Delle cose visibili e invisibili
in “Finisterre n. 2”, Elitropia, Reggio Emilia, spring-summer 1986
‘Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature: for by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible […]’ (Epistle to the Colossians, 1: 15-16).
Now that Nanni Valentini is no longer with us, now that he has gone for ever, I read again these words of Saint Paul that are dear to me, and I see that they speak of the world of his images: the heaven, the earth, the face, the visible, the invisible; and only now I realise that his art is forcibly inscribed in what Klee called ‘the prehistory of the visible’.
In looking at his works in terracotta, I have always had a sense of their enormous strength and fragility, as if the material act that he had accomplished in producing them was little compared with the energies and germinal powers that extended beyond the limits of the visible work.
Klee, a master and artist loved by Valentini, wrote that ‘Today the relativity of visible things is made manifest, and that expresses the conviction that, in the face of the universe, the visible is only an isolated example and that there are very many more truths than we know’. The art of Nanni Valentini entered the region of the very many truths, overstepping the threshold maintained by the laws of the purely visible. It can be said that his work can be summed up in the act of rendering the invisible visible, in the act of bringing it to light.
Only after his unexpected death did I read a revealing phrase in one of his texts: ‘They are signs, still signs in and of the countryside, glinting shadows, scratches, cracks, voids, glimpses, waits, visible signs then.
Those invisible ones that we are looking for are still jealously sheltered in the earth, but their foreshadowing already traverses them, they are behind the walls, beneath the skin, between the folds of the fabrics, hidden in a memory without a code, preserved by the spirit of time with all successive signs’ (Galerie Rota, Heilbronn, 1979).
The sculptures of Nanni Valentini are not definite works; they do not reproduce the visible world – ‘Art not does not repeat visible things, but makes visible’ (Klee). From the infinity that opens up beyond this world, they bear the sign of the hidden energy and its transformations, the imprint of the possible forms that can always come into being; Nanni Valentini has also written: ‘One thing I believe I know for certain: that I subjectively conceive material as the place of all the transformations, of all the similitudes. The forms are the traces, the tangible signs of these transformations, and also the place where insomnia prevents the creation of simulacra and the imprints are certainly of necessity’.
Every one of his works in terracotta or on paper bears the image of this creative act, the generative force, the infinite world of original creation. His sculptures are fragments, sherds, chips of that origin that is continually re-generated and re-vealed; they exist in that place that is the tip of the tangent between the visible and the invisible.
I still have before my eyes some of the works that he exhibited in 1984 in the Padiglione d’Arte Moderna in Milan with the title Deriva, and that he had nonchalantly piled up in the courtyard of the studio after the show: Guscio [shell], Spirale [spiral], Sole [sun], Ansa [handle], Antro [cave], Onda [wave]. The word deriva refers to the drift of the water. In observing these fragments with their difficult, rough and unfinished form, recalling the remains of a primitive hearth or the scrap from a material shipwreck, you feel that they come from somewhere else remote in time, but very close in space, from where they have been expelled and dragged to us by invisible currents. Each constituent piece of Deriva repeats the same initial act and comes from the same place, to which the viewer is inexorably summoned.
He had a profound sense of what it means to be a creature; every one of his works – from the first faces in terracotta of the 1960s to Nascita dell’angelo [birth of the angel], his last work exhibited in the Hetjens-Museum, Düsseldorf – recognises the creature and its unicity. In the world of the visible, every creature is an image, a manifestation, of the invisible. Il volto di Endimione e i 28 volti di Selene [the face of Endymion and the 28 faces of Selene] is the title of one his most beautiful works, which presents itself as a long and untiring reflection on the creature and its face. The human face too represents a tangential point between interiority and exteriority, between the self-presentation of the creature and its hidden mystery; the face is the ‘geometric place of the intimate personality’ (Simmel). The forms generated by Nanni Valentini are figures of that origin that he sought, an origin that is repetition and continuous movement – ‘Movement is at the basis of all becoming’ (Klee). His stupendous drawings, like the clay sculptures, bear the mark of the inexhaustible movement of the material. The generation of the forms consists of repetition, which is the cosmic action par excellence. The potency of his works never lies in the realised form, but in the revelation of those seminal potencies.
His death has stopped a work still charged with future works, but the-strength-to-come is already completely inscribed in the sculptures that he has left us. His inquiry had in fact some time ago reached a completeness of conception and of execution that consisted in the revelation of the movement of becoming – ‘On the earth, inactivity is the momentaneous pause of matter: to consider that pause as primary is an error’ (Klee). One of Valentini’s favourite themes was that of the house and dwelling. Case [houses] is the title of twenty-four sculptures shown in Barcelona in 1984, and he dedicated numerous drawings and works of the previous years to dwelling. To dwell is the act proper to humans (Heidegger); it is to be on the earth as a mortal; this is the place of the tangent. In the work of Nanni Valentini, existence is represented by a line that touches the earth at a single point: ‘But it is precisely this dichotomy that I am interested in following: the aspect in which the image becomes the representation of a side, of a tangent. The new-born child resting on the earth in the Abruzzi is not only a ritual of Mother Earth, but the unresolved, indefinite point of this tangent, and as such can become the myth of the fleeting […]’ (Deriva).
Man is placed on the earth. ‘The mortals are the human beings. They are called mortals because they can die. To die means to be capable of death as death. Only man dies, and indeed continually, as long as he remains on earth, under the sky, before the divinities’ (Heidegger). Valentini’s attention to the theme of the dwelling and of dwelling moves from this thematic nucleus, filtered by the rêverie of Bachelard and the dedication to the material element. To dwell means to cultivate and to protect growth, and the verb ‘to create’ has the same root as ‘to grow’. The tree, the house, the plant, the seed are motifs of the earth, signs of its manifestation.
The art of Nanni Valentini knows all this, because it knows the root of existence: our mortality; he has continually rethought it through his painting, through the vortices, the magmatic abysses, the shadow of the angels and the colours of the earth. This is why his work bears the sign of something both unknown and familiar, secret and well known. The origin yearned for by the artist is always within reach, but always inaccessible; it lies at the foundation of being, it is its very foundation; it is the jealous secret of every birth but also of every death.
Nanni Valentini’s sculptures are surrounded by a silence that cannot be found elsewhere, a silence deliberately sought by him. He wrote: ‘The thought that underlies my work leads me to believe that also the void, like silence, cannot do without its own object, even if this is infinite and that art, like poetry, is a cosmos where the archaeology is without memory and where the things scatter their meanings, and the sense is not transparent’.