Nanni Valentini. Terra-numero e Terra-bagnato, Studio Casati, Merate, April 1979, exhibition catalog.
In La Terre et les Rêveries de la volonté, we mainly studied the dynamic impressions or, rather, the urges that are awakened in us when we form material images of earthly substances. Indeed, it seems that the materials of the earth, when we employ them with a curious and courageous hand, excite in us the desire to work them. We speak then of active imagination. If one could systematize all these urges, which come to us from the matter of things, one would rectify what is too formal in a psychology of projects. One would distinguish between the project of the foreman and the project of the worker. It would be understood that homo faber is not merely a fixer but also a shaper, molder, forger. He wants, under the exact form, a right matter, the matter that can really support the form. He experiences through imagination this support, loves the material duration that alone can give the duration of form. Then man is as if stimulated for an activity of opposition, activity that presses, that provides for the resistance of matter.
Thus is founded a psychology of the preposition against, which starts from impressions of an immediate, immobile, cold against, to an against protected by multiple defenses, to an against that never stops resisting. Thus, studying in the previous book the psychology of against, we began the examination of images of the deep. But the images of the deep do not only have this mark of hostility, they also have welcoming, inviting aspects all to the whole dynamic of attraction, of attraction, has been somewhat immobilized by the great forces of the earth images of resistance. Our study of terrestrial imagination written under the sign of the preposition against, must therefore be complemented by a study of images that are under the sign of the preposition in (within). Images are not of concepts. They do not isolate themselves in their meaning. They tend to exceed their meaning. Imagery is then multifunctional. We can feel in the action within very numerous material images of the earth, an ambivalent synthesis, dialectically uniting the against and the within and showing a strong solidarity between the process of extroversion and the process of introversion. In La Terre et les Rêveries de la volonté we showed with what rage the imagination would wish to rummage through matter. All great human forces, even those that unfold outwardly, are imagined in an intimacy: for this reason, in the first book we spoke of the intimacy of matter, while now we speak of the hostility of matter.
In Gaston Bachelard, La Terre et les Rêveries du repos, I sought, not without complicity and presumption, a companion in the search for “clay”.
Terra-numero e Terra-bagnato are the two works I set up.