Procedere per frammenti
in Conversari, Studio Dossi, Bergamo, 1984. The variants to the replies, kept in the archive, are published as well as the written interview.
Accame: To proceed through fragments. The proposal of your sculpture as an uninterrupted work that spreads, expands, reaches and oversteps limits but is not dispersed.
I believe that we have to start here, from this first assertion of a constant characteristic in your work that, precisely in the breadth of its fragmentation, finds the tension of a unitary idea and at the same time suggests the waiting, the attention towards a place of becoming. A space of forms that always moves beyond its own boundary. This suggests how the concatenation of presences is also constructed around the concatenation of absences. The assertion, if I am not mistaken, that in the difference that distinguishes these forms, in the distance that permits us to grasp them singly as works, the sense of their very order is legible in Deriva.
Valentini: The experimentation. The poetic of the sign sought in primary events. The choice and the risk of loving Morandi, Licini, Fontana, having traversed the dramatic relation art, ideology, politics. I have no choice but to believe in this story: a story made of fragments.
Identity, the individuation of autonomy, is at stake: the fragment, like the sign, is assigned a space made of weaves, nets, infinite trajectories. A geometry where the points are knots and the centres seduction; in this place the forms are little more than sensations: fragments, therefore, that poetry shreds to compose.
A.: Now I would like you to talk to me about a work that, more than any other, is articulated by fragments, though conceived as an ensemble, seen in an order that is recognised in the fragmentary nature. I am referring to Deriva, that you exhibited in your show in the PAC in Milan. I would like you to describe and tell me how it was formed. The ‘description’ by the artist always says more than it seems to describe.
V.: I wanted to close a period where the space was always an empty space, tautological with respect to the earth; I rested finds, signs, contiguities on it, I experimented with thicknesses there, I created alchemies without form, with signs of their own that could point to single meanings. The myth of Osiris, the grand metaphor of the river, were my inspiration. Symmetrical with respect to the space that I seek: I thought of it as a blue centre from which commence three spirals of black earth on a large receptacle. Thirteen fragments, as though carried outside, around; the lunar months beneath the form of clods.
Clods that would reflect principles of various forms: the tetrahedron, the mouth, the pitcher. The blue is a tribute to the Egyptian ceramicists who have used the clay and sand of the Nile to create the most beautiful turquoise in existence.
During the work I glimpsed other possibilities of materials such as metal, vegetal sources and coloured stones. Deriva was the sequel to Il vaso e il polipo, where two elements are detached from the Cretan amphora to create diverse destinies: for the octopus, like the fragments, the vicissitudes of the face and the gaze; for the vase as the centre the risk of waiting and listening. Today, just as when I was a boy, I still walk on the beach along the shore to look for a fragment of that turquoise.
A.: In referring to the earth, as you often do, not only as material for your sculpture, but as a receptacle of all the forms, as place of the possible, you manifest a vision of the earth in a primordial sense as the matrix of archetypes and primary impulses. But I seem to catch in the modalities of your work a different meaning that the earth comes to assume: the material, the earth as filter, as crucible within which cultural refences, models or citations, technical or expressive realisations find themselves reunited or confronted with a ‘strong’, unwieldy presence. So the material/earth not only as material passage, but also as intellectual filter. A ‘strong thought’ that acts here in fragmenting and simultaneously unifying diverse confluences.
V.: Until now and with Deriva, the earth has been a receptacle of its own signs. In one of the last works with different signs, I have made a face of Oedipus in white clay in which I dug my fingers and covered the cavities with red clay. Clay blood of Adam, blind and mute.
Although I am sure that the earth does not reflect signs, I have tried a work on the faces of Bacon. I do not know how it will finish. However, the relation with the earth-material drives me outside to try. Is not perhaps the pleasure of the souls that of becoming moist?
A.: The material as place. This is certainly the start for you, the moment when hand and thought recognise one another. The hand externally, between the earth and the instruments, the thought internally, in the silence of the things thought. The place of the material, however, is multiplied in different spatial situations in your work. Interno [inside], Antro [cave], Bocca [mouth], Ansa [handle], Guscio [shell], Spirale [spiral], Centro [centre], all works that indication a proliferation of spaces. Here too that proceeding through fragments, not only of the objects but also of the spaces, reappears, in so far as they are all born from ideas that take on body from the continuous and insistent relation between a material that is made concrete and presented in all its expressivity, and a space that moves around them with equal incisiveness. Still, the idea of space that you seem to prefer is that accompanied by an idea of cavity, of a place inside which, although open to the exterior, it encloses a penumbra of its own, a centre…
V.: Yes. In the vase, in the poetic of the cavity, I recognise my work and my inquiry. The hand that shapes a vase presses, expresses itself, thinks from inside: by resonance, as in a temple. It is an already decided asymmetry. From that penumbra where the seed also dwells, only the sky can be seen.
A.: You showed me something in your studio that I really did not know, but that now I cannot help finding a relevant part of your work: I am referring to the paper works, to the large drawings that you have been making for many years. I was struck not only by the quality, the extraordinary force that distinguishes them, but the fact that they are made largely with the same material as your sculptures, soils as if regenerated by the water that become docile materials for painting. And behind this painting too, except for a few specific cases, there is never a project for a sculpture. I noticed how in reality you play on these sheets with such freedom and expressive felicity that is at the same time delicate and tense. Because these fragments, these earthy excerpts, are your most secret laboratory of ideas, not projects. It is here that you agitate and rekindle an inventive tension that will later reach the material and from here the three-dimensionality of the forms. I would like you to tell me something about this part of your work and whether what I have said comes near the truth.
V.: The gaze and the words with which you have tried my ‘papers’ and drawings awaken emotions I recognise that are never dormant, those that only the drawing has shown and revealed for me, but that I have never offered in the relation with others. As in the words of the philosopher, the meaning of the private: ‘nature loves to hide herself’ and ‘[…] the earth becomes sea and the sea expands […]’.
Often I dream with my eyes open that I have a navel cord that has never been cut: then the earth becomes something like dust, mud, the cracks in the pebbly riverbed, the deserted surfaces to traverse to the horizon, coarseness and dryness to mark. It is these presences that I follow in drawing. A long navel cord that moves. It is a research I began twelve years ago. Certainly, the fragment, like the sign, is assigned a space made of weaves, nets, infinite trajectories. Myth and symbol are the points of arrival and the centre, the models are ancestral memories. A geometry where the points are ‘knots’, convergence is tension, the tangents meetings of margins. Margins and knots as places of dialogue where, as Heraclitus says, man is summoned to know his own difference from God, with his own folly. In this place the forms are little more than sensations: so fragments that poetry rips apart not to recompose or to decompose, but to compose.
The Greek vase on which the story of Oedipus is painted should be seen at eye level. It turns ad infinitum but is always diverse, while that Chinese one should be seen from above and is closed. A pale turquoise enamel drips from inside like water that, although opaque, lets the support of clay shine through. The two certainly hide a complementarity: which? One of my latest works is the face of Oedipus, of white clay, egg-shaped, into which I have dug my fingers and then recovered the cavities with red clay. Clay – Adam’s blood, mute and blind. It is difficult for me to explain the relation I have with the earth and earth-material. Because if there is an archaeology of man and of things, there is also an archaeology of concepts and images with a different time and different intervals. Certainly the earth has a density that does not restore the image of your modelling: it does not reflect, it only absorbs.
Yes, it is in the cavity of the vase that I look for a content and its extension. We have not managed to give replies to the enigmas except archaic ones. Heraclitus, Empedocles, Oedipus, the sword and the cup are presences that I feel ‘simply’ alive. The imprint of the foot has always belonged to the earth, just like the vase that rises to the light to preserve and keep with the shadow; that is the one who swallowed the walls of feathers and wax of the oracle. The internal-external surface of the vase holds the ancient dichotomy comprehend and understand; that is, understand by resonance, like a temple. It is once again the Greek philosopher who says ‘The earth hosts and refuses’, ‘loves to hide herself’. So you cannot plan, but it is precisely this refusal, this concealed thing that only the drawing can reveal and show.