Nanni Valentini, Sulla materia [On the Matter]. In: E. Maurizi (ed.), Materia come realtà [Matter as Reality], exhibition catalog, Pinacoteca e Musei Comunali, Macerata, December 1979. Republished in Riga 3, 1993, p. 58. Republished in: Flaminio Gualdoni, Nanni Valentini, Silvana Editoriale, 2005, p. 164.
My friends Paolo and Oscar told me that you would appreciate a few “lines” about the subject. I had to give it some thought and also tried to anticipate some ideas about the work I will be doing in Macerata.
Your question “about the matter,” stimulated and caused me regret me at the same time. However, I have been reflecting not without some inflection of paranoia, especially about the unfortunately historical transgression of writing about, quoting one’s own, etc. (don’t have any). In order to say anything, I am forced to talk about myself, and if I am not yet at the reckoning, I cannot even ensure that the project accommodates all possible wishes.
I chose matter as poetics and, above all, certainly not identifying it as a sculptor or painter would do: and even less as my matter, but as a partner that responds to me with signs of its own. In any case, in ceramics I am not seeking either the myth of the orphan or the tragedies of the telluric. I deeply love the hidden drama in the seed-air and I look for it in reflections and correspondences.
My work has always been a continual bouncing back and forth between painting and ceramics. One might say between appearance and certainty, or between the visual and the tactile.
But it is precisely this dichotomy that I am interested in exploring: the aspect in which the image becomes the representation of a hiatus, of a tangency.
The newborn, laid on the earth, in the Abruzzi, is not only a rite of the Earth-Mother, but the point of this tangency, the unresolved, the indefinite, and as such, can become the myth of the ungraspable, the place in which incongruence, seeking its possible homology, creates fetishes.
It seems that this is a specific, a place of working on matter, a reflection on the earth no longer embroiled in trinities, but with its possible polarity and its possible transparency.
I think of it, in fact, as being crossed by a diagonal, run across by a double echo without redundancy, simultaneously arid and wet, without any references to layers, with all times; thus, without archaeology.
I think of the earth of Isaiah covered by darkness, of that which, blushing, Jeremiah generates, of the Earth-Mother that gives birth to the children-ancestors, of the earth grazed by the breath of Mercury, and of that which imprisons the shadow of butterflies.
These are the signs on which my attention lingers. I do not believe in poetry-communication. I like to consider the earth only as locus of a poem, a place that is empty and thus open to the possible, where the only risk is that of an imprint.
The diamond that imprisons the light, and thus all that is external; the wall-plaster that, reflecting instead, diffuses all the light, thus renouncing its own form; the crater that accepts itself as an unformed spectacle and the seed that hides all possible sound are the poly-types of the images that I have of matter.
The only communication that I can think of is the incestuous act of the hand that caresses the clod of earth and the gaze that runs along the furrow.And there is one thing that I believe I feel with certainty: that I subjectively conceive matter as the locus of all transformations; of all similitudes.
Forms are the traces, the tangible signs of these transformations, and also the place where insomnia makes it so that no simulacra are created and that any imprints are certainly of necessity. Perhaps the scientists are right when they speak to us of black holes, saying that what is reflected there is the slag, the imperfections of matter, still inhabited by the silver egg born in the womb of obscurity.
I add to the writing “on matter” these notes about the work I plan to do in Macerata.
It is a work on the environment. I try to build on some geometric and material peculiarities. They will be accents, shifts, pauses, so without noises without words and figures, but, with only decipherments.
1 This work consists of casts on four walls of the city; they will then be printed in ceramic and exhibited as translocations (70 x 100m). During the exhibition period, the walls to which the cast is attached (their perimeters) will be covered with lime or canvas.
2 It consists of earth collected along the perimeter of the city (boundaries). It will be baked or kneaded into straw, and will be used to manufacture the surface of the city with bricks built on the site and some earthenware. (Instead, the perimeter of it will be drawn with a plumb line). Within this surface will be a pot, and within it a plumb line will be lowered as the axis of the center.
3 A plumb line will cross the whole space along two orthogonal axes, and it will be modulated by stones (in stone, papier-mâché, ceramic and wax).
4 This work will consist of installing objects at the poles of the axes of the previous work (earth, straw, glass, steel will be the materials).
It is clear that these indications are assumptions, thus liable to change and rethinking. However, previously I spoke of accents, and they are so as rhythms of a background of the place where Paul will make the hierophany of the form, and Oscar will indicate with his wings a performance where the actor is not moving.
P.S.: All the work will be set up in the church.