Nanni Valentini: objects of thought
handout, Il Cortile Gallery, Bologna, 19 April – 2 May 1980
The raw and the cooked of matter, primarily taken as intermediaries in a process that is always underway, through the coaction to repeat nature in the anthropological structures of the imaginary – the title of the fundamental book by Gilbert Durand, who wrote:
The problem of the existence of ‘affective memory’ is simply the question of the possibility of the synthesis between a resurgent representation, purged of its original existential affectivity, and the affectivity of the present moment. The most gloomy memory is liberated from its existential sting, and can thus be integrated in an original whole that is the fruit of a creation.
Far from being at time’s orders, the memory allows a doubling of the instants and a splitting of the present, confers an unaccustomed substance on the sombre and fatal flux of becoming, and guarantees in the fluctuations of destiny the survival and permanence of the substance. As a result, regret is always penetrated by some sweetness, and leads sooner or later to remorse.
In fact, in making it possible to return to the past, the memory organises in part the reparation of the ravages of time. The memory certainly belongs to the domain of the fantastic because it orders the recollection aesthetically.
But if the memory certainly has the fundamental character of the imaginary, which is a euphemism, it is also by virtue of that an anti-destiny and rises up against time.
In making free use of this citation as an introduction, I consider it pertinent to the work of Nanni Valentini, perhaps because the emergent correlations lead one to seek affective memories through the natural operation of the imaginary. Naturalness of the raw and the cooked, if ‘the work lets the earth be the earth’ (Martin Heidegger), simultaneously, employed in the process of artistic manipulative transformation that takes shape, effectively, as a mobile sign among the immobile signs, but rising and falling in the imaginary of time. Thus the act en-counters the form, and on the physical impact it naturalises the psychic charge of the matter, which becomes a body shaken on the locus of action. No longer matter as an archaeological find, or the mimetic fiction of a nostalgic return, but as Earth, of those objects of thought that envelop within themselves the traces of a complex formative itinerary, actually contiguous with the anthropological structures of the imaginary.
The body of the matter generates the imperfect synthesis of the image, inasmuch as the specular ambiguity of the work reflects the expected surfacing of those arbitrary signs that the artist stimulates but does not organise rationally, questioning the very ability to realise being in doing, perhaps with the secret aspiration to materialise in doing the being in becoming.
On the other hand, as a close reader of Gaston Bachelard, Nanni Valentini is perfectly aware that ‘our past existence imagines its revival’, just as, after all, ‘to arrive at the archives of the memory, it is necessary to find values beyond the facts’.
To be sure: ‘To relive the values of the past, it is necessary to imagine and to dream, to accept the great psychic dilation of the rêverie, in the calm of a deep rest. Then the Memory and the Imagination rival one another to give us back the images that belong to our life.’ Precisely, the images of our life, of our primordial encounter with the contaminated experience of living: living in the face of existence, being interpreted in doing, the anti-destiny of matter as the mirror of human perishability.
Language of revealed signs, or signs of a hidden language?