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This volume on one of the leading exponents of Italian sculpture continues the series of in-depth exhibitions and publications that ABC-ARTE is dedicating to the grand masters of the European avant-gardes, following the complex analysis of Fundamental Painting in the exhibition Absolute Painting.
Nanni Valentini is one of the most singular and lively personalities in the artistic explorations of the postwar period.
His approach to material, colour and figure immediately marked him out as unique in the contemporary debate. His learned and wise approach, combined with the dry potency of his sculptural visions, had no parallel among them.
The career of Valentini, who met a premature death in 1985, began with the prize that he was awarded in the Faenza National Ceramic Competition in 1956, followed by the one he won in 1958 at the Everson Museum of Fine Arts of Syracuse (New York State). His friendships with Fontana, Tancredi and the brothers Giò and Arnaldo Pomodoro, a strong attraction to the study of the most disparate intellectual fields, and his immersion in the Milanese scene of the 1960s rapidly carried his poetics from ceramics to a fundamental reasoning about the sculptural form and the image.
In the 1970s works such as Paesaggi d’argilla and Garze expressed his desire to reinterpret the clay of the earth as the possibility of infinite transitions and realities, and no longer as a simple medium.
This was the starting-point of his profound, immensely rich artistic poetics consisting of clumps of earth, landscapes, bricks, gauzes, faces and dwellings.
This volume concentrates on an examination of the crucial years 1975-1985. After a long period in which Valentini was recognised as one of the most important living ceramic sculptors, this was the decade in which he secured a place for himself on the Milanese scene with a memorable one-man show of paintings and sculptures in Carla Pellegrini’s Galleria Milano, a one-man show in the 1982 Venice Biennale, and a large-scale retrospective in the Padiglione d’arte contemporanea in Milan in 1984.
His works have also been shown and are present in many public and private collections, including the Museo del Novecento in Milan, the Museo Civico di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Varese, the Everson Museum of Fine Arts in Syracuse, the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro in Milan, the Museu de Ceràmica in Barcelona, the Hetjens Museum in Dusseldorf, the Frankfurter Kunstverein, the GAM in Turin, the Galleria Civica in Modena, and the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Faenza.
Antonio Borghese
ABC-ARTE
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Nanni Valentini. In the space between the visible and the tactile
To start with the chronology: in 1954 one of the greatest sculptors of postwar Europe, Leoncillo, won first prize at the XIV Faenza National Ceramic Competition. Two years later, the same prize was awarded to Giovan Battista Valentini, who was not yet twenty-four years old. And in 1958 his enamelled and incised bowl won a prize at the XX Ceramic International Exhibition at the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts (later the Everson) in New York State beside giants like Hans Coper, Lucie Rie and Peter Voulkos. The suggestion to invite him had come from Lucio Fontana.
Primordial, predestined talents exist, and the ceramic world immediately recognised that Valentini’s future as a brilliant ceramicist was already prefigured. But he already knew well at an early date that an instinctive and completely fluid identification with working with clay cannot be confined to the proud ceramic compound, but requires fundamental reasoning on the plastic form and its image. In other words, Valentini was not very interested in regarding himself or being regarded as a precocious great ceramicist. In the first place, he knew well that the current idea of ceramics was too imbued with idées reçues regarding the applied arts to be accepted without reservations in the elevated and limited circle of the ‘fine arts’. Fontana’s famous claim ‘I am a sculptor, not a ceramicist. I have never thrown a plate on a wheel nor painted a vase’ and masterpieces like the Angelo for the Chinelli tomb in the Milan Monumental Cemetery (1949) were there to show him the way. Secondly, he noted that, in the climate of the integration of the arts that characterised the Milan Triennials and the choices of Ponti’s Domus in those years, the treatment reserved for those artists already recognised as belonging to the circles of ‘fine art’ when they plunged their hands into clay – above all Asger Jorn after his move to Albisola Superiore – was different from that accorded to those who had grown up and developed in ceramics, as the examples of Arturo Martini and Leoncillo showed.
Still, from the activity of working with clay he retained the crucial importance of the knowledge derived from processes, an idea of experimentation that was never out to shock but was intellectually and practically considered and safeguarded. This provided him with an essential anchorage at a time when to be an artist only too often meant posing as an artist who virtually looked down on technical appropriateness. More fundamentally, he realised that the idea of ceramics is the capacity to confer form rather than the act of forming itself, the act of listening involved in thinking/making rather than intention. This stance informed many of the characteristic examples of the period with regard to material, sign and action. He sought the points of intersection outside the canonical boundaries of the discipline in the vital territory of his truly intellectual explorations and his first painterly experiences. These were prominent galleries such as La Salita in Rome and Numero in Florence, where he took part in collective exhibitions, and such figures as Gastone Novelli, Emilio Scanavino, Tancredi, Ettore Sottsass Jr, the Pomodoro brothers (a dual exhibition with Giò was held in the Galleria del Giorno in Milan in 1960, shortly before the one-man show in the Salone Annunciata), and Bepi Romagnoni: but the debut was still as a ceramicist, in the prestigious Ariete gallery in Milan in 1958, together with Albert Diato and the support of a presentation of Fontana, with grès in which the material is also its own surface, and the marking is inherent in the material: ‘I found a marking that was not separate from the material’, he wrote, as an accident due to its thickness.
The fluid and extremely volatile range of his contacts in those years, marked above all by the deep bonds of friendship with the very different genius of Tancredi, taught him that the real question was that of how to transfer his refined artisanal skills to a setting that would restore their reason and necessity, that would make of them not the purpose of an exhibition but the means to ponder an authentic substance of expression.
1960 was the year of the publication of Arturo Martini’s La scultura lingua morta by the Spotorno gallery in Milan, which finally put this final and fundamental text in circulation. Some of the commandments that can be read there are striking: sculpture as ‘bow of the spirit’, not ‘cliff, but water and sky’, not ‘an object, but an extension’, not ‘a showy virtue, but a dark womb’, and Valentini grasped what it can and should be. This was also the moment when he directly assisted Fontana with the important Malendri tomb in Faenza, an experience that gives the measure of the genius’ ruminations on a creativity that is aware of the limits of reason in painting and sculpture, and of the first exhibition of Fontana’s Nature in ‘Dalla natura all’arte’ in Palazzo Grassi, Venice.
Until then his daily life had been spent on the production of ceramics and the obsessive drawing that went with it – drawing on paper was and would always be the Leitmotiv of his activity, the place of every identification – and the tension of a private passion bent on becoming practical knowledge, the possibility of finding the affinity between a possible way of making sculpture and painting, on the one hand, and art on the other.
It was the fame of being a prestigious ceramicist – winning the first prize again in the Faenza competition in 1961 – that was his disadvantage, the first limit to cross. He saw there the risk of aptitude, the rhetorical confidence in his hands – essential to achieve definite and significant ends, but lacking a fundamental necessity.
Abandoning the daily practice in the workshop and cultivating the profound core of his identity as an artist involved radical choices – of life style, because it meant calling into question his very means of subsistence, and of personal strategy. Valentini was aware that, if artists of the previous generations had been allowed a relative ignorance of culture, art history and its forms, that was no longer possible: not for him, at any rate, who in terms of self-representation had no alternative in the form of a vocation to shine in the world, to construct useful relations, to decipher the convenient mechanisms of the art system.
His years of ‘crazy and desperate study’ consisted of relentless drawing and a vast study programme: the history of art and philosophy, anthropology and poetry, cinema and music, reaching heights of complexity that led him to write, not posing as a theoretician, but to understand, to find and thereby to find himself. He assumed an attitude to the world consonant with his character and his choices, becoming solitary, cultivating his own marginality (though never adopting the marginal pose so commonly practised by others), ensconcing himself in an allure of shyness that was the fortress of effective knowledge that could only be shared with very few. It was a form of self-defence and the cultivation of a fierce otherness, lived with such inflexible intellectual firmness, such unbending ethical rigour, to lead him to write in 1983 that his curriculum in the world of art ‘has had in me not a friend but a tenacious opponent with regard to order, continuity and promotion’.
It was not, however, a leap into the dark. Valentini was immune to the changes in taste and to art that only wanted to be a discourse on art. He had touched earth, had knowledge that dark complicity, knew that it was a mother if one has the humility and willingness to become one of her children: for example, ceasing to reason in terms of material, colour, form, or to shelter within the confines of a discipline. He left the experience and familiarity with the object to others. In 1968 the Ceramica Arcore laboratory was born, directed by his wife Tina and his brother-in-law Marco Terenzi, a wizard with the lathe, imbued with his wisdom and so committed to him that the myths regarding the extraordinary products of the laboratory, often attributed to his artistic personality by the market, are still rife today. But then, as we know, the market is not primarily interested in knowing and understanding.
Valentini concentrated on himself, listened to his own voice, accumulated experiences and ideas in a non-linear fashion: ‘– To go where, friend? – I don’t know, but we have to go’, as Jack Kerouac put it. He allowed thinking to raise big issues and to propose uncomfortable questions, while his hand followed and tested techniques and instruments, time and time again. He wrote to his friend Novelli: ‘There are those who manage to create and to act without expending anything of themselves and those who have to use themselves up completely to do the tiniest thing. It’s like wanting to plant a seed very deep in hard ground’. But the seed was planted anyway.
The turning-point came in 1973: ‘I privileged drawing and terracotta with which I made a series of plates with imprints of trees, leaves. That was my first work’. He had learnt from Fontana how to reread the reasons behind the autonomous creative force of the earth, no longer a medium but a substance with infinite possibilities. The years 1973-1974 saw the emergence of Paesaggi d’argilla and Nascita del seme. The display of the earth as earth, passing tautologically from lack of form to being, object of reconsideration and subject of generation in the process, and therefore essential qualification of vision – the substance and scope of vision was one of the themes that he took to be fundamental, like the internal geometry of the body and its possible identity, the face, in various degrees of profound and radiant penetration – shaped the primary, primordial field of creative activity.
The direction of the gaze stimulated the intuition of the series created at the same time as the Garze, monochrome gauzes whose surface the eye can pass through but whose opaque additional elements give them a basic geometric form redolent of structure, of real space, without fictional provisos.
‘I like to manipulate the earth, to see it through a web, to bathe things in colour. I try to understand what is in the space between the visible and the tactile’, he wrote in 1975, at the time when, in treating the earth as earth, Valentini assumed it as a whole as equivalent to the idea of material, which is nothing but itself and its own physical and mental stigmata, body and skin, the axis of a rotation that becomes navel, horizon, the verification of the gaze and in the gaze, appearing and immediately becoming possible as memory and word, discourse: true because not different from itself.
It was also the moment when Carla Pellegrini, a gallery owner with a distaste for the obvious, came across his basically different works and decided to present them in her Milanese gallery on 20 May 1976, followed by another memorable exhibition, Ceramiche e luoghi, in 1980. In 1976 ‘there were transparent webs hanging or detached from the wall. In another room there were terracotta floor tiles’, the author wrote. According to Tommaso Trini, Valentini’s operation was ‘to recreate the minimal and mental equivalent of the perception of the landscape, and therefore of reality’, ‘the screened visibility of a Lo Savio delightfully opening onto the delicate landscapes of Melotti’; a blue that indirectly evokes the Theogony of Hesiod in which Gaia, ‘ample-breasted, a safe haven for ever’, gives birth to Uranus: earth and sky, horizon and landscape, visible and tactile, the space in which an autonomous meaning is produced.
The gauzes of Garze and the plates heralded a season of extraordinary fervour, an intense sequence of lumps of earth and bricks, mute qualifications of the place, the sequence, the spiral and the crater (a huge Cratere, 1981, entered the collections of the Civico Museo d’Arte Contemporanea (CIMAC), then the Museo del Novecento in Milan, a Colonna blanca with crater, 1985, went to the Musei di Varese), the wall, doorway and window, and therefore the idea of the threshold: and the hearth, and thus the home: and the face. These works progressively teased out the varied formative actions of the earth, as in Rotazione, fully sculpture and determination of its place not only by convention, which won the Faenza Prize a third time for the artist in 1977. They were open to grafts, suggestions and mood shifts between the philosophical, the poetic and the anthropological (if I may record a personal recollection, the most vivid is formed by our intense conversations about Vernant and Caillois), in which the hand of the artist operates on the earth like a son caught up in an incestuous and, in its own way, pure love: Un ombelico per Empedocle, 1978, Una materia per Pitagora, 1979, Endimione e i 28 volti di Selene, 1980, L’ombra di Peter Schlemihl, 1982: down to the gnosis of L’inno della perla, 1984.
The Leitmotiv is the face, the very possibility of the gaze and of its caprices: they are bony faces, full, corporeal like cast-off clothes, like a Romanesque capital – take the capitals of Dialogo, shown in the one-man exhibition of his public celebration in the Padiglione d’arte contemporanea (Pac) in Milan on 19 January 1984, a sequel to the one-man show at the Venice Biennale in 1982 – and taken together have the vacant features of Totenmasken, metaphysical mannequins, like imprints on a face. Plates with blind faces also appear, as well as Scudo di Perseo, 1981, and Gorgone Medusa, 1982, in a reflection conducted in a wide range of works. Another theme that undergoes numerous elaborations is Il vaso e il polipo, 1982, a sort of ekpurosis in which the model of the Cretan jug of Gurnià flares up in the separation of the image from the sculptural body, and while the octopus does have eyes, the face of the twin, Il vaso cretese, 1983, now in the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro in Milan, is no more than an imprint.
The transition is crucial for Valentini, for it materially incarnates his statement that he is no longer a conventional ceramicist because the very idea of the vase, crater, bowl, meander can support something very different. Deriva, begun in 1982, is only a step away, in which the centrifugal force is activated by the large spiral cavity within which movements, actions and vocations of the material are deposited: shell, spiral, wave, meander, centres, cavern, sun, mouth... Every element is itself and at the same time an organic part of a flow, and the sense of process, the temporal implication of this coagulation of forms is declared by the many studies, continuous hypotheses of variants, of material and effective impurity called upon to refute suspicions of something well made and to place value on unfinishing, on the movement of intimate tensions that the creative act records but does not placate.
The new decade had also introduced new fundamental themes. First of all, there is the centrality of the idea of the home as dwelling, as highlighted in Das Haus in der Kunst at Babel in Heilbronn in 1981, and reinterpreted down to the one-man show in the Museu de Ceràmica in Barcelona in 1984. Houses are archetypes that become places, memory, narrative, poetic interstice, perfect symbol of space as something feminine: the house that generates inside and outside, that encloses space, womb and warmth, darkness and intimacy: the material of life.
Valentini reached his extreme point – extreme not because he ran out of themes to explore, but because of his sudden death – in his reflection on the standing figure, the ancient fascination that made him look at Martini, Sironi and Carrà, and that an Annunciazione imbued with the air of Mantegna in the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua led him to conceive as a double in between: in between structuring bodies, cavities that tell a lot, and skins as trembling drapes, restoring the rustle of the passing of the angel. The Annunciazione was also present at the one-man show in the Pac in 1984 to compose a problematic triad of many annunciations and many suggestions.
Man is earth, the angel is the other of the earth, the complicit other of man in a dazzling and uncontrollable reverberation of mental and poetic doublings.
Poetic, above all, in an inextricably tangled whirl of suggestions. The angel of Rilke, and of Keats, and of Benjamin. Above all, I believe, ‘the necessary angel of earth / since, in my sight, you see the earth again’ of Wallace Stevens. The angel of the annunciation of Antonello too, whom you only see in the gaze (within the gaze) of the Virgin, and the one rustling in the domestic surprise of Lorenzo Lotto. And the angel of Licini who tempts Amalassunta, the impure Selene of the Marche: it is his face and the shiver of collapsing and quivering lines to dissolve the foreignness of the sky and that lie behind Angelo Dioniso, 1984-1985, now in the Museo Diocesano in Milano, kindred spirit of Licini’s in his Miracolo di San Marco.
La nascita dell’angelo, 1985, is the title of the sculptures planned for a one-man show in the Hetjens Museum in Düsseldorf, which opened a few months after the death of Valentini. Another vast work was ready in the studio, Casa (now GAM, Turin), sharing the same conception as Dialogo shown in the Pac, which would be highlighted in the 1987 retrospective in the Galleria Civica in Modena alongside Angelo Dioniso.
It is the angel that leaves a blue trace in the house in Modena. Blue because it is celestial substance that becomes an inside, a passage, a possibility. Blue like the metaphysics of Japanese ceramics. A different metaphysics. And always the clay of the earth.
Flaminio Gualdoni
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…. I chose matter
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.
Nanni Valentini, 1979