What We Talk About When We Talk About Love?, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love? wrote Raymond Carver in the early 1980s in one of his most famous and extraordinary short story collections, recounting the crisis of the contemporary era through the seemingly minimal lives, broken relationships, dramas, houses, and motels of deep provincial America. This quotation came back to my mind reading the beautiful title chosen by Alberto Mattia Martini for the exhibition by Bertozzi & Casoni held until September 10 at the ABC-ARTE Gallery in Genoa, which reads verbatim: What’s the most incredible thing you’ve done?, What’s the most incredible thing you’ve done? Bertozzi & Casoni, like Carver, invite us to reflect on wonder, amazement, and also on the melancholic drama of contemporary life through their surprising accumulations of objects, trash, and traces of humanity, as Alberto Mattia Martini calls them in the exhibition text.
Because, over the years, we have seen many works by Bertozzi & Casoni in fairs, galleries, and museums, and we have learned to appreciate them, to love them deeply, to recognize their language, their baroque richness, that almost obsessive taste for detail, for a corroded surface, for the fold of a rag or a plastic bag, for the rust dripping along a drum. We should therefore be used to it by now, know its secret once and for all, and no longer be surprised; instead, every time, we draw close again, look better, and ask ourselves if everything is truly made of ceramic. Everything, yes, everything: the metal, the plastic, the cardboard, the piled clothes, the feathers of a flamingo or a parrot, the whole and broken eggs, the flowers, the insects, the crumpled sheets, the dirty teacups, the remains of a meal. We know very well what the answer is, yet we continue not to completely trust what we see, because the wonder produced by the extraordinary meticulousness of their work as ceramists does not end when we have discovered its secret, but restarts every time from the incredible ambiguity of viewing what unexpectedly stands before us. “The phase we prefer is probably the research carried out after an intuition, an idea,” the artists recalled in an interview conducted a few years before the passing, in 2023, of Stefano Dal Monte Casoni. “Researching materials, images, and relationships engages us like embarking on a journey, an adventure. The most difficult part is the realization, where it is very important to stay focused on the point, which in some cases can also mean staying on that point for a year or more.” Yet, they warned, “art looked with suspicion upon those who, like us, came from a background where technique was such an important part of making art.” And it is remarkable to think how that very technique, once viewed with such diffidence, has become today the primary reason for our wonder. Today, with Stefano Dal Monte Casoni no longer with us, those words inevitably take on a different meaning, because what remains is not merely an extraordinary technical skill or an unmistakable repertoire of images, but the common grammar built by the two artists over more than forty years of work, still capable of holding together expertise and hazard, wonder and melancholy.
Alberto Mattia Martini writes that “the works of Bertozzi & Casoni configure themselves as vestiges of the contemporary, testimonies of an anthropological condition marked by accumulation, consumption, and the continuous transformation of the material world. Ceramics becomes the vehicle for a radical questioning of the visible. Wonder is no longer merely a quality attributed to the works, but a category through which to interrogate the relationship between reality, representation, and perception.” Indeed, the word “vestiges” continues to come to mind while walking through the exhibition, because when we think of vestiges we usually think of something ancient, a vanished civilization, a fragment that time has consumed and then spared, whereas these are the vestiges of a civilization still in full swing, our own. They are the things that until a moment ago we held in our hands, on our plates, in our pockets, or in the bathroom cabinet: chip bags, snack packaging, cigarettes, medicines, receipts, banknotes, cans, plastic forks, flyers, dirty plates, watermelon leftovers, coffee cups, car batteries, drums, and paint cans end up resembling one another, as if everything, once used, acquired the same patina, the same melancholic color of waste. Industrial residues assimilate to table scraps, objects that have traversed the cycle of production and labor for years blend with what remains of a breakfast or a party, and even an UNICEF flyer—which should rightly remind us of the dramatic problems of a distorted contemporary world that contemplates without resolving issues such as world hunger, the horror of wars, and the great problems still afflicting a large part of the human family—ends up, abandoned, sad, lonely, half-crumpled, alongside broken eggs, dollars, and a hot water bottle, becoming itself abandoned paper, a consumed image, part of the same accumulation of which we ourselves are both victims and producers.
In this madness of things, in this continuous mixing of goods, scraps, and images, there is nature, which in the work of Bertozzi & Casoni seems to become ever more present and ever more stubborn: there are eggs, which belong to life and at the same time are its empty shell; there is a huge octopus stretched over a tray of cups, a reptile’s tail crossing a pile of plates and leftovers, and then parrots, a flamingo, insects, bees, monkeys, flowers. Animals that at first sight would seem alive and yet are also modeled and painted in ceramic—belonging, that is, to the very same material as the drums, boxes, and packages among which they appear. There are insects that land three-dimensionally on the petals of a bouquet of flowers, while other insects are painted in orderly rows on the surface of the vase, so that we no longer understand where reality ends and its representation begins, which insect imitates the other, which flower is truly a flower and which is merely the image of a flower, in a continuous mimesis in which everything is fiction and, precisely because of this, everything ends up feeling terribly real to us.
And then there are those honeycombs that grow inside old mailboxes, filling them, pressing against the doors, mixing with letters, catalogues, postcards, and flyers left there, abandoned, perhaps because no one ever came back to retrieve them; honeycombs that reach the point of invading even the word “Best Wishes”, composed in large golden letters, undermining with their silent growth the somewhat conventional optimism of that well-wishing formula. It is a deeply ambiguous image, because on the one hand those honeycombs can seem like a sign of regeneration, of a nature reclaiming spaces abandoned by humanity; on the other hand, they possess something both vital and disquieting, growing with the same insistence with which our accumulations grow, entering every nook, covering words, pushing out whatever had been deposited there. Nature does not oppose waste, nor does it come to purify or redeem it: it mixes with it, inhabits it, and builds another form of life inside it.
What is that written word “Best Wishes”, in the end? Is it one of the many kitsch inscriptions to which our present has accustomed us, perhaps made with balloons for a children’s party, or one of those texts that now inhabit the confused and overflowing landscape of contemporary art, which we find in every fair as one among many familiar presences in its infinite constellation? Perhaps it is both, or perhaps, after all, it is no longer possible to distinguish between them; and it is precisely here, in this uncertainty between a party decoration and a work of art, that a melancholic, sometimes almost tragic irony begins to surface—that bitter laughter that seems to have always accompanied the work of Bertozzi & Casoni. Because in their universe, it is not only goods, food, packaging, and everyday objects that become waste, but also contemporary art, its myths, its most famous works, its very way of transforming things into images and images into valuable objects. Everything here is a game of recycling and returns: the masses of compressed materials inevitably bring to mind the accumulations of Arman and the compressions of César; the cans of Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit are stacked on a tray like expired canned goods; Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box, the supermarket box that became one of the absolute icons of twentieth-century art, turns into the comical house of a macaw, its parrot head poking out like one of those hunting trophies that used to hang on walls. And so art itself—which had taken the common object, the trash, the industrial box, the commodity, and brought them inside the museum—ends up inside the accumulation.
Works worth hundreds of thousands, if not millions of euros, return as quotations, boxes, cans, and consumed images; catalogues, exhibition flyers, and drawings by Picasso pile up like scraps of a past no longer known to hold value, or if it ever did, inside rusty mailboxes, mixed with honeycombs and uncollected letters. From one of those mailboxes sticks out a flyer for a James Brown exhibition; from another, with an endless play of self-irony, comes the brochure for the very Bertozzi & Casoni exhibition we are attending: thus the exhibition narrates waste while already becoming an image of waste itself—an abandoned flyer, another vestige ready to enter the grand archaeology of the present.
Perhaps it is precisely this ability to involve everything in the game—ourselves, art, everyday objects, and even their own work—without ever taking the reassuring stance of those who judge the world from the outside, that makes their irony so bitter and so profoundly human. And so, before those mailboxes invaded by honeycombs, those broken eggs, expired medicines, parrots turned into trophies, and catalogues and cans blending with the remnants of our daily lives, our wonder is no longer the initial one tied to the extraordinary skill and expertise of the artists: it has become more restless, more melancholic, crossed by the references and reversals that every object sets in motion. Yet we continue to draw close, to look closer, almost wanting to touch those surfaces and, although we already know the answer perfectly well, to ask ourselves once more if all of this is truly just ceramic or rather a piece of our own life—of our eternal accumulating, consuming, abandoning, and transforming everything first into lived experience, then into scrap, into trash, and finally into vestiges, like the many tools, votive figurines, weapons, and pottery shards that today, in the well-kept display cases of archaeological museums, we contemplate with a mixture of wonder, astonishment, and a subtle, poignant melancholy for the billions of existences and lives that preceded us in this world.
