Annunciazione, Dialogo, Deriva. Tre lavori di Nanni Valentini
In Nanni Valentini, exh. cat., Padiglione d’arte contemporanea, Milan, 19 January – 20 February 1984
On the point of beginning to write this text, I still do not know what to say about the exhibition that Nanni Valentini is preparing while immersed in such intense concentration. I do not know how the new forms on which he is working will be presented there. In two visits to the studio in Arcore, I have only been able to feel a temperature and to perceive, scattered in the room, splendid fragments of a work in progress, very promising phrases of an incomplete score that still remained in the mind and heart of the artist.
Yet I try to write, evading the first obligation of the critic to speak in the presence of the work and that alone. So I try to compensate, with that faculty of anticipation that comes from having frequented the career of an artist, the lacunæ, the gaps, the absences that still separate what will soon be joined together, the anatomies of a body, the signs of a landscape, the stages of a story that will be composed in the final presentation of their expression, only in the rooms of the Padiglione d’arte contemporanea, on the day of the inauguration. Only then will it be possible to see what has emerged from Valentini’s kiln and to add the main chapter to these preliminaries: the article in which, depending on what it will be possible to see, it finally becomes possible to approach what is hidden there.
But in this interval that the text is obliged to fill, in the improbability of a critical discourse that waits to know its own object, there is a subtle justification. What Valentini comes to demand of the critic is a sort of complicity. While inducing him to venture into unknown territory, he forces him to glimpse that of the artist, permits him to approach the most constitutive modalities of his way of operating, the technical times, the imaginative places that are familiar to his practice. For that waiting that the critic has to measure by the elusive means of foresight, is reflected in the analogous waiting of the artist when the work is out of his sight for as long as the fire performs its action on it. Far from being inert and neutral, this pause is full of imaginative events, as is every interval that leads us to link memory and foresight while we wait.
This characteristic of how Valentini and other sculptors operate when they work in ceramics is not a purely instrumental condition, a simple conditioning imposed by the technique, of something more substantial even though intimately linked with the technique. It is a modality, or rather, an ensemble of modalities that structure the wanderings of the imagination, mark its periods, define its evolutionary stages, acting in consequence on the root of the formative processes of the images.
In the passage from raw to cooked, the earth changes appearance and the work is transformed far from the gaze of its maker in a process in which he is incapable of intervening. But during the whole time in which the fire works on the forms, the artist’s room remains open to the winds of the imagination and to the unforeseeable directions that their entry may imprint on the thought of the sculpture.
There is a danger in the failure to perceive the value of this interval that marks the formative process and the profound correspondence that it creates between the transformations that take place in the kiln and those that, at the same time, take shape in the mental furnace of the sculptor; it risks leaving out of the interpretation such a significant part of Valentini’s work – in the first instance, the sense of his repeated insistence on the fragment, which is configured as a very powerful phenomenology of the research and one that is in need of further clarification. For, in fact, having recourse to the presentation of the fragment is not in the least a response, in the work of Valentini, to the suggestion of the evocation of the incomplete, distant as it is from the extreme polarities – certainty of the primacy of the idea and regret for the loss of the totality – that characterise every poetic that appeals to it. Rather, the fragment is the phenomenon in which the prolonging of the imagination in the temporal intervals of its execution becomes concrete, it is the presence, the artefact that gradually takes the place of the disappearance of the work from the artist’s vision. It is the form of a desire, of an anticipation, the witness to the unstoppable movement of thought.
Take the stratifications that are so recurrent in Valentini’s sculpture: the superimposing of membrane on membrane, surface on surface to find the volume. This stands out as one of the most original of the procedures that the artist deploys. It is in this material imagination of the ceramic, in the modalities of a thinking within the technique, that this layering too finds its explanation, one that is not unambiguous yet coherent and revealing. This process of the reformulation of pre-existing figures also speaks of a temporal interval and therefore of an imaginative progression marked by the interventions of the fire. A confirmation that the above argument is not so far from the hypothesis of a correct reading can very probably be found in what appears as the driving force of Valentini’s inspiration – in his tireless scrutiny of the expressive possibilities of the earth, in his patient and advancing inquiry into the constitutive data of the ceramic experience, in his immersion in and identification with the intelligence of the material. These are yet further indications of a formal desire entirely implicated in the demands of the craft and intimately justified by them. Valentini developed a proliferating, variegated analytic in the course of the 1970s that, although well informed, was far from the cold programmatic determination pursued in a large part of the experience of the past decade, yet able to carry a richness of significations and a density of meaning far removed from contemporary sculpture. That analytic was the result of an almost total adhesion to the individual specificity of the medium to constantly lead the imaginative possibilities of the sculptor to its interior. It is worth repeating the words of Gualdoni here, who has emphasised this peculiarity of Valentini’s research on more than one occasion:
Rather than conceiving the material, Valentini set out to know it with love and humility, to encourage it to take shape instead of shaping it himself: far from meanings such as modelling (which presupposes the will and the external act of organisation), the artist assumed the specific characters of the earth as given linguistic data. What mattered was to verify and bring to light its intimate, infinite possibilities of association and articulation, in the quest for that ultimate and ineffable truth that is the substance of the material.
These words have their counterpart in a reflection written by Valentini a few years ago:
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.
It is thus towards this reservoir of signs enclosed in the earth that Valentini’s analysis is directed; he rummages in the labyrinth of their relations with the hands of a midwife, and it is here that he eventually retraces in the primary phenomenologies of the material but beyond them, the dense and palpitating symbolism that the boundless cultural memory preserves. In this way the material of the earth ends up assuming the role of a true and proper structure of the imaginary, and its symbolic heritage functions as an inexhaustible generative source of forms and a creator of images.
By virtue of this creative dynamism that underlies the executive motives, in Valentini’s work there is no trace of an iconographic project, of a programmed image that precedes the possibilities of invention inherent in the expressive material. Essentially this means that whatever suggestion, impulse or creative stimulus Valentini may receive in the course of time (and the observatory of such an excited sensibility will be bound to catch many), it can only be recognised and then translated into a work if it shows itself to be implicated in the formal conditions of the medium: its own and those that the tradition and past experience of the artist have condensed. So in the end this is what grounds the continuity of Valentini’s creative world, that internal coherence that will presently be manifested again, on that occasion with Annunciazione, Dialogo, and Deriva.