Nanni Valentini: della materia
in “Gala International”, XVI, 92, Milan, giugno 1979
Between the hand and the material lies the active imagination as the psychological basis of homo faber, arising from an interaction between agent and object. This is what Gaston Bachelard suggests in La terre et les rêveries du repos, the dimension of an ‘intimacy of the material’ that completes and dissipates that common and drastic one of the ‘hostility of the material’ as a polarisation between project and reality, between imagination and material.
Following very similar premises, Nanni Valentini has always displayed, right from his first works of the 1950s, a completely original and methodologically consummate approach to his own expressive materials.
Valentini was not out to try to impose inert forms on the material that are born and matured in the mind, but to explore a poor and elementary material like the earth in its primary phenomenologies (natural state, mixtures, etc.) and in the dynamic of its natural qualities: hardness, fragility, roughness, porosity.
In fact, his was not so much a work on a single primary element, but rather on its physical dialectic with air, fire and water, in a sort of micro-cosmology in which the earth reveals its own internal capacities for mutation, those that define its formal aspects through autonomous generations.
Rather than conceiving the material, Valentini set out to know it with love and humility, to encourage it to take shape instead of shaping it himself: far from meanings such as modelling (which presupposes the will and the external act of organisation), the artist assumed the specific characters of the earth as given linguistic data. What mattered was to verify and bring to light its intimate, infinite possibilities of association and articulation, in the quest for that ultimate and ineffable truth that is the substance of the material. So his operational methodology consisted less in imposing himself conceptually on the material, reproducing a schematic antithesis of his with the form, than in conducting operations that pressed the material to reveal itself totally in its organisational capacity, charging it with ulterior valences homogeneous to those primary ones.
This is how his tables of series emerged. They develop the signifying potential of the earth from its primary aspect to the various levels of aggregative complexity, especially its capacity to form images according to a formal process of self-generation. This is the origin of the analyses of earth and water (such as the splendid Terra-bagnato recently exhibited in the Studio Casati in Merate), as though summoning to the light atavistic perceptions between the natural and the conceptual.
And lastly, this is the origin of his modular iterations of simple elements (brick, clod) that with every passage in their making become charged with new, unforeseen suggestions and indications, situated between the two fixed poles of the maximum of neutrality and the maximum of non-manipulated and non-predetermined organisation.
Instead of having recourse to the structuring construction, however poor and basic, Valentini operates a kind of alchemy of physical transmutations, an incestuous ritual of identification with the most intimate part of the earth, between culture and myth, between science and tradition, between project and love, according to the modes of a qualitative exploration of reality – an exploration regarding the modalities and motives of change, and at the same time the logical possibility of the change itself, the identification of the active forces, starting from the thought of a material that is not inert but animated with an almost active power: in a word, the reverberation of the Presocratic physis. It is revealed to us through our relation with things, through the mechanism of symbolic stratifications of the collective and individual unconscious, consisting, as Bergson wrote, of matière and mémoire.