis-à-vis certain figures of the new art with a complex and problematic profile: Asger Jorn, Alberto Burri, Emilio Scanavino, Germaine Richier, Gastone Novelli, Tancredi. Valentini also formed a friendship with Tancredi that was carried into the Milanese period, interrupted only by the sudden disappearance of his friend.
If we add to this range of suggestions the special relation with Arnaldo and Giò Pomodoro, who came from the same region and, like him, had begun to distil from highly skilled craftsmanship the virtues of a very lofty expressive practice, the contours of the horizon are complete. They were not only artists whose burning of the old artistic conception was leading to the creation of a fertile soil from which new ones could emerge; they were also, and above all, figures who were carrying out that transition with a responsible and essential revision of the historical idea of art, and with a lively and extensive plurality of disciplinary resources, from painting to sculpture, from architecture to writing.
And these were also, and always would be, the times of a sort of feverish, compulsive practice of drawing: besides being a study and exercise, drawing suddenly also became a place for intellectual adventure, comprehension, illumination: genetic topos of the image, powerful in the measure in which the birth of the image was to be a conceptual obsession throughout the trajectory of the artist. If one fully grasps the range of these intellectual meetings of Valentini, one can understand how his first period was bound to be, vocationally, one in which he combined the places and occasions of ceramics with those of art. The only distance between the vase and the sculptural relief, the painting and the design, was a question of instrument.
Certainly, he was not so ingenuous as to be unaware of the old membership rule by which to be an artist is to distinguish oneself continually from the artisanal sphere in one’s self-perception and in that of the world. Moreover, right from the start the debate on the integration of the arts was the false conscience that made it possible to practise applied art en artiste, whether in stained glass or in copper relief, but considerably more difficult to rise to artistic parity starting from an applied practice: even Fontana, though at a time when he was already the object of unanimous recognition of his genius, decided to proclaim and stress that he was a sculptor, not a ceramicist, to clear the ground of misunderstandings that he evidently regarded as derogatory. All the same, Valentini had a conviction that was ingenuous and more profound at the same time. As a result, he was rather more concerned, in himself, about how and where what he made was identified and classified. He was as indifferent to his reception on the part of the artistic compound as he was later to be, going so far as to admit in his last years that he had been a ’tenacious opponent’ of his own success. He was indifferent above all because he was convinced, right from those years of crazy and highly desperate study, that the objective of gaining recognition as a sculptor, painter or ceramicist was totally inadequate, limiting and misleading when the stake was to become an artist, a great artist: at least for art and art alone, following his own fierce desire.
So there he was in those late 1950s taking part in ceramics contests, obtaining prestigious awards such as the 1958 award from the Syracuse Museum, collaborating in design practice with Luigi Massoni with the Serie natura, and exhibiting in one of the most selective galleries in Milan, Beatrice Monti’s L’Ariete, under the auspices of two brilliant and splendidly infectious figures like Lucio Fontana and Ettore Sottsass. Two years later he was to exhibit with Giò Pomodoro in the Galleria del Giorno, and to hold a solo show in the Salone Annunciata of Carlo Grossetti.
It was in 1960, on the threshold of an affirmation that seemed to arrive naturally and authoritatively, that Valentini had to face a sudden crisis of cultural growth. On the one hand, in drawing and in the immature experiments in painting, he was growing in an agitated, bony figuration that was sentimentally implicated in frequenting that ‘existentialism’ that for many who had grown up in the bosom of informal art, friends like Bellandi and Romagnoni and Schiavocampo at the head, seemed to constitute a coherent development towards a critical figuration in the wake of lessons like those of Gorky and De Kooning. On the other hand, his sculptural work was moving further and further towards the tremendous border on which object and sculpture enter into definitive collision, revealing the dramatic alterity that had been one of the crucial themes of the entire postwar artistic scene. Regardless of the implications of utility as constitutive of the object, to which Valentini had never attached importance from the first, it was the conceptual and formative substance itself that was the question. A pre-emptively intellectualised process, requiring a completed result, called for the object, as much as the sculpture is material inhabited by obscure and vital formative tensions, which are established through intrinsic signs, in a theoretically unlimited formative time, because it shares in the vital flow.
This is how Valentini interpreted Fontana’s work, and through this the dramatic lesson of the late Martini. Before a decisive fork in the road, the artist was bound to choose the road of inquiry, hazard, sculpture. For more than a decade he was no longer heard of in Faenza. During this prolonged crisis, dogged by its biographical and economic implications, another element was at play that it is worth reflecting on today, decades on. Although Valentini never wrote about it, this element was a recurrent theme in our interminable conversations: the sudden awareness that he gained of the risk of talent and the meretricious nature of rhetoric.
At the beginning of the 1960s, after what were perhaps the most vital three years in postwar Italian art, rich with extraordinary experiments and leading personalities, he realised how easy it was, in the end, to find a sign, to raise the temperature of the image to a cry, drawing on the facility of the rhetoric of the new and the academy of anti-stylism.
He saw there the mirror opposite of his own artisanal bravura, which allowed him, without claiming any intellectual merit for it, to be acclaimed as the new international genius in ceramics. For years he had hoped that art would provide a credible alternative to the narrow horizon of his native discipline; he had hoped, above all, for a measure of authenticity, a concern about clarified truth. To realise all of a sudden that everything can be reduced to an empty ritual of disdained actions, of inert even if brutal materials, of different signs for the sake of being different; to realise that to be recognised as an artist makes demands on artistic practice; to realise all that in a phase in which the great hope of living the true life of art was alive in his spirit, was a bitter disappointment.
Many at this point have given up. It is a recurrent happening. But not Valentini. His desire was too strong and unquenchable, too lucid the love for what he knew, after every doubt and distinction, to be and to want to be art. And then, it should be affectionately recalled that he was too stubborn a man, a messy combination of humility and unyielding pride, to admit defeat.
If the world of art was ‘only’ this, a version of the limited and inauthentic world of the ceramicists that was precisely more able to talk about itself and to make a myth of itself, it was a problem of the world of art.
Valentini found himself on his own again, but ready to commence his own solitary journey in search of what really is worth making.
The 1960s, apart from a couple of transitional solo shows without any authentic meaning, was a decade of the total revision of his own desire for art. Valentini started again from what he knew: drawing, the studio, direct or indirect solidarity with others like him, Tancredi and his companions from the exhibition Una scelta in 1963. Valentini’s characterised its meaning as ‘to find or find again those signs, those words more proximate to us, not to interpret them but to question their places, to listen to their contiguity’.
Was a living sign that nourishes the formation to become its endogenous and autonomous identity possible? Was a figure possible that was not a being related to the world but an inner necessity?
And then, on what certainties or conceptual hypotheses did all that talk about form and formless, and figure, and image, and story, and sign, rest? The artistic debate was not enough. There were unavoidable questions about a lot else for anyone wanting to strip bare the nucleus of substance.
Valentini recommenced from the ancient thinking about the primacy of drawing, the intellectual tension at its base, its sovereign capacity to identify, knowing and bringing back to thought without departing from itself. He drew after the grand landscape painting, with its horizon; he drew from the object, in a sort of feverish suspended trance that reverberated after the object through autonomous temperatures.
And he read, studied, passing in a kind of voracious craving from philosophy to poetry, from Heidegger to Wallace Stevens… something that an intellectual cannot do today, but not regret either. To understand him from his books. How many, not knowing him, have thought that the contents of his library could be illuminating have been stopped in their tracks by a bizarre situation. Valentini’s books did not rest, except briefly, before and after, on the shelves. A bookworm in the almost literal sense of the term, he crushed, devoured, translated them into mental pulsations, notes and ideas, laid on the same sheets where the drawing proliferated (recall the felicitous phrase of Jean Cocteau, for whom it may be the sign itself that writes words and creates images) to the point of losing them as objects: truly continuing their life in the friendly service, kind by kind, of the gift.
Those drawings, those unplanned, unsystematic readings, proceeding through tips and curiosity, in which you recognise the love of the self-taught and the certainty of one who knows what he does not want, are the building blocks that Valentini accumulates one by one and sets aside for the edifice which will be his art.
‘I found a sign that was not separate from the material and discovered that it had a more sculptural density. It was a start.’ To find a sign, the primary qualification of the material, that opens the door to the possibility of meaning. It was still above all the dialogue with Fontana that guided the artist problematically, particularly the Fontana capable of finding, at the point where there is no longer any question of two dimensions and three dimensions, the perhaps essential sign as pure differential of material and generator of space, an immediate and unrelated action as well as moneme constitutive of an image.
Valentini’s studio work in this period was intense and tenacious, a sort of conquest and acceptance of the solitude of one who seeks, as a counterweight to the generosity of opening up to the outside world, in the period of political engagement of the late 1960s. His political period was both agitated and brief.
Bringing his own severe but honest availability in line with the stock of new liturgies, cunning and inauthenticity that almost immediately gained control of the new left, he realised that this was not and could not be his point of reference. Besides, revolutionary hope entailed faith, and Valentini was a silent but critically obstinate companion and tried to understand: when he understood, he was bound to resume the burden of his own solitary journey.
It was from this moment, the early 1970s, that the figure of Valentini had definitively become that of the medieval wanderer, who carries everything he is and possesses with him, and is well aware that what counts is the journey, not the goal; that somebody walks a stretch, only a stretch, of the road with you; that the journey leads to the unknown, not to confirm his own certainties, to recognise what is already known. Valentini carries precious objects in his bag, a maybe disorganised but heartfelt culture, the growing certainty that knowing how to make art is not knowing about art, a manual dexterity in which talent has been replaced by a radical criticism, a primal sense of authenticity. He carries, above all, his own Oedipal relation with ceramics.
It was in fact ceramics that was to guide the beginning of his long, sensational maturity. The choice was deliberately elementary, terracotta represented for him at this moment a sort of initial level of modelling.
In terracotta emerged the first of the many primal modes that he was to practice for years. The plate, in the first place, the closest to the page of drawing, in a movement of going/return for which the mark, the material clot on the leaf, abandons itself to unusual material swellings, bypasses the intellectualised abstraction to become a thing, while the marks are imprinted on the plastic field, intrinsic to the substance.
In second place, the sphere was at the same time a seed, the hope of perfection but also feminine, impurely opened to the possibility of generation. The suggestion of Fontana is evident, of his Nature, but perhaps even more of the spatial canvases in which the hole and the cut, and likewise the painterly clot and the stone, are a conceptually and physically concrete sign in themselves. All the same, Valentini was looking further, already thinking about the primordial specificity of clay, which can be transformed from instrument to protagonist and domina of the very idea of formation.
The early themes, especially the face and the place, return with tension and a new clarity in the drawings. The horizon and presence, the figure as a non-antagonistic accomplice of the horizon in a condition of reciprocal necessity; the place as a required ‘where’; the face, apex of every possible individuation.
In his paintings, as if due to the problematic tumult that at this moment tackles more than it can handle, Valentini raised the question of the nature and substance of the gaze, the question of the surface that captures and repels, of the surface of truth and of apparent deception, the question, above all, of the nature of the sky, without which the opacity of the earth would be despairing mute obscurity, and it signs unknowable.
The 1976 exhibition in the Galleria Milano was the definitive turning-point. ‘There were transparent canvases hung at a distance from the wall. In another room there were clay floor tiles’ – heaven and earth. Heaven, if the sky is that of Licini. The gaze that traverses and the blinded gaze. The eye and the hand: the visible and the tactile, and the lively zone to explore between visible and tactile. And the limit of appearance, the canvas as expectation of the deception of art, to which to counterpose the concreteness of the surface and of self-assured signs. The signs that are born from the earth, the signs of the earth, capable of becoming word, of being other than sons.
Certainly, it happened – nor could it have been otherwise, after all – that the prosaic art world interpreted the canvases as possible declinations between lyrical abstraction and analytical painting, and the clay as rustic variants of Arte Povera. So be it. Valentini was not working for them.
Now, finally, he was able to see the destiny of the sign itself, and the entire scenario of the enterprise that awaited him.
The plate reflects on the clod, the brick, the plastic moneme from which the membrane can be detached, as though revealing the hiatus between substance and appearance, but also the place can be determined. It was and was to be architectonic space, the stairway and the threshold, the arc and the wall. And much more: the hearth, the house, the dwelling.
This was the direction Valentini chose. In reflecting on the exhibition, he felt that paintings were too imbued with appearance, calling for an inevitable ‘as though’. The clay had vocations and forms of behaviour, a distinction that became a precise sign and implied the destiny of the fundamental form, it was the origin and exile of things.
The anthropological readings of the 1960s, combined with the reflections, doubts and questions about form and image, eidolon and symbol, led him to concentrate on the primary modes of the earth.
He felt in the earth the moist cavity becoming a krater, a female accident of the horizon, and the vase rethought as first measure of man, form and position, the generative curve of verticality, the possible body. He sensed the fine tangent that articulates the time of the horizon and stimulates its movements.
He became a potter again, with the wisdom of the biblical potter: ‘Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, What makest thou? Or thy work, He hath no hands?’ (Isaiah 45:9). The clay was not mute, or rebellious, but established a relation of complicity, trust, maternity with its maker. The glimpses of the 1970s unfolded definitively almost the entire problematic spectrum of Valentini.
In his turning to and questioning of ancient wisdom – Giorgio Colli, Bachelard, Heidegger again were now his privileged reading matter – the artist experienced the profound, vital, altogether anti-intellectualist measure of the feminine earth-womb, of the place in which difference is not given but which contains all the possibilities.
Wisdom was, for Valentini, the stupefaction provoked at the sight of the fundamental basis of the earth, when it is a dry, rough clod and when it accumulates, flowing and desirous of purity, in the bend in the river. Wisdom was to test the obscure logos, the passage from extraneous blindness to the humidity of the sign. Wisdom was to think Mother Earth not through some cultural game of citations and evocations, but by becoming the loving, almost incestuous son. He proceeded, as he had always done, but now with a different awareness, through problematic series. It was the horizon, the clod/brick that became place, it was the seed and the krater.
It was, in 1978, Un ombelico per Empedocle [A navel for Empedocles]. The omphalos was the centre and spiral (but centres and spirals already featured in the formative works of 1973 and 1974, in the expansion and centrality of the clod), a chthonian passage that consumes and an expansive movement of the sign, which grows into a vase: and the vase is breathing, time, movement, krater and individual. And above all place. The omphalos is symmetrical with the sun, the junction of two fundamental distances.
And there was Una materia per Pitagora [a material for Pythagoras], a wall of 97 plates, bricks, imprints, contours, meanderings, colours, vocations, possibilities of being a wall: and once again, plexus and cavity. And Portale, in which the clods/bricks rested on the horizontal before reaching the miracle of the curve, of the equilibrium that makes for the air, when the menhir becomes intelligence of the sky.
And the Soglie [thresholds], trajectory of wisdoms of the landscape, like a nature that takes to establish itself, double spiral of infinite movement on the horizon and krater-omphalos, basic triangle without growth and arc drawn, bare, in the air.
Endimione e i 28 volti di Selene [Endymion and the 28 faces of Selene], to which I have elsewhere referred as ‘bony, full, corporeal like remains, like a Romanesque capital. As an ensemble they have the empty features of Totenmasken, of metaphysical mannequins, imprints in the void, exhausted like certain portraits of Tintoretto. They are strong formal sedimentations, impregnated with matter like the paintings of Carrà and Sironi, favourites of his youth that reappear with a strong presence, finally, in the drawings that Valentini has left regarding the unfinished theme of the body and shadow’.
Once again, as in the beginning and in many reprises, we find the face, blindness and sight, the terrible mystery of the gaze, the taboo of the eyes, Selene, celestial mistress of the air, silence, night. Endymion the assistant (paredros), perhaps, not the conqueror but the conquered, privileged as perhaps the artist was with respect to the divine, but a head not a face, a body not a gaze directed towards the supreme deception.
Like all the other problematic series, Il vaso e il polipo [the vase and the octopus] was created in that fatal year 1978. It introduces a sort of condensed problematic drifting on the theme. The Minoan pitcher of Gurnià, where the octopus embraces the entire surface of the vase with its flowing, sensuously curved spirals, even forcing its corporeality, was the motif. The krater, the rotation from the centre vertically upwards, the assumption of body and space, the accidental object of the handle, which is also, in turn, coil and flow, and then the image as veiling and possession: and the blindness of the face, again, to render the destiny of the form dramatic.
Finally, there are the Case [houses], announced for a long time even though implicitly. Place par excellence, because Heideggerian dwelling and perfect re-symbolisation of space as feminine: house that generates inside and outside, that closes in saying the space, house-uterus and warmth, obscurity and intimacy, material of life.
And around them the spiral and the krater that become hearth. It is once again from Crete, together with the obsession with the octopus as decoration, with decoration as the infinite negation of the body in its superficial appearance, that Valentini takes the idea of the hearth that is the basis of the megaron, place of verticality that returns the air to the chthonian cavity. All of this took place in some two years of work: an impressive mass, not for its quantity – sketches, drawings, notes, variants and works that could never be called finished – but for its stupendous, dizzying and problematic opening.
It is worth returning to a passing remark on the impossibility of saying when any work of Valentini was finished. His was a totalising work of study, exclusively devoted to research, to the point of becoming the knowing adversary of his own identification as an artist.
He did not work to show, much less to sell, because he had no desire to be called an artist. In fact, he had his suspicions. Besides, his was a continuous rumination, questioning, trying out with his hands, to reach a point, and once he had understood or intuited what was necessary, to go further, increasing the intensity of the problematic tension.
The exhibitions took place, they looked for him and sometimes found him, but he did not look for them. He showed what at that moment tormented him, using the public occasion as an altogether private verification of what he was turning over and over in his mind.
In the end a show was something familiar to him, the installation could be dismantled, the elements dispersed – given away, sold, broken, it was of no importance – and the memory of the event consigned to a simple photographic documentation, in which he failed to take the slightest interest.
If he had a strategy, it was to live in the world of art as an undercover, who could have a room in the 1982 Venice Biennial and only use it to reprise from a different point of view the reasoning of the Soglie, virtually uninterested in any other implication. And to carry on, in the studio.
The 1980s arrived, and this lively, intense problematic and expressive concentration led Valentini to return to a long postponed but always implicitly cultivated obsession: the idea of the body, of the organic individual fact.
His experiments around the fundamental idea of house and dwelling continued unfolding until interrupted by his sudden death.
1981 marked the solo exhibition of Case in Heilbronn, 1983 the Casa per Pierpaolo, 1984 the solo exhibition in Barcelona. The studies for four large houses date from 1982, though only two of them were to see the light in a developed form. The first was shown in the solo exhibition in the P.A.C., Milan – a closed, opaque, introverted volume, with those extraneous walls in cement that speak the introverted mass.
At the four corners were four capitals: faces, therefore, faces again. The mainline history of sculpture broke into Valentini’s reflections, as systematically occurred in all his brief years in the 1980s, and brought the Romanesque flavour of the figurative architectural junction, which is the gaze from and to the whole architecture, as well as wandering formal structure and irruption. It was, above all, a radical questioning of the apparent duplicity of the ideas of the body that it invoked.
The second house was shown in Modena a few months after his death, but already completely realised in the studio. It is the house of the angel.
But already in Ombra di Peter Schlemihl, the suggestion of ulterior motifs was certainly present. The literary justification, the opening between body and shadow, was a reasoning on the presence and loss of the body, on the very possibility of a body.
Valentini noted: ‘If there is a body there will be a shadow, and so leaving the body to others, I have cut out that shadow (because it belongs to the earth)’.
Because the shadow belongs to the earth, in the lively and continuous dialogue between vertical and horizon, between above and below. The vase, the face, the capital: the statue. This was the necessary, definitive passage that Valentini’s fate rendered final.
To paraphrase the artist, if there is a body, not only is there a shadow, but a statue is possible. Provided one understands the sacred mystery of the double, the substance of Adam that is statue of itself in the hands of the Creator. That means starting again from history, from the Palaeolithic Venus to the Canopic vase, from the kouros to the idol, and to have the courage to settle accounts with the Renaissance measure, with anthropomorphism as representation and metaphysics, but not only. It meant for Valentini resuming the thread of the uninterrupted dialogue – as the drawings clearly show – with his heroes of the 20th century, the deliberately graceless Carrà, the obscurely monumental but as synthetic as ever Sironi, and above all Martini.
The intuition, perhaps the spark, came from a Mantegnesque model (but the reference should be taken à la Valentini, not philologically) and certainly from the memory of the medieval wooden bodies that could be clothed for sacrality and ceremony; and the ancient doll, and the dream of the automaton, the marionette and the mannequin of De Chirico…
Was it possible that the statue could be, in itself and for itself, not double but another equivalent individual, perhaps hoping for an identity in those empty eyes, a gaze, the gaze; that it was, in other words, the final moment of difference, earth creating a creation?
While the drawings and sketches, the studies, the experiments followed one another in rapid succession, as if from a natural understanding of the fundamental motif, Valentini tackled the theme of the angel. Man is earth, the angel is the other of earth, the other of man, complicit, in a shining elusive reverberation of mental and poetic doublings.
Poetic, above all, in a whirl of suggestions that could not be unravelled. Rilke’s angel and that of Keats and Benjamin. Above all, I believe, ‘the necessary angel of earth / since, in my sight, you see the earth again’ (Stevens).
The angel of the Annunciation of Antonello, too, whom you do not see except in the gaze of the Annunziata, and that rustling in the domestic surprise of Lorenzo Lotto. But also the angel of Licini who tempts Amalasunta, the impure Selene of the Marche: and his face and the trembling of collapsing and shaking lines to dissolve the extraneousness of the heaven. In Annunciazione (P.A.C.), everything was there: the column-statue that is column-house, a de-created statue (for Simone Weil, ‘creation is abdication, and to de-create is to strip and to strip oneself of the I’) – or perhaps only a hypothesis of the dramatic result of the form from the material, through the sonorous cavity – and that light rustling, that vibration, that possible being, impalpable imprint, ineffable. Which is, nevertheless. The angel is this.
It is the angel who leaves a blue trace in the house of Modena. Blue because substance of heaven that becomes an inside, a passage, a possible. Blue as the metaphysics of Japanese ceramics. A different metaphysics. And always the earth.