Typescript of uncertain date, referable to the years 1980–1982, unpublished in life, first published in the catalog of the exhibition “Nanni Valentini opere 1982–1985”, Galleria Civica, Modena, 1987.
Recovering signs left unfinished by me, I searched, in the layers of materials (those to which art has assigned a place) what was the spell that makes simulacra wait (the room with walls of wax and feathers is uninhabited).
I exhibited a clay “landscape” in Cadorago in 1975. Clay laid out on a piece of land, taken to be fired and then laid back in the same place. The horizon of this landscape was not circular (do circular horizons exist?) but arranged on an asymptote (certainly this kind of horizon exists). I thought of it as a background, as a support (backdrop gathering the lights of an evening) for a recent work. It is a surface that bends along a curve with one part becoming concave and the other convex. In the convex one, an old “tale” is projected as figuration, while in the concave one the tale becomes pneuma. Visible therefore only by sensation.
(They tore off the loop of the ancient vessel therefore the center of the earth and the surface of the sky claim possession.)
Although the tale ends with the spell still hiding the hero’s face, it nevertheless gives us the map to find the bight of the vase again.
(I cherish a distance that has as its cadence a gaze without expectation.)