In the Underbrush, Providence, March 2015.

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Nella selva antica

 

The following is a survey of the sides of my work dealing with “historicized” nature and “naturalized” history. It treats of a photography-based work, where the photograph is always somehow “modest”, not only because for me is “just” a document, but because such a modesty allows, then, my further interventions.

 

Gulliver in Lavera, 2010  (01)

My interest in landscapes resonates with my interest in faces to the extent that both involve the same type of approach to the photographic medium. Both subjects also correspond to my interest in intermediary spaces, which are not completely natural yet not yet fully “humanized”. The photographs in this series were shot at dawn on a winter Sunday, at the industrial site of Lavera, one of the largest petrochemical complexes in Europe, built in a once-idyllic spot on the Provence coast. I will quote a passage from an article by Daniela Goeller, who speaks more eloquently than I can.

“The landscape is a complex construction. It is way of looking at an environment and exists only through the eyes of the viewer. More than a reflection of the outside world and the surrounding countryside, the landscape constitutes an ideal space for projection and reflects different artistic and political visions and concepts imposed by our civilization on nature through the centuries.” ( http://www.tk – 21.com/Gulliver -a- Lavera ).

These images comprise different layers. In the foreground, a beach view fronting some industrial buildings. Then two layers: very diluted paint drippings that creates a sort of cloud (or sun) upon drying; and printed on glass in the foreground — almost erased by the rudimentary method of transferring prints with trichloroethylene — are engravings from Gulliver’s Travels.

The choice to re-use and “re-engrave” illustrations of Gulliver’s Travels, an allegorical and satirical work by Jonathan Swift, with other historical images, is significant: the work was written in the 18th century, the Age of Enlightenment characterized by faith in justice and progress, which are subtly mocked by Swift. It is also the century of Piranesi and the romantic fascination with ruins, which is possible only if they are considered as a nostalgic remnant and not a real possibility (Albert Speer exercise I was talking yesterday was actually an “exercise of style”); such an “enlighted” vision allows ruins to be used for decorative purposes.  (02a-02b)

The chemical plants that I imagine Gulliver finds on the shore instead of the Lilliputians, are not (yet) ruins, but I confess that I conceived this work a few months before the Fukushima accident (March 2011), which demonstrates the enduring power of Nature and sets, once more, some questioning about where the Enlightenment Age is taking us. I didn’t want it to be an illustration of a contemporary event, and it took me long before showing it.  (03)

 

Robinson a Rosignano, 2011  (03bis)

As a complement to the previous series, a few months later I created a few works named after the fictional character of Robinson Crusoe. It is well known that Jonathan Swift wrote his famous novel, Gulliver’s Travels, partially as a reaction to Defoe’s optimistic vision of the relation between nature and humankind. You can tell me if I am wrong, but one could say that Swift is on the side of a “hard primitivism”, which would be more linked to materialistic philosophies, according to Erwin Panofsky on his article on a Piero di Cosimo (1466-1521) cycle of paintings, “The early history of man”, (Journal of the Warburg Institute, vol. I, n. 1, July 1937); while Defoe could be on the side of a “soft primitivism”, let’s say more idealistically and “Golden Age” oriented.

Piero di Cosimo himself, according to Vasari biography, was practicing a form of “natural” life closer to Hell than to Eden, like in this “primitive hunting scene” (I do owe, among other findings, the discovery of this cycle to Gilles Tiberghien book Art, nature paysage, Arles 2001). Please notice how in this painting there is no hierarchy, or psychological difference, between men, beasts and hybrid creatures. This is a vision of the early times of humanity that is neither biblical nor neo-platonic. What a difference with this other hunting scene, painted about thirty years previously, in 1470, by another Florentine, Paolo Uccello (1397-1475), and of which Piero was fully aware: here nature is so completely submitted to human action that it becomes a demonstration of geometry.  (03ter)

But, coming back to my subject: in the Tuscany coast town of Rosignano Marittimo, there exists a stretch of white sand beaches that resembles the Caribbean islands. (04a) Although these beaches may appear natural and are appreciated by tourists in the summer season, they were created by the waste of a sodium hydroxide factory, owned by the Belgian firm Solvay.  (04b)

I went to these beaches in wintertime (like many, I like seashores in winter) and photographed the site. Afterward, I combined these images with reproductions of fishermen’s tools from Greenland, using red translucent paint, and engravings taken from various editions of Defoe’s book.

I imagined translating the very moment in which Robinson, not believing his own eyes, found the traces of human feet in the sand.  (05-07)

 

Drum songs, 2010-2011  (08a)

Somewhere in a Nordic island, urbanscapes set side by side with landscapes, the former accompanied by transcriptions from the East Greenland drum contests (the poetic duels the Inuit used to perform to resolve conflicts, to avoid killing each other), the latter accompanied by reproductions of objects retrieved from the harbor, presented like scientific plates. Printed writings over images of civilization, red signs over images of nature, with no other purpose than to let them accompany each other.  (08b-09c)

 

Marmo, 2011-2012  (10)

In the autumn of 2011 I returned to Italy to photograph the subject of nature exploited by humans. I wanted to compile a stock of images to work on during the winter months. But I found humans submerged by natural phenomena. I encountered days of heavy rainfall and flooding in Tuscany, and the trip was unsuccessful.

I did however manage to take four acceptable photographs, in the marble quarries of the cloud-covered mountains of Cararra. On the long trip home, avoiding the highways and taking side roads, I stopped where I knew of abandoned churches, and I photographed the second image incorporated into each of these pieces: a detail of artifacts made out of perennial marble; medieval churches are among the most striking symbols of Western civilization.

So this series depicts both concavity (the quarried mountain from which the marble is extracted) and convexity (the sculpted marble of the cathedral).  (11-14)

 

Romitorio, 2011  (15)

If you hike in the Fiora valley, in the Latium region just South of Tuscany, and go up and down on banks collapsed after recent floods, and you enter woodlands tangled like jungles, you can reach a couple of romitori, or hermits places, which survived the centuries, thanks to their isolation and to the little interest they have aroused in succeeding generations.

Here is Poggio Conte: past a waterfall that provided drinking water to the monks, you can see the remains of two tiny cells, to which lead arduous steps carved into the tufa, and a Cistercian-inspired rupestrian church. Its interior – in spite of the oculus carved into the facade – is completely dark: if you make photographs, it will be at random, and only the film development will reveal the surviving fragments of the paintings that decorated the vaults. You will discover that this hermit from end of XIII or beginning of XIV Century (perhaps a monk of French origin?) painted the walls with decorative motifs decisively prosaic, reminding more of an interior design than of an exercise of meditation or veneration.  (16-17)

Nature is slowly retaking its rights; mosses and lichens cover lily flowers, red griffins and phallic shapes. Slowly fades away the work of the solitary men who spent years in shaping and covering with colors this dark cavern, being aware that very few people would ever look at them. Over my intrusive flash photos I superimposed, as a weave backlit readable, a sonnet taken from the Canzoniere of Petrarch. It speaks, in beautiful metaphors, of priceless sufferings of love. I transcribed it in a continuum, like a telex.

(18)  I don’t know if there is anything in common between this text and these paintings, apart from the fact that both poet and painter belonged to the same half a Century.

 

In Tuscia, 2012  (19)

The San Pietro Bridge near Farnese, after flooding; the Etruscan site of Rofalco, after archeological excavation; the tangled forest known as la Selva del Lamone, where a trail has been blazed.

These images have been reproduced on glass and superimposed on white paintings with a fluorescent shape, which creates a shift in the surfaces, endowing the work with what I consider a trace of modernity that was otherwise missing.  (20-22)

 

Rupestrian, 2012-2013  (23)

Although the term rupestrian denotes an art form ‘executed on or with rocks’ (e.g. tombs, sanctuaries, cave paintings or inscriptions), it can also refer to the process by which human-made creations fade away and become part of their surroundings.

In this sense, Rupestrian occurs at the meeting point of nature and history. In such instances, it is not only as if civilization and abandonment occurred in successive waves over the centuries; rather one was the pre-condition of the other. A natural site transformed into a “work” through human intervention is, in turn, retrieved by nature, which makes a “work” out of what remains of the initial human intervention. For me it is not so much about working horizontally in space (e.g. Land Art) as engaging vertically with time, which serves as a medium in a process of stratification ― a form of the ‘reverse archaeology’ I was mentioning yesterday.  (24-30)  You noticed that several of these works present the silhouette of a wild animal, either sewed on the plastic or transferred on the glass. They are taken from a Portuguese popularization booklet, found in a flea market, and are meant to symbolize the return of the natural element.

 

Land paintings, 2013  (31)

I call these photographic works Land paintings. They are an attempt to respond to a question about my own presence within historical space. I have tried to define this location through the concept of “rupestrian”.

In recent years, whenever I could, I hiked around the Tuscia region, north of Rome, in a sparsely inhabited land full of prehistoric and archaeological sites, with a leaf, or a tongue, made out of latex dipped in red fluorescent pigment, leaving it on the ground, and then shooting it. The Etruscan tombs, which become medieval hermitages, then sheepfolds, then wartime shelters, finally lovers hideouts, are the usual stops of my wanderings.

I decided to entitle this photographic body of work “land paintings” partly as a reference to the notion of “picturesque” so dear to several land artists active in the 1960s and 1970, and in opposition to the modernist vision of a work of art seen as a unique, timeless experience, to be grasped in one single glance. The title is also meant to evoke the idea of stepping on earth, looking for hidden and forgotten places.

In my previous work, the sign placed on the photograph was a means of preventing the fruition of the image in its entirety, of opening up a gap of time within it, by using a fluorescent color that displaced the vision. This intrusive element is now a material one and becomes an artwork as soon as the photograph is taken. This is the reason I don’t usually add other semantic levels to it. Also, in contrast to Land art, I don’t transform the site into which I introduce myself, I just leave a sign.

This sign left on the sites before photographing them constitutes a marker of my “I have been there” but also a way of seizing the baton, in a relay race with the past. And here I would simply like to recall that, in Italian, the baton is called il testimone, “the witness”.  (32-39)

Sometimes, though, when I was in the presence of an articulated human construction more or less preserved, I felt the need to superimpose layers of writings and colors on the images.

For instance, in the “Garden of the Monsters” of Bomarzo, which I again consider a “rupestrian” site  (40a)  (rocks become statues, statues are deformed by natural elements), what is developed is an iconographic program inspired by alchemy and mythology; we are in the Mannerist age (second half of XVIth century); many writings carved on the sculptures are quite cryptic (can you read, all around the ogre leaps, the sentence “Ogni pensiero vola”, “Every thought flies”?). As a resonance to that, I blurred my own images with several semantic layers, either scratched glass or dripped paint.

This series is titled Horror vacui: (40b-42)

  

Nel parco, 2013

When I was reviewing the text for this lecture, a couple of weeks ago, and trying to find the proper translation for Il parco dei mostri, I suddenly realized that my inclination to a “vertical” presence in a given historical space depended not only on my background as a researcher, but on my own biography. When I returned to the Bomarzo garden wasn’t it to retrace my own steps, to find echoes of voices and sounds, which had, once, filled these empty spaces? Was I not rehearsing a family party somewhere in the late 1960s, filmed with a Super 8 camera?   (43a-43j)

 

Nella selva antica, 2014 

  1. On the Plateau. (44a)  Last year a friend told me that my series of works entitled “Rupestrian” reminded her of Robert Pogue Harrison’s essay on forests (Forests. The Shadows of Civilization, Stanford 1992). I found that book and read it but set it aside for a long time. The concept that I took from it is that the forest is a human invention, a cultural contrivance. At that time, I was thinking about my literary models of a now-gone generation who experienced the Second World War in their youth: Nuto Revelli, Primo Levi and others. The last survivor was Mario Rigoni Stern (1921-2008). Born in the Asiago plateau, an area heavily damaged during World War I, Rigoni was influenced by the nationalistic rhetoric and wanted to pursue a military career. However before long he became convinced of the injustice of the war, a conviction that was further strengthened during his service in the Italian Expeditionary Corps in Russia, in the disastrous retreat of January 1943, and subsequently in his years of internment in a German military concentration camp. When, at the end of the war, Rigoni flew to get home, he hid himself in the Austrian forest and survived eating leaves, berries, bird eggs and snails.

The theme of the forest, as that natural site completely destroyed by Austrian and Italian bombs between 1915 and 1918 and subsequently replanted, exemplifying the ‘artificial’ that laboriously reverts to a natural state, is central to Rigoni’s oeuvre.  (44b, c, d)

For Rigoni the forest is a mirror of the world “as it should be”, a world where “siamo tutti compaesani”, we all belong to the same village (allow me to note that in both Italian and French, the word for landscape, paesaggio/paysage, come from the Latin pagus, which means village and, by extension, country). In this ecosystem we can all live together, men and beasts of various species, once the carrying capacity of the environment is under control (and the share of passionate hunters like Rigoni has been taken).  (44e)

But the good forest, according to Rigoni, is not the one that grows spontaneously and wildly. Rather the good forest is the one tamed by human labor, where humankind plays the role of the caring gardener.

As I wandered, as a tourist, around Rigoni’s homeland I recorded some images of forests, which, upon closer inspection, reveal traces of the war: the collapsed trenches, the craters created by bombs. There I encountered a theme of my Rupestrian series: these sites are also taken back by nature, even if here the traces left behind are the result of humankind’s diabolical engineering rather than its creativity.

And what do these photographs have to do with the verses Dante penned to describe his entry into earthly paradise, the “ancient forest”, at the summit of the Mount of Purgatory, and his encounter with the beautiful and spiritual Matelda, guardian of the Terrestrial Paradise, where flowers bloom without being sown? “Qui fu innocente l’umana radice; qui primavera sempre e ogni frutto…”, Here the root of Humanity was innocent: here is everlasting Spring, and every fruit… (Purgatorio, XXVIII, 142-143)  (45-47)

 

  1. In the Lamone. (48)  Dante was certainly the last visitor to the Garden of Eden. No forest, not even the ancient forest that covered the volcanic formations of the Tuscia region in central Italy, can be considered primeval forest; even the conservation is an artificial fact. In the Selva del Lamone natural reserve, for instance, everywhere traces of human “civilization” can be found: dilapidated walls, the remains of road pavement, the furrows of the charcoal wagons, the heaps of stones that once constituted Etruscan walls, and today the strips of white and red paint on the network of trails.

This is all but the nature depicted by Leopardi in his Operette morali, a powerful and cruel nature that, in its manifestations, doesn’t even bother to know what happens to mankind (Dialogo della natura e di un islandese, 1824). This is a today European natural “park”, where the primeval is doomed to be just reminiscence: trees, bushes, rocks covered by moss look at my eyes like Romantic Age fake ruins.

My photographs taken in the Selva are reproduced on transparent layers and superimposed on reproductions and personal variations of prehistoric petroglyphs; those in Nevada date to ten thousand years ago and are the oldest discovered on the North American continent. They are the signs of an era when humankind was just beginning to appropriate nature. They are reproduced with red fluorescent acrylic paint, as a gesture of signage, the difference with the petroglyphs being only the technology of the reproduction.  (49)

 

Here you find a variation on this same subject, a series named Eden; I just emphasized the relation to the theme of ruins into nature that we were discussing previously. (50-51)

This series means for me an open and unresolved reflection on nature seen as a historical phenomenon;

Going back to Panofsky considerations on Piero di Cosimo, his “hard primitivism” can be seen as one of the two historical lines in the human relation to nature, as pointed out by Robert Harrison: an “antagonistic” line, marked by the Enlightenment idea of the human progress “against” and “in spite of” nature, which is aimed to the future and eventually could lead to the destruction of nature; and a nostalgic, romantic view of a “natural” state of human purity. In such a vision the early times of mankind weren’t the “primitive form of existence as a truly bestial state” described by Piero, but rather Dante’s earthly Paradise.

At the beginning of his book on Forests, Harrison quote the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico: “This was the order of human institutions: first the forests, after that the huts, then the villages, next the cities, and finally the academies…” (The New science, 1725). But after this passage Vico goes on: “the nature of the peoples is such that first it is crude, afterward severe, then benign, later on delicate, eventually dissipate”.     Now, I wouldn’t say that this thinker belongs to one of the two lines we were mentioning.

Rigoni Stern takes on Vico’s reflection, and assumes that the city (the last stage of human progress before academies, if one trusts Vico) has become a place of “spiritual solitude”, where “barbarity dwells in the very hearth of the humans” and states that the wood has become a place of salvation, “Ed ecco che il bosco è diventato luogo di salvamento” (Introduction to Boschi d’Italia, Roma 1993).

I just point out how this word “salvamento” echoes with “salvatico”, “salvation” almost sounds like “savage”.

We can say, at the end, that Rigoni represents a form of “soft positivism”: nature, accompanied by the man, will always come over the deadly enterprise that is war (and, I would say, civilization). But the man, in order to survive along with the nature, needs to take from it only “a part of its interests” and never touch its very capital.

 

  1. Ferula lamonis. (52)  Ferula communis (Giant fennel) has been known by humankind since mythological times. Prometheus is said to have brought fire to humans in a fennel stalk. Moreover, a ferula stick crowned with a pinecone and decorated with vine leaves was carried by the Maenads who followed Dionysus’ cortege. Whereas its cousin, Foeniculum vulgare, is healthful, ferula is a toxic and invasive plant. Known as narthex – ‘scourge’ – in Greek, it grows in the deciduous forests of the arid coastal plains of Sardinia, Greece and the Maremma. However, unlike the ferula in Dionysian rituals, it is infertile in this environment, making it appear as a mere intruder.  (53-55)

 

Here you have some variations on the theme.  (56-57)  I added to my photograph a print taken from the plates of Georges-Louis Buffon Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (second half of XVIII Century), depicting wild animals. In his lifelong enterprise of describing quadrupeds and birds, creating a classification dependent on their degree of “sympathy” towards mankind, Buffon “liked to set up those animals in mythological settings and in History’s harmonious remains, referring back to an almost “Rousseauist” state of innocence” (quoting the writer Francis Rousseau). I do extract these illustrations from their original background to set them in a more uncanny context.

And, finally, what I find a more accomplished work inspired by Rigoni Stern books and places; the “return to the heights”: Anabasis.  (58-61)  I did show you the different steps of my procedure, which is at a same time an ideological commitment: to constantly affirm the multiplicity of any image, as well as of any individuality.  (62)

SP, 2014-2015

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Identifications and their Shadows, Providence, March 2015.

History, photography, evidences

 

The starting point of my interest in the medium of photography is a direct inquiry into its nature as a truth-bearer. I am interested in photography, first of all, as testimony, understanding that a testimony, if not false, is at least able to be interpreted in multiple ways.
In regard to the photograph’s subject matter, I consider photography to be a ready-made; it affords a certain freedom of manipulation, which, in my case, implies almost always a slight displacement of the subject. In such a displacement I recognize my work as the work of a translator.
From this perspective, there is no difference between the found image and the created one; photography is merely a document. It’s a matter of taking the image and removing it from itself, in order to open it up to other, possible interpretations, in order to encourage its movement.
I will show you two sets of images: the first set concerns several recent works based on archival materials; the second set documents a few site installations I created in Norway, France, and Italy.

La Buoncostume, suite (mixed media, 2009)  (01)
In January 2008, in a dumpster near the police headquarters in Rome, a bin man found two large garbage bags full of photographs: eight thousand images (identification, monitoring, evidences), “no longer relevant to the investigations,” which the police threw away instead of bestowing them to the State Archives. The found images were acquired by an antiquarian bookshop, Il Museo del Louvre; an exhibition was organized and the information was communicated to the newspapers. But the same day of the opening, the Civil Guard, sent by the Authority of the Cultural Heritage, entered the gallery and seized all the material presented, including the exhibition catalogs. However, a gallery assistant managed to hide one of the catalogs, which I used to choose and modify six images: they surely come from the “vice squad” of the police and, judging by the clothes of the suspects, would date from the late sixties. Working on them, I tried to keep the idea of a series, superimposing these photographs, which have a certain statuary elegance, over texts drawn from an Italian grammar book. There is no relationship between images and text, except perhaps the fact that these texts establish rules, which are linguistic rules.   (02-05)

Leçons d’anthropométrie (mixed media, 2009-2010)   (06)
The series Leçons d’anthropométrie derives from my researches in the archives of the department of Gard (southern France). It is well known that any nomadic or itinerant had to carry an “anthropometric book,” which was stamped at every entrance or exit of a French village. This book was in effect from 1912 to 1969. It contained, in addition to personal data and characteristics of the carrier, his photograph (face and profile) and the fingerprints of all ten fingers, following the instructions dictated by the world famous criminologist Alphonse Bertillon. I chose six photographs of anonymous members of the same family (taken in the twenties), and reproduced them on glass. I transcribed with a marker, on the cardboard backdrop, some articles of the law ruling the movements of the nomads. I painted red and white geometric shapes over it that could recall the Russian Constructivists or the Bauhaus designers. To confuse the identification process, I overlaid the frontal image of a person with his profile, or with a picture of a relative.   (07-09)

Phantombilder (mixed media, 2010)   (10)
My last example of the difficult relation between truth and image is also the most paradoxical. I refer to the so-called photo fits of the German police (and, perhaps, of other national police departments), which one can find easily on the Internet. In a technical sense, photo fits are photographs, that is, photographic reproductions. But, at the same time, they do not reproduce anything. They are merely pieces of fixed memory, artificially reconstructed. What they reproduce does not exist, even though they are images as credible as “true” photographs.
We are here before a kind of icon of a face, which seems strangely flat to us, and which bears something doubly uncanny – to borrow Freud’s term -, something like a double death: the first one produced by the photographic process itself, the second one by the montage procedure. This results from the effect of the death mask which—as Alfred Döblin observes in 1929 in his introduction to August Sander’s Antlitz der Zeit, Visage of time—is proper to photography (Döblin was surely referring to the then famous wax mask of L’Inconnue de la Seine, and wax or plaster casting can be seen as a double of photography, since both are deadly in their capacity to freeze time and to condemn a subject like the Unknown of the Seine to be young and smiling forever).   (11-12)
To return to the German Phantombilder, what is lacking in them is the asymmetry that characterizes each individual, that is, the irregularity or the accident: the history of a face and a person. What remains is an icon, a logo, which nobody will ever recognize, but which will be useful in defining an individual.
How have I treated these phantom-images? I have made them transparent, reproducing them on glass. I have placed them in simple square frames. I have superimposed them on contemporary wallpapers, in an attempt to give them an “uncanny familiarity.”  (13-14)
Lingering on allegories taken from Freud’s texts, I could refer to his famous article on the Wunderblock (A Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad, 1925); my work, indeed, is a work of stratification. But, if I do add layer upon layer, this is not in order to liberate the past or to make it more legible, whether in the first or the last instance. On the contrary, in a kind of “reverse archaeology”, I create a blurred image that perhaps could lead to the intuition of “something else”, that I don’t know and that I can’t anticipate.
The following slides document my attempt to follow a single process that re-takes the existing image and translates it in another language. Sometimes only a slight shift is needed.
Mirror (dripped) 01  (15)
Teatrino (dripped) 01 and 02   (16-17)
Pontormo-LG   (18-19)
These works must be taken – among others – as a criticism of the eugenic attempt not only to define human “types” but also to find the “truth” of an individual through the examination of facial signs. I have used the illustrations from La nouvelle iconographie de la Salpétrière, the photographic revue published in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century by Professor Charcot and his assistant Albert Londe.
I would just note that, in my effort to resist the mimetic “swallowing-up” of the photographic image, I have made it vulnerable to other agents; for instance, the red fluorescent signs and the drippings are a dramatic element whose function is to remove the photograph from its own saturation: here it is not possible to read an image without the eye being forced to encounter the above-mentioned “something else”, a something else that displaces the image and moves it into a different context.

Laralia. A transient monument.   (20)
This work, made in Norway in 1999, was entitled Laralia. The dictionary tells us that, in ancient Roman times, the Lares were the ancestors’ spirits, whose images, made out of painted wood or cast wax, were collected and worshipped in a specially designated part of the home called the Laralia.
These pictures were periodically displayed in processions, and then set on fire. Pliny the Elder mentions them in the section of Naturalis Historia devoted to painting (Book, XXXV, 6-7): in his criticism of modern art then in vogue, he underlines the moral value of these portraits, which served not only to commemorate the deceased, but also to accompany the living, so that “when somebody died, the entire assembly of his departed relatives was also present.”
Ten pictures of local people, chosen at random among the ones conserved at the Fjaler Folkbibliotek in Dale, underwent a multi-staged process of transformation: first, they were deformed in order to reveal their Anamorphosis, reminiscent of the long evening shadows; then, they were enlarged to life size; finally, their silhouettes were traced and cut out on boards of pine wood. (21)
These black silhouettes were placed atop a hill and then set on fire, in a brief ceremony. On the other end, the three-meter-high wooden boards, from which the silhouettes were carved, were erected upon a plateau, above the village of Dale. During the day, in sunlight, the shadows on the ground change shape, cross each other, and are, for a fleeting moment, similar to the original picture.
The instantaneous freezing of the photographic image documents a unique state of a person and is meant to be recognisable by the person’s relatives and the collective memory. In this installation the image is subjected to multiple reproductions, which progressively distance the subject from its departure point.
The final stage of this process – the woodcut – is the opposite of the photographic image, in terms of the time and energy required for its execution; the slowness can be seen as a less tyrannical and more intense way of recording the image. The ten pictures, transformed into steles whose commemorative function is only vaguely related to the individuals they portray, will surrender to the action of time and nature, which will further modify them and ultimately lead to their decay.   (22-28)

The cares of a family man   (29)
The title of the next work is The cares of a family man. I don’t know why I named it after Franz Kafka’s novel, Die Sorge des Hausvaters, where the main character is a shapeless and changing creature made out of left-overs and living in the most obscure parts of a mansion. I think that unconsciously I identify Odradek with the beast that dwells in each of our homes, the beast of identification and of the measurement of the other, the same beast that today, in the streets of France, expresses itself with the slogan “ici on est chez nous!”, “here it’s our home”.   (30)
This same beast forbids August Sander, in the mid-thirties of last Century, to publish his portraits, because of his unwelcome “Enlightenment” aesthetics and because of the Socialist Workers Party involvement of his son Erich. After this, he was doomed to realize gorgeous landscape photographs of hilltops in the Cologne region; he also composed a couple of strange visual cut ups, made out of facial details belonging to diverse individuals. The two surviving panels bear the title Studies: Mankind, while the subjects of his previous work were always identified, at least with the mention of their profession.  (31)  I think that these “dissections” demonstrate a giving up of the principle of identification, as well as the “second death” of the subject to which I referred at the beginning of my talk.
I would also remark that, in Sander’s images, the face is only a component of the recorded signs: the posture, the clothing, all seem to have as much importance, as in this photographic portrait, dated 1938, whose title is National Socialist, Head of Department of Culture (copyright Die Photographische Sammlung, August Sander Archiv, Cologne).   (32)
You surely know that in the late Thirties Sander made several clandestine portraits that bear the title Victim of persecution  (33)  , and also some photographs of political prisoners, including his own son Erich. This one was taken in 1943  (34)  and this one in 1944   (35). Erich Sander, who was also a photographer, died in March 1944 after ten years in prison.
Why did I mix Sander’s images with the other sources I used for my work, which come mostly from the “beastly” side of photography? It is because the digital stretching of the images makes them anonymous and ghostly like the Etruscan “sunset shadows”?  (36)
In the same years in which Sander was completing his Antilitzt der Zeit atlas, several scientists were realizing monumental photographic bodies, following the myths of the archetypical, the whole, the pure. Professor Montandon from France went to the Hokkaido islands, North Japan, to document the entirety of a Caucasian minority: his The Ainu civilization was published in 1937.  (37-38)
This professor, back in the Paris occupied by the Nazis and where the extermination program was being set up, published a useful booklet in 1940: How to recognize and explain the Jew. In 1941 he helped to organise the propaganda show Le Juif et la France (please note the use of the singular “the” Jew).  (39)
On his side, Professor Genna, director of the anthropological institute of the University of Rome, went to Palestine, where presumably the only Semitic community that hadn’t ethnically mix from biblical times, the Samaritans, were living. Along with the usual body measurements, he took pictures (face, side and three quarters) of each one of the three hundred villagers. (40-41)  In 1938, one of 180 scientists, he signed the Manifesto for the Race which opened the way to the Italian anti-Semitic laws.
I don’t know the particular myth that led the Swedish fellows from the Uppsala University in their quest for Nordic, Baltic and Lapp “purity”, but in 1936 the excessively zealous head of the State Institute for Racial Biology, Herman Lundborg, was replaced (still, this institute was, under another name, the main actor of a program of forced sterilization which ended only in 1975).  (42)
In contradiction with the heaviness of this subject, I chose to reproduce the stretched images on a silk fabric, which is very light and flies with the least breeze. It makes a row of banners or flags, whose movements have a festive side. But I prefer to show them at night and under artificial lighting. I wanted these frail pieces to signify the immanence of the past and our responsibility before it: hic est historia.   (43-45)

“Memory and immigration”   (46)
In the wake of the presidential elections in France, in May 2012, during which the right-wing Front National party, known for its xenophobic views, captured one-third of the votes in rural areas, a group of teachers from a high school in the Camargue region near the city of Nîmes applied to the regional school district to set up an artist-in-residence program devoted to the theme of “memory and immigration.”
Once I installed my studio in an empty classroom and began discussing with the students, I realized that only four out of twenty-eight of them had no foreign origins (which means, just as an afterthought, that several of their parents of foreign origins voted for a xenophobic party). I asked the students to find family pictures, or to take photographs of relatives or neighbors who had been or were immigrants. Each student, then, had his or her picture enlarged and mounted on a good frame, the same for everyone. Each one intervened on the image as he or she wished.
From my side, I used their work for a simple installation made out of enlarged photocopies. The documents that the students brought were superimposed on the pictures I took of them, in a photo studio setting. Once in the studio, each one was asked to keep a white cardboard oval before his face. Mounted in the school hall, these images changed depending on the place from which they were viewed: outside (where the sunlight was intense) or indoors, where this same light created a light shadow behind the foregrounded subject. Sometimes an ancestor’s or a foreigner’s portrait could replace the cut-out face of the young person. My aim was easily understandable: to make the subject (which was also the bject) say: “I also could be the other”…   (47-56)

Fifty righteous  (57)
To close my review, I wish to mention a work I realised in another high school in France. I was invited to intervene, along with the history teacher, on the matter of “the Righteous,” the persons who, during the Second World War, accepted to shelter or protect persecuted Jews. Their names (about four thousands for all of France) are listed in the Yad Vashem garden of the Righteous among the Nations, in Jerusalem, and in the related database accessible on the Internet (www.yadvashem.org).
Starting from the simple consideration that, if questioned, these persons would answer that they “would have had no other choice,” and lingering around the idea of a “banality of the goodness,” I decided to transform the found portraits of the southern French “Justs” into flags, public signs that would be at the same time festive, enigmatic, and transparent. You will notice how the stencil technics I applied doesn’t go without recalling the most iconic image of the hero, Che Guevara. (58-65)

SP, 2013-2015

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03-inconnue

06-phantombilder

07-la-buoncostume-suite-01

08-la-buoncostume-suite

12-la-buoncostume-wallflowe

13-lecons-danthropometrie

14-lecons-danthropometrie

15-lecons-danthropometrie

16-miroir-dripped

17-tds-detail-01

18-tds-detail-02

19-teatrino-dripped-02

20-teatrino-dripped-01

23-pontormo-suite-01

24-pontormo-l-g-suite

25-laralia-spuglia

26-laralia-spuglia

27-laralia-spuglia

28-laralia-spuglia

30-laralia-spuglia

35-lares-spuglia

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National Socialist, Head of Department of Culture 1938, printed 1990 August Sander 1876-1964 ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Lent by Anthony d’Offay 2010 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/AL00151
Victim of Persecution c. 1938 August Sander 1876-1964 ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Lent by Anthony d’Offay 2010 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/AL00111
Political Prisoner [Erich Sander] 1943 August Sander 1876-1964 ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Lent by Anthony d’Offay 2010 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/AL00133
Death Mask of Erich Sander 1944 August Sander 1876-1964 ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Lent by Anthony d’Offay 2010 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/AL00119

41-manduel-spuglia

42-manduel-spuglia

43-manduel-spuglia

44-manduel-spuglia

46-manduel-spuglia

49-manduel-spuglia

45-manduel-spuglia

50-manduel-spuglia

 

Available small formats

A selection of recent small formats (20×30 cm / 8×12 in), lead framed.
For larger sizes (30×40 cm and over), please visit the page
Avalaible works.

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From Rofalco 02, 2017-2025, 20×30.
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Hopi a Poggio Rota, 2017, 20×30.
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Baedeker-Roja 01, 2018, 20×30.
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Regordane 01, 2019, 20×30 (from the installation Millenovecento). See the remaining pieces : Millenovecento residui.
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Baedeker-Roja 02 bis, 2023, 20×30.
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The remaining Galatina, composed in a series : AMEN (2024):
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Senza titolo (diploma), 2025, 20×30.
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Nella selva antica 08, 2025, 20×30.
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Paulhan 02bis, 24×36 (a 2022 revisited piece).
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Raubtiere Marelle, 2015, 30×20.
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Gulliver Partizipal, 2025, 30×20.
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Works at Baudelaire Gallery, Gerberoy.

From the series Land paintings, From Cythera, Predators.

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The following three works are from the series Land paintings:

2013-In-Tuscia-08-32×32.
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2013-In-Tuscia-10-32×32 (available on request).
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2015-In-Tuscia-14-30×30 (available on request).
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2018 From Cythera A and C series, various size. Engravings from the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Francesco Colonna’s work published in Venice in 1499 by Aldo Manuzio) superimposed on SP’s photographs of the Jardins de la Fontaine in Nîmes, or on satellite images of Cythera island.

2018-From Cythera A 05-30×37.
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2018-From Cythera C 02-30×37.
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2018 From Cythera C 04 30×30.
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2018-From Cythera C 05-30×37.
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2022-2023, Two variations on the series Land paintings (number 16 and 17), 40×30 cm: .

2020-Eden-00-C, from the Rupestrian works. Also a series of visual interventions in a « historicised » natural setting.

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The three remaining pieces from the series Predators (Raubtiere) series, exhibited at the opening of the Baudelaire Gallery show in 2022:

2021, Predators 02, 03 and 04, 33×42 cm. Fluorescent acrylic shapes directly painted on plates from the 19th-century German natural science book entitled Naturgeschichte der Vögel für Schule und Haus (1887).
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Lastly, a rather recent triptych on Eugene Boudin’s paintings of Normandy coasts. Satellite images as backdrop for a Boudin detail, as well as a same sized red rectangle.

2024-Boudin en Picardie 01-24×42.
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2024-Boudin en Picardie 02-24×42.
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2024-Boudin en Picardie 03-24×42.
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Pinocchiella drawings, 2024-2025.

A work in progress: variations on the Puglianelli sketches.

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Pinocchiella 01-04, 2024, 15×10 apiece.
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Pinocchiella 07-10, 2025, 15×10 apiece.
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Pinocchiella 11-14, 2025, 15×10 apiece.
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Pinocchiella 15-18, 2025, 15×10 apiece.
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Pinocchiella 14, 15, 19, 20, available.
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Pinocchiella e Pulcinelli on cork, 2025.

 

PePs A-D, 9×36 cm, 2025.
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An applied art variant: Pulcinellas and Pinocchios on cork, to be used as coasters or to be hung on the wall as original drawings (cork thickness: 3 cm, possibly reinforced and with beveled corners).
Sold per set at a price of 15 euros each.
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PePs 01-06, 10×60 cm, 2025.
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PePs 07-12, 10×60 cm, 2025.
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PePs 13-15, 10×45 cm, 2025.
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PePs 16-21, 9×54,2025.
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PePs 21-27, 10×60 cm, 2025.
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Dante all’università per stranieri (2017-2025)

Spuglia Dante 01

Spuglia Siena 01

La sede di un’università per stranieri pare il luogo indicato per un’installazione artistica che ha per soggetto l’opera dantesca, che è come il “logo” della lingua italiana.

Come alludere meglio alla sua perennità, e allo stesso tempo alla precarietà dei tempi storici e della trasmissione letteraria, se non trasferendo il testo su maioliche, su materiale da costruzione?

Trascrivere manualmente un canto a scelta per ogni cantico; l’incertezza e l’imprevedibilità della scrittura a pennello su un supporto permanente quale la piastrella è l’aspetto contradditorio, quindi interessante, di una tale installazione.

L’idea della trascrizione di testi letterari mi viene da un lato come un tentativo di parodia della cultura popolare (i proverbi sulle mattonelle appese nelle sale da pranzo) e dall’altro dalla lettura di un breve testo di Walter Benjamin. Lo scrittore tedesco confronta lettura e trascrizione; la prima è come sorvolare in aereo una strada: se ne ha una vista d’insieme ma non se ne ha l’esperienza; per conoscere davvero un tragitto occorre percorrerlo a piedi, così come fa l’amanuense che ricopia un manoscritto antico.

La mia è una grafia pessima. Il tentativo di addomesticarla va insieme a quest’idea del necessario conservare e tramandare. E il supporto ceramico è forse più duraturo della carta e finanche dei vari mezzi informatici di stoccaggio.

Tre canti della Commedia, uno per cantica, sono trascritti piastrella per piastrella, una terzina per pezzo. In tal modo il filologo del futuro potrà ricostruire almeno qualche rima completa del testo dantesco. E l’archeologo del futuro dovrà capire perché testi letterari fossero parte delle mura di un grosso edificio rivestito anch’esso di mattoncini in cortina.

Il formato “zoccolo” (10×20 centimetri) permette di riprodurre una terzina intera; ho vegliato, una volta scelta una delle varie edizioni possibili, a evitare ogni refuso, nel processo abbastanza laborioso del lavoro in officina. La mia sola licenza artistica: ho scritto in continuità lineare, come nel flusso di un telex, senza rispettare il verso né l’a capo.

Un canto a scelta per ogni cantica: rosso per l’Inferno, naturalmente; verde ramino per il Purgatorio; azzurro per il Paradiso, evidentemente. Un piano di scale per ogni canto: possono essere percorse in senso ascendente o discendente. Ma la gerarchia dantesca non è rispettata: il Purgatorio si troverà al piano superiore e il Paradiso in quello intermedio. La realtà che viviamo merita di farsi trovare ai piani alti.

Salvatore Puglia, novembre 2017

PS: nel maggio 2018 sono state aggiunte un centinaio di maioliche, nelle varie lingue insegnate all’università, come contrappunto al testo dantesco.

Spuglia_Dante_02

Spuglia_Dante_01

Spuglia Siena 04

Spuglia Siena 05(Foto: M. Vedovelli)

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L’installazione è stata poi ripresa, nel 2022 e 2023, con la produzione di diverse maioliche intitolate a personalità letterarie, sistemate a prossimità delle aule a loro dedicate. Vedi anche:
Articolo sull’inaugurazione dell’aula magna, settembre 2022.

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See also the short video (2017):
Dante all’università per stranieri

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Polifilo alla Marina di Vietri

Polifilo alla Marina di Vietri 01

 

Dwelling Tuscia

00 panoramica paese

01 casa panoramica

02 casa dall'esterno

03 ingresso piazzetta

04 Aliosha sulle scale

05 Via per Sant'Anna

06 Sant'Anna

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

08 Ingresso living

09 finestra stanza

10 stanza letto

11 stanza letto

12 stanza bambini

17 livingOLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

14 le sedie delle Trusche

16 il sotto colonne

19 autobus per Viterbo

 

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Video stage Alois

 

 

Pinocchiella e Pulcinelli on ceramics, 2025.

A couple dozen  Pinocchiella e Pulcinelli on ceramic tiles, sized 15×10, realized in January 2025.

In 2024, I used the same motif on slate tiles measuring 14×10 cm: Pulcinelli e Pinocchiella.

Price of the each tile 15×10: 30€, shipping within Europe included.

In the images below, the last open kiln (September 2024), and the new figures out of the oven (”a terra”, January 2025).

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A project for a table:
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New sketches:

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Anne Clergue galerie, Arles, 2024-2025.

 

Φersu, 1986.

Exhibited at the show Masques d’Artistes, Salons de la Malmaison, Cannes, France, March to June 1987.

Realized in Paris, 5 rue de Condé, during the Winter of 1986-1987.

 

5, rue de Condé, 1986-1989.

Des négatifs retrouvés dans une malle, accompagnés du roman d’un ami.

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Merci a Gilles, qui m’a transmis un exemplaire du livre de Pierre, que moi-même j’ai égaré.

 

 

Puglianella, 2024.

The subject of this series is the popular character of Pulcinella (Punchinello) from the Neapolitan glove puppets theatre (please refer to Bruno Leone‘s Casa delle Guarattelle and to the World Enciclopedia of Puppetry Arts article).

On June 18 2024 I completed 104 sketches, following the venerable examples of Giandomenico Tiepolo and Mimmo Paladino Punchinello drawings, and, as on October 14, I had done a total of 208.

About 50 original drawings have been transferred on ceramics, and I maintain the right to reproduce them in the future.

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Please also see the links to the Giorgio Agamben’s book on Pulcinella (2016), to the recent show of Mimmo Paladino drawings (Naples 2023-2024) and to the Giandomenico Tiepolo  series Divertimenti per li regazzi (also, the Italian Wikipedia article on this popular figure).

”La morte è morta!”, Anonymous guarattellaro, Genoa, april 2013, and a French text accompanying the achieved project:

Pourquoi Polichinelle ?

Pourquoi ce personnage de divertissement populaire et enfantin, alors que Spuglia est censé faire, depuis quarante ans, un art érudit et engagé et même, comme il prétend, ‘’une photographie de l’histoire’’ ? Et avec tout ce qui arrive dans le monde ?

Que peut dire de ‘’sensé’’ ce guignol dont le seul ressort dramaturgique est le constant malentendu linguistique avec ses adversaires, et le seul levier comique est sa (très limitée) mimique ?

N’ayant pas de réponse à ce questionnement, ne sachant pas pourquoi, après une visite au mont Janicule de mon enfance avec mon fils Lucien, où l’on assista à une représentation en tous points identique, mot par mot, du Pulcinella e il diavolo que je vis en 1961, je décidai, devant son enthousiasme, de l’aider d’abord dans la construction d’un théâtre en carton et, par la suite, de me mettre moi-même à dessiner des Polichinelles, entreprise pour laquelle j’eus la chance de tomber sur deux illustres antécédents, les 104 dessins de Polichinelle de Domenico Tiepolo (fin XVIIIe siècle) et les 104 dessins, du même sujet, de Mimmo Paladino (fin XXIe siècle).

Ces petits dessins, qui au lieu que 104 sont devenus 208 (je ne le dis pas par vantardise mais parce-que leur exécution est des plus rapides), ont fini naturellement par être reproduits sur des supports d’art applique, la céramique, l’ardoise. Le personnage de Polichinelle vient de la culture populaire et il y retourne. Il servira à décorer une assiette ou un carreau sur lequel on posera une cafetière.

Ce n’est qu’après avoir entrepris ce labeur que j’ai commencé à me documenter et j’ai trouvé des béquilles idéologiques de grande envergure : Giorgio Agamben et Bruno Leone. Du premier je vais citer le Polichinelle ou Divertissement pour les jeunes gens en quatre scènes (édition française Macula 2017 et italienne Nottetempo 2015) et en particulier la phrase, très réconfortante pour moi : ‘’Précisément parce qu’elle porte en elle une dimension métahistorique, la comédie entretient un lien intime avec l’histoire, elle en porte la crise – le jugement – en tous sens décisive’’ (p. 13).

Ce paragraphe vient juste après ceux où Agamben dit comment les comédies de Aristophane, Lysistrata, Le Acharniens, ont été écrites dans une ville sous siège et dévastée par la pestilence.

Bruno Leone (le ‘’sauveur’’ de la tradition napolitaine des Guarattelle, le théatre de rue des marionnettes à main) ne manque pas de citer Agamben (qui à son tour le cite) quand il parle de la voix de Polichinelle, produite avec un instrument mécanique, la pivetta ou ‘’sifflet pratique’’ : ”La voix – le geste – de Polichinelle montre qu’il y a encore quelque chose à dire quand il n’est plus possible de parler, tout comme ses blagues montrent qu’il y a encore quelque chose à faire quand toute action est devenue impossible” (G. A., Autoritratto nello studio, Nottetempo 2017, p. 109, édition française Autoportrait dans l’atelier, l’Arachnéen 2020, que je n’ai pas consulté, c’est pour ça que la traduction est la mienne).

Il est émouvant de lire Leone quand il décrit comment, face à une vraie situation de guerre (l’invasion de l’Irak en 1990) il doit faire jouer Polichinelle, qui ne s’exprime habituellement que dans des situations de conflit : avant qu’ils ne puissent le toucher, tous les adversaires, le diable, le policier, le mafieux tombes raides morts : la guerre l’empêche de faire la guerre.

Là est la mission de la marionnette : ‘’Pulcinella con la sua voce e il suo ballare mette in scena la voglia di vivere nella sua essenza primordiale’’.  Polichinelle, avec sa voix et sa danse, met en scène la volonté de vivre dans son essence primordiale (B.L., ‘’La voce di Pulcinella’’, Revista de Estudos sobre Teatro de Formas Animadas, Florianópolis 2018, v. 1, n. 19, pp. 46-60).

Et cette volonté de vie d’un personnage (du latin persona, de l’étrusque Φersu) est plus forte que tout, même que la mort : voir la représentation d’un Guarattellaro de Gênes, en avril 2013, ‘’ la Morte è morta !’’….  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzYrQGg9znc.
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All the Punchinellos sketches:

01-04
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05-08
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09-12
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13-16
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17-20
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21-24
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25
-28
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29-32
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33-36
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37-40
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41-44
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45-48
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49-52
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53-56
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57-60
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61-64
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65-68
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69-72
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73-76
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77-80
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81-84
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85-88
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89-92
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93-96
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97-100
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101-104
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And the ”off-the-shelf” drawings:
105-108.
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109-112
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113-116

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117-120

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121-124

.125-128
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129-132

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133-136

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137-140

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141-144

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145-148

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149-152

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153-156
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157-160
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161-164
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165-168
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169-172
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173-176
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177-180
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181-184
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185-188
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189-192
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193-196
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197-200
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201-204
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205-208

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Up to 130, August 2024.

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This series is followed (end of October 2024) by the Pinocchiella sketches, which will be reproduced on slate tablets.

Note: you may have noticed the play on words between “Pulcinella” and “Puglianella”, which aims to desacralize this almost mythological character, while taking artistic responsibility for such a desecration.

 

An etiquette lesson, video, 2000.

Ou bien… ou bien, video, 2000.

Un échange public

A video recorded at the Jan Van Eyck Academy, Maastricht, The Netherlands, in 2000.

 

 

A native Spanish speaker reading a text in a language he does not understand, a French-Russian conversation manual from the Soviet period, in front of the Reykjavik municipal library in winter.

Uno speaker di lingua madre spagnola che legge un testo in una lingua che non comprende, un manuale di conversazione franco-russo del periodo sovietico, di fronte alla biblioteca municipale di Reykjavik, in inverno.

 

Pistris, 2024.

Pistrice bicefala 01, 10×30, acrylic on slate.
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Pistrice bicefala 02
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Pistrice bicefala 03
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Pistrice bicefala 04
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Pistrice bicefala 05
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Pistris bifida biceps

Questo lavoro di arte applicata, su ardesia e su ceramica, è una ripresa su altre forme della tematica della mostruosità, già sviluppata nella serie Histoire des monstres (2021-2024).

La Pistrice, come è noto, è un mostro marino mitologico, ibrido di mammifero carnivoro, di pesce e di serpente, divoratrice di esseri umani.
Rappresenterò questa variante di Leviatano su tavolette di ardesia da 10×30 cm, in un formato a ‘’zoccolo’’ che permette di sviluppare il corpo e di apporvi una coda-fauce dalla quale – a partire da modelli trovati nel Medioevo fantastico di Jorgis Baltrusaitis che mi accompagna dal 1979 – fuoriusciranno personaggi contemporanei che forse qualcheduno riconoscerà.

Per informazioni e eventuali ordinazioni, potete andare sulla pagina Bio/Contacts di questo sito.

This applied art work, on slate and ceramic, is a reprise on other forms of the theme of monstrosity, already developed in the series Histoire des monstres (2021-2024).

The Pistris, as it is known, is a mythological sea monster, a hybrid of carnivorous mammal, fish and snake, a devourer of human beings.
I will represent this variant of Leviathan on 10×30 cm slate tablets, in a ”plinth” format that allows the body to be developed and a tail-fauce affixed to it, from which–from models found in Jorgis Baltrusaitis’ Fantastic Middle Ages, which has been with me since 1979–contemporary characters will emerge that perhaps some will recognize.

For information and possible orders, you can go to the Bio/Contacts page of this site.

Cette œuvre d’art appliqué, sur ardoise et céramique, est une reprise sous d’autres formes du thème de la monstruosité, déjà développé dans la série Histoire des monstres (2021-2024).

La Pistris, on le sait, est un monstre marin mythologique, hybride de mammifère carnivore, de poisson et de serpent, dévoreur d’êtres humains.
Je représenterai cette variante du Léviathan sur des tablettes d’ardoise de 10×30 cm, dans un format « plinthe » qui permet de développer le corps et d’y apposer une queue, d’où émergeront – d’après les modèles trouvés dans le Moyen Âge fantastique de Jorgis Baltrusaitis, que j’ai en ma possession depuis 1979 – des personnages contemporains que certains reconnaîtront.

Pour toute information et commande éventuelle, veuillez vous rendre sur la page Bio/Contacts de ce site.

 

Batz Variations (2024).

2024, Les bêtes de Batz 07, 24×42.
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2024, Les bêtes de Batz 08, 24×42.
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2024, Les bêtes de Batz 09, 24×42.
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2024, Les bêtes de Batz 09, 24×42.
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2024, Les bêtes de Batz 11, 24×42.
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Île de Batz, juillet 2024.

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Millenovecento (2018-2024)

Below are works from a new series on the Ex voto theme, featuring red fluorescent shapes painted on paper documents. The subject is, plainly, “my” XXth Century. The Ex voto series was created and exhibited from 2004 to 2006. This new series is photography based: a black and white image printed directly on glass is superimposed on a “re-painted” found paper.
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2017 Civiltà romana 06 30x30

2019 Ara Poliphili 02 20x30

 

2019 Cranial nerves 02 30x40

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Millenovecento, installation in progress (120×160 cm), October 2019:
Millenovecento parziale

Nella mia installazione del 2006, Ex voto, intervenivo con forme di colore sui miei propri disegni, così come su documenti originali trovati negli archivi e nei mercatini di quartiere. Il riferimento evidente di questo lavoro erano i tanti muri delle chiese italiane coperti di quadretti o di formelle di parti del corpo in argento. Nel mio caso, non si trattava tanto di rendere grazie a un salvatore intervento divino, quanto di presentare una parodia laica di questi memoriali.

La struttura a mosaico (o a « quadreria ») dell’installazione affermava che ogni pezzo, pur essendo unico e insostituibile, non poteva avere senso se non nel contesto di quelli che lo circondavano. La cornice di piombo, che costruivo nel concepire l’immagine, costituiva un tutt’uno con l‘immagine presentata.

Una dozzina di anni dopo il compimento di quel lavoro, ne presento una “ripresa”, a base fotografica stavolta. E stavolta l’installazione è più decisamente orientata sulla storia, la nostra comune storia intrecciata alla mia biografia. In questo senso “storicizzo” me stesso in quanto uomo che ha vissuto la maggior parte della sua vita nel secolo passato.

Non c’è una gerarchia delle immagini né per pregnanza né per qualità. A buone stampe analogiche di mie foto accosto ritagli di giornale, fotocopie, fotografie da archivi privati. A volte l’immagine è riprodotta su vetro e sovrapposta a documenti cartacei, altre volte è la fotografia su carta che fa da sfondo a un testo o a un grafico riprodotto su vetro.

Ogni volta è presente un passaggio di colore, un rosso luminescente, che crea uno sfalsamento della visione e che è, a tutt’oggi, un po’ la mia firma.

Quest’installazione di un centinaio di pezzi sarà doppiamente storica: difatti debbo interrompere il mio ventennale stile di lavoro. La ditta UCIC di Asti è recentemente fallita, ventiquattro fra suoi ventisei addetti si trovano in disoccupazione, e né io né i miei amici italiani riusciamo più a trovare, in qualche fondo di magazzino, l’insostituibile Lumen Rosso 26.

2019 Z Lumen


Millenovecento, full installation, March 2021.
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The installation at the Gallery Sit down, Paris, October 2020-January 2021.


At the Gallery Troisième oeil, Bordeaux, March-May 2021.
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Here’s the artist’s comment on each piece:
Millenovecento 01-120 and Millenovecento 121-156.

In my 2006 installation, “Ex-voto“, I intervened with color shapes on my drawings, as well as on original documents found in the archives and in the neighborhood markets. The clear reference of this work were the walls of the Italian churches covered with small squares or panels of silver body parts. In my case, it was not so much a matter of giving thanks to a savior divine intervention, but of presenting a secular onthese memorials. The mosaic structura of the installation states that each piece, unique and irreplaceable, could not have meaning except in the context of those around it. The lead frame, which I built in conceiving the image, was one with the image presented. A dozen years after the completion of this work, I present a «shot», based on photography. This time the installation is more decidedly history-oriented, our common history intertwined with my biography. In this sense, I «historicize» myself as a man who lived most of his life in the past century. There is no hierarchy of images neither by the subtance nor by the quality. A good analogue prints of my photos alongside newspaper clippings, photocopies, photographs from private archives. Sometimes the image is reproduced on glass and superimposed on paper documents, other times it is the photograph on paper that is the background of a text or a graphic reproduced on glass. Each time there is a color change, a luminscent red, which creates an offset and which is, to date my signature.

Here a reminder of the
Ex voto installation, 2006 (200×350 cm):

Déjà, Espace Commines, Paris

DSCN0277

2006 Ex voto 01

Déjà 01

Déjà 02

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Ruins in the Forest 12 bis, 2022.

Exhibited at the show Le sport : pour la beauté du geste, Les Franciscaines, Deauville, January-May 2024.

RnF B 12 bis 30×40
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Texte Thierry Grillet

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Canopiocchi mediorientali, 2024.

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And the PDF of the whole series, completed February 1st, 2024:
2024 Canopiocchi mediorientali TOT

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Canopiocchi : un jeu de mots entre canopi (canopes) et occhi (yeux), qui sonne toscan vernaculaire, comme toscan est le personnage du conte pour enfants de Collodi, Pinocchio.

Comme on le sait les canopes étaient des vases destinés à contenir les cendres d’un chef, forcément d’un guerrier, dans la civilisation d’Étrurie centrale (Chiusi, Arezzo).

Et Pinocchio, c’est la marionnette-enfant qui ne sait pas choisir entre le bien et le mal, les Lumières ou les Ténèbres, l’école publique ou le Pays des jouets (il Paese dei balocchi).

J’ai imaginé, aussi dans une tardive réminiscence beckettienne, deux personnages contraints de cohabiter dans un même espace exigu. Les couvre-chefs des deux personnages principaux rappellent des costumes moyen-orientaux, leur bec ou leur nez ramène à l’imaginaire de la bande dessinée.

Qu’il me soit permis pour une fois un brin d’humour noir, noir comme l’ardoise.

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Canopiocchi: a play on words between canopi (canopies) and occhi (eyes), which sounds vernacular Tuscan, as Tuscan is the character in Collodi’s children’s story Pinocchio.

As we know, in the civilization of central Etruria (Chiusi, Arezzo), canopic vessels were used to hold the ashes of a leader, necessarily a warrior.

And Pinocchio is the child-puppet who can’t choose between good and evil, Enlightenment or Darkness, public school or the Land of Toys (il Paese dei balocchi).

I also imagined, in a late Beckettian reminiscence, two characters forced to cohabit in the same cramped space. The headgear of the two main characters is reminiscent of Middle Eastern costumes, while their beaks and noses remind of the world of comic strips.

Allow me, for once, a touch of black humor, black as slate.

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Canopiocchi: un gioco di parole tra canopi e occhi, che suona dialettalmente toscano, come toscano è il personaggio del Pinocchio di Collodi.

Come sappiamo, nella civiltà dell’Etruria centrale (Chiusi, Arezzo), i vasi canopi erano usati per contenere le ceneri di un capo, in genere un guerriero.

E Pinocchio è il burattino bambino che non sa scegliere tra il bene e il male, tra l’Illuminismo e le Tenebre, tra la scuola pubblica e il Paese dei Balocchi.

Ho anche immaginato, in una reminiscenza tardo-beckettiana, due personaggi costretti a vivere insieme nello stesso spazio angusto. I copricapi dei due protagonisti ricordano i costumi mediorientali, i loro becchi e i loro nasi sono fumettistici.

Permettetemi per una volta di abbandonarmi a un po’ di umorismo nero, nero come l’ardesia.

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Histoire des monstres bis (2023).

Some of these works are ”old” Historia Monstrorum reconfigured using my characteristic luminescent red, while others are new creations. As Aldrovandi’s monsters are often sea creatures, I have chosen to reproduce them together with transparent photographs of European coastal sites.

Histoire des monstres 07 bis, Via cava Fratenuti-Raia exiccata, 24×42.
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Histoire des monstres 13 bis, Pont du Gard-Sus marinus, 24×42.
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Histoire des monstres 15 bis, Maguelone-Orca balaenam, 24×42.
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Histoire des monstres 16 bis , Maguelone-Monstrosus Cyprinus, 24×42.
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Histoire des monstres 02 bis, Lagos-Andura piscis, 24×42.
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Histoire des monstres 11 ter, Camp de César-Niliaca Parei, 24×42.
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Bestiarum 2023, 15×15 et 20×20.

15×15 available December 2023
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20×20 available December 2023
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Une nouvelle série de dessins inspirés par la céramique vernaculaire d’Italie du Sud et l’ouvrage de Jurgis Baltrusaitis Le Moyen Âge fantastique. Je les ai exécutés sur biscuit à la fin novembre à l’usine Scotto de Vietri sul Mare.

Format des carreaux : 20×20 et 15×15 cm, épaisseur 1 cm. Couleur :  rouge bordeaux.
Prix 30 € pièce les 20×20, 25 € les 15×15, frais de port inclus.

Pour les formats ”zoccolo”, voir : Bestiarium 10×20

Voir aussi la page récapitulative Ceramic writings 2003-2023.
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A new series of drawings inspired by the vernacular ceramics of Southern Italy as well as by Jurgis Baltrusaitis The Fantastic in the Middle Ages.

Format of the ceramic tiles: 20 x 20 cm. Thickness 1 cm. Color: Burgundy red.

Price: 30 € per tile, including shipping within Europe.

Orders can be made via my website, at the page Bio/Contact.

 

 

 

Bestiarium, ceramic tiles 2023.


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A new series of designs inspired by Southern Italian vernacular ceramics and Jurgis Baltrusaitis’ book Le Moyen Âge fantastique. They have just come out of the kiln at the Scotto factory in Vietri sul Mare.

Tiles are available in 10×20, 15×15 and 20×20 cm. Thickness 1 cm. Color: burgundy red.
Price €25 each (€30 the 20×20), shipping not included.

See also the Ceramic writings 2003-2023 summary page, and examples at the bottom of this page.

Remaing tiles, format 10×20 cm.
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Remaing tiles, format 15×15 cm.
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Remaing tiles, format 20×20 cm.
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Anni Settanta, triptychs (2023).

(From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triptych)
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At the dawn of my seventies, I am beginning a ”historiographical” work on the 1970s, the decade of my twenties. I think it will develop in triptychs and I hope to complete three or four of them.

Wallflowers remix (Anni Settanta, uno).

 

La Buoncostume remix (Anni Settanta, due).

 

Cravos (Anni Settanta, tre).

 

Polytechnio (Anni Settanta, quattro).

 

Fenomeni morbosi svariati (Anni Settanta, cinque)

 

 

Millenovecento residui

Laralia (Dale i Sunnfjord 1999)

This work is entitled Laralia. The dictionary tells us that, in ancient Roman times, the Lares were the ancestors’ spirits, whose images, made out of painted wood or cast wax, were collected and worshipped in a specially designated part of the mansion called the Laralia.
These pictures were periodically displayed in processions, and then set on fire. Pliny the Elder mentions them in the section of Naturalis Historia devoted to painting (Book, XXXV, 6-7): in his criticism of modern art then in vogue, he underlines the moral value of these portraits, which served not only to commemorate the deceased, but also to accompany the living, so that “when somebody died, the entire assembly of his departed relatives was also present”.
Ten pictures of local people, chosen at random among the ones conserved at the Fjaler Folkbibliotek, have undergone a multi-staged process of transformation: first, they are deformed in order to reveal their Anamorphosis, reminiscent of the long evening shadows; then, they are enlarged to life size; finally, their silhouettes are traced and cut out on boards of pine wood.

These black silhouettes were placed atop Dalsåsen Hill and then set on fire, in a brief ceremony.
On the other end, the three-meter high plates, from which the silhouettes had been carved out, were erected in the Øvstestølen Plateau, above Dale, in a spot visible from the Jøtelshaugen Peak. Painted in oxide red, these steles turn their backs to the west, so that, at the end of the day, around mid-August, the shadow of each top touches a stone, under which the original picture of the corresponding individual has been placed.
This work is mobile. During the day, in sunlight, the shadows on the ground change shape, cross each other and are, for a fleeting moment, similar to the original picture.
The instantaneous freezing of the photographic image documents a unique state of a person and is meant to be recognisable by the person’s relatives and the collective memory. In Laralia this image is subjected to multiple reproductions, which progressively distance the subject from its departure point.
The final stage of this process – the woodcut – is the opposite of the photographic image, in terms of the time and energy required for its execution; the slowness can be seen as a less tyrannical and intense way of recording the image.
The ten pictures, transformed into steles whose commemorative function is only vaguely related to the individuals they portray, will surrender to the action of time and nature, which will further modify them and ultimately lead to their decay.

This work is not intended to be a mere celebration of local history. Instead, it is an attempt to finding a sign or a “monogram”, of vanished individualities that could possibly remain after a progressive flattening of the recorded images. Perhaps this process mirrors the functioning of our memory, with its arbitrary choices, gaps and repetitions and constitutes an attempt to navigate between the opposing poles of amnesia and hypermnesia, forgetfulness and obsession.

laralia-01

laralia-02

laralia-032

laralia-04

laralia-05

 

(A short movie by Knut Nikolai Bergstrom, 3’32”)

laralia-06

 

Note: for a journal of this installation, see Diario Boreale, interrotto. And, also in Italian, a transcribed notebook: Taccuini scandinavi 1999-2000.

 

 

 

Travaux d’intérêt local (gardois)

de 2023 à 2017

Les monstres du Gardon 01, 24×42, 2023.
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Les monstres du Gardon 02, 24×42, 2023.
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Paulhan 00, 24×36, 2023. La série de six : Paulhan.
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Nuovi mostri 01, 30×42, 2023.
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Le monstre du Gardon, 20×30, 2023.
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Garriga-Potlatch, 30×30, 2023.
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From the Road 02 bis (Nages), 31×50, 2023.
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From the Road 01 bis (Camp de César), 31×50, 2023.
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Ponge 06, 24×42, 2022. La série de six : Ponge.
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Menard 05, 28×42, 2022. La série de six : Menard.
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Feuchtwanger 01, 30×40, 2022. La série de sept : Feuchtwanger.
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Histoire des monstres 11 (Laudun l’Ardoise), 24×42, 2021.
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Garriga-Petrarca III, 32×32, 2021.
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Au Temple de Diane 02, 20×30, 2020.
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Ordinary Humans 10, 20×30, 2019.
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Ordinary Humans 01, 20×30, 2019.
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Nella garriga 08, 45×60, 2017.

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Les sites représentés, en ordre chronologique : Font Verte (Gorges du Gardon), Nîmes, La Calmette, les alentours du Pont Saint Nicolas, Laudun l’Ardoise, le Mas Saint Nicolas, l’Oppidum de Nages, le Gardon de Mialet, les Salins d’Aigues Mortes, le Pont du Gard.