The vase and the octopus
exh. cat., Galleria Vera Biondi, Florence, 15 January – 16 February 1982
Nanni Valentini’s conceptual and operational intervention in the material might be compared with the action of one who scratches the surface of things with a faint, light, perhaps minute trace to imprint there the wilfully labile memory of his own existence, but in fact, his inquiry goes further, making a deep incision to probe the secret of the material. Valentini’s ores return to their primary place, are ‘restored’ to their original home, the earth – the Great Mother, someone would say: few signs bear witness to the long subterranean work of the process of fashioning: the oxides, the clays, the crushed, decanted, time-worn material contain the human work that has gone into them and yet seem to forget it. It is as though the poetic nucleus of Valentini lies in this self-annihilation, in the return of the worked material to its primal state, as though the ‘arousal’ of the material through rational human intervention is a fleeting moment, essentially of little importance, and that the striving of the substance, of the earth, is for the reconquest of its lost entropic tranquillity.
The ores, the raw, the cooked, the dry, are ‘stations’ of the material, paradoxically evolving towards the zero point, towards absolute stillness. This is how the biological and cultural memories perceptible in Valentini’s works, which surface for a brief moment from the petrified, blocked magma, should be considered: the octopus and its imprint, marked on the fragments of the large amphora, certainly refer to the naturalistic style of Late Minoan I, but are also more distant memories whose roots lie in the infancy of humanity, and this intellectual and poetic regression has its correlate in the contemporary return of the material to its initial state.
Ancient symbolisms are anchored and mingled in the chaos that precedes the cosmos, to construct a new cosmogony: the concave and the convex, a surface that is bent to become a three-dimensional space, the primary conditions of the amphora, of the vase (not understood simply as a material container, but also as a spiritual one) are already a primary cosmogonic system in which lie infinite expressive possibilities too.
‘The vase, the octopus, the earth desire to return separately’, writes Valentini: an external force, the will of the artist, has forced them together, but little by little the violence of this act is dissipated as the inertia, or rather the extremely slow internal changes of this material prevail, cancelling the aggressivity of the human intervention.
Valentini’s work comes close to the cut-off point as he explores the movements that are no match for the material in its drift towards immobility, but probes the hidden richness while it is still – in Aristotelian terms – potency and not act, while the internal processes of the material have not yet stopped, crystallised in the timeless fixity to which everything seems to tend.