Poetics

Artist statement

I think that art is an instrument capable of making contact between a subconscious, profound dimension and the external world; capable of creating a link, a status of resonance with others.
Artistic images are complex representations. The greater the level of elaboration in terms of both form and content, the greater the artistic value and expressive power of its communication.

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Presentation of an artist’s journey

For the occasion of the exhibition of “Sogno di un nuovo mondo - opere recenti”
Museo dell’Antica Grancia, Serre di Rapolano (Siena), Italy, July 21 2001

(….)What I’m presenting you with tonight is a synthesis of my journey as an artist starting off from San Francisco in the year 1990 to paintings which are here exhibited and which were executed in a studio on the Siennese hills earlier this year.
I should mention briefly why I found myself so far from Tuscany in 1990 and from Sienna in particular where I was born. I should, however, start from the very beginning and talk about my “vocation” for painting which first emerged quite suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of 16. Just as surprising was my decision to enrol in the Institute of Art and in so doing abandon the scientific studies I had started some time before. But it must be said that this sudden passion for painting must have had quite a solid foundation given that it has never abandoned me and has continued to grow in both intensity and meaning over the years.
As a matter of fact, the decision to undertake artistic studies occurred in a period of my life characterized by enormous difficulties both at an emotional and an interpersonal level. Looking back it would be nice to say that this decision was part of an internal and unconscious movement which aimed to overcome the existential conflict I was going through in those years. It represented therefore an unconscious attempt to use painting to determine a change, a transformation in my life which I felt to be a vital necessity.
This deep intertwining, the relationship between art and life, the way my emotional states would have a repercussion on my paintings and how they would undergo modifications in the complex process of elaborating images is a constant in my work as an artist to the point where each painting can be interpreted as a page of the diary of my life, not meant in a figurative sense but as a narration of the processes of all my unconscious transformations.
Once having finished my studies at the Instituto d’Arte in Siena, I undertook four more years of studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence determined to start a career as a painter. At the end of which, once having also completed a series of study-trips to various European capitals, I felt an urgent need to undergo a separation from my daily routine which seemed hopeless and which was also characterized by an exasperating isolation.
So, quite unconsciously and rather by chance I found myself in San Francisco at the end of 1987 where initially I would live through a difficult period related not only to the immediate and direct contrast I felt with a foreign language which seemed hostile and a cultural context and lifestyle which were totally new to me.
Once again my artistic research and the effort I was willing to make in order to paint represented a fundamental point of reference, a sort of safety net which would help me time and time again to keep put and not give up in the face of difficulties.
The images which start off this projection date back to 1990 and are the product of a two-year period characterized by a tenacious struggle against the impossibility to paint, as if there was an interior emptiness which made every attempt to construct an image futile and I would end up making the white canvas black where it was impossible to see a form or figure of any sort, at the most one could perceive an indefinite, rarefied and timeless atmosphere.
Around the autumn of 1989 I reached the most dramatic moment of this existential crisis....every brushstroke seemed pointless and would be irredeemably and swiftly cancelled.
At that time I was attending the San Francisco Art Institute, one of the most avant-guarde and important art schools of the USA where I was able to become familiar with and part of the art scene of that city.
One morning, once again seized by a sensation of extreme discomfort, I found my way to the library of the Institute where a book on Paolo Uccello caught my eye. He had been a Florentine painter of the 1400s for whom I had developed a great passion years back when I was completing my studies at the Istituto d’Arte.
Leafing through that book I was immediately seized by a myriad of stimuli so irresistibly beautiful did the multicoloured images appear...I would insert a particular from one of these paintings into the painting I was working on and which I had just left on its easel downstairs. A painting which was dominated by white and light blue and seemed to represent a landscape, perhaps marine, characterized by an indeterminate nature and a foggy indecipherable atmosphere.
Inserting that particular, in all its detail, inside my composition in the far-right corner exalted me...as if the image created in this way corresponded to my internal image which finally found a way to represent itself. Or, perhaps, Paolo Uccello’s fragment added that touch of vitality which I was unable to find within myself and which I was forced to borrow from outside.
I’d like to add that the more or less partial insertion of elements, re-elaborated to some degree, from the Italian pictorial tradition especially from the late Middle Ages-early Renaissance forms a constant in nearly all my work of the 90s, especially the work done in the United States.



San Francisco 1990
This series of paintings well and truly marks the beginning of my professional activity. Not only because thanks to them I experience my first success, my first professional contact with a gallery, my first exhibitions and sales but also because they represent the beginning of a formal research and the birth of a personal “style” determined in part by a greater relationship with my tools as a painter. That is by a more physical and involving relationship with the very act of painting. I was beginning a process that represented a fusion, a synthesis between idea and execution, image and matter.
Whereas prior to this moment the mental aspect or design had prevailed over the actual execution of the painting and the images had been impressed onto the canvas but had not originated from it nor had they been constructed from matter; fundamental to my research was the use of new tools and materials: spatula, modelling paste, crumpled up tissue-paper applied in layers and glued onto the canvas etc.
Each painting of this period took ages to complete and was a torment. But each painting can be seen as the result of a conflict which finds a resolution and its execution was often accompanied by dreams I had during this process that seemed to be strictly related to all the phases of its production.
I’d like to say something in the way of explanation as to why I was so strongly attracted to painting of the late 1300s early 1400s which represented the transition from Medieval to Renaissance painting. As we know, Siennese painters did not fully learn from the Florentine Renaissance but continued to refer to the narrative tradition of the Middle Ages which was rather naive and anecdotal enriching it, however, with research into a spatial depth which was conducted intuitively and not following rational and illusionistic principles characteristic of the Renaissance.
It was as if I could perceive another presence in their images, an internal image which belonged to them and went beyond the subject represented, filling the painting with tension and a quasi-magic atmosphere .
What also struck me was the insertion, often totally out of context, of elements which had nothing to do with the subject of the picture, more often than not of a religious nature, and which would take on new and undecipherable meanings, such as the two gigantic black crows from the painting “S. Antonio tentato da un mucchio d’oro” of the Maestro dell’Osservanza which dominate the scene and appear to be the real protagonists. Or like the little boat that seems to have run aground on a green field and the extraordinary trees in the background which take on almost human forms and are full of life.




New York 1991-92
Around autumn of 1990 an important phase of research both on a personal and artistic level begins to take shape...I had the sensation that finally I had a solid basis which would allow me to continue exploring and facing new realities without succumbing.
I was, in short, ready for my next big step...so soon after at the beginning of 1991 I moved from San Francisco to the great metropolis of New York.
I spent my first few months in New York feeling quite fed up with the rarefied atmosphere that had characterized the art work I had done in San Francisco. My insistence on using dark earth and brown tonalities made its execution even more difficult given that it was problematic to distinguish the forms.
After many attempts, around May of the same year, I started noting a difference this time getting some help from Paolo Uccello and no less from the famous little boat of Ambrogio Lorenzetti ("Paesaggio", recently attributed by critics to Sassetta) which I had already utilized in some works in 1990 and would re-elaborate in numerous other works. Some figures and forms begin to emerge, whilst the palette’s colours grow richer and I no longer limit myself to using dark colours.
In the paintings completed in the year 1992 which were mostly inspired by another work of Sassetta’s, S. Antonio picchiato dai diavoli, greater importance is placed not only on the subject matter of the images but also on their execution. The material gets thicker; the dense acrylic impasto applied to the canvas almost exclusively with a spatula cannot be removed once applied. The images that emerge are the result of layer upon layer of matter.
What begins to take hold in these paintings is a method of working in phases typical of all the work completed in the 90s. The development of an idea, persisting until the theme exhausts itself, always goes hand in hand with a transformation of “style” and thus providing confirmation of the impossibility of separating the ideation from the physical creation of a work.....as if new contents can only emerge from new forms.
The transition from one series of work to another is always marked by a period where I feel quite empty and unable to create; perhaps this may be due to a difficulty one has in separating from the artistic elaboration of the previous series of work which in turn then prevents me from having intuitions into something new worthy of development.


THE FALL OF THE REBEL ANGELS
New York 1993
With this series of work, inspired by the homonymous painting of the 1300s, I feel to have finally put behind me the period which had preceded this one.....finally I can tolerate images which are defined, forms which emerge with their contours and stand out from the brightly coloured backgrounds and are no longer hidden and suffocated by a rarefied atmosphere.
Their realization marked a particular moment....for many years, perhaps I still do, I considered them my most important works, in a nutshell, the most “successful”, the ones I could be proud of; perhaps this was due to the successful fusion of an idea and its realization ( they too are painted by spatula and with a rich acrylic impasto), perhaps their monumental character or their grand visual impact or the unconscious meaning they held in spite of my unawareness.
For about a year after their completion I was unable to produce anything important; every attempt would end up being a desperate mechanical repetition of the process that had led to their creation. At the heart of this crisis laid the partly conscious conviction that I was incapable of, not only going beyond, but of ever again equalling the artistic level herein achieved.



INTERIOR LANDSCAPES
New York 1994-96
This series represents getting over a crisis which followed the completion of the Falling Angels if only for the fact that my research into images took off again. Perhaps it’s not really a chance happening that the first picture of this series which was then rapidly followed by others was completed in my studio in Sienna, during a summer holiday spent in Italy.
I could put this renewed activity down to a change in painting technique. At a conscious level in fact I thought that this would have obliged me to a different construction of the image and therefore to new results; they are in oil, a painting technique which except for a few sporadic attempts I hadn’t utilized for years. This new technique allowed me to add and take off colour making for a very intimate, if not organic relationship between an idea and its execution. The idea was immediately and continuously transformed in the fluid movement of the paint-filled brushstrokes in the absence of any intermediary whatsoever, without heavy impastos to worry about and prepare before applying on the canvas quickly to avoid them drying out. An error could be immediately corrected, a sudden change introduced or the original colour brought back.
In spite of some references to Siennese art, these works are constructed quite freely and in a very personal way.
This series, more than all the others contains the greatest number of images I have constructed so far and their realization entailed much less conflict. It has also generated the highest success I’ve had both professionally and commercially.



INVISIBLE MOVEMENT
New York – Siena (Montechiaro) 1997-98
In these works I have attempted to represent the human figure, to represent interior movement, something quite indecipherable and uncertain which perhaps alludes to “primordial” ways; atmospheric images seemingly unfocused which recall a reality which is intangible and immaterial.
They were completed without a study model but with the help of several snapshots and painted with a myriad of different coloured brushstrokes placed one alongside the other whose movement defines either the background or more delicately the figure. The latter doesn’t have defined contours and never stands out from the background with which it is intimately connected.




EMERGENCE
New York – Siena (Montechiaro) 1998-99
The element of continuity with the previous series is represented by the presence of the human figure which has now been inserted in a defined and certain space and determined by the lines which form its contours.
With this series in fact an interest in the line begins to emerge even if at an embryonic level. What begins to take off is the idea of constructing forms that start from the black line, from its movement, even if in this series of works this theme will not be completely developed....we find that the paintings here exhibited better develop this theme.
The black lines, in fact, often stand out from the background and are continuously interrupted without resolving their continuity by the figures that seem to be rather than constructed, enclosed within the lines.
The biggest limit of these paintings appears to be their structure, based on a drawing and therefore rather rational. This is perhaps the most figurative series of works I have ever realized. Once again I have inserted elements from Medieval and Classical painting...such as the little boat and the little devil by Sassetta. The figures are instead taken from paintings by Tiziano and Rubens.




DREAM OF A NEW WORLD
Siena (Montechiaro) 2000-1
The end of the previous series is followed by a profound crisis once again related to a vital need to have something new emerge but feeling totally incapable of producing new images. Nearly all my attempts at painting ended up in my producing dark images where one could barely see some coloured lines. However the feeling that prevailed was that of uselessness, of my impotence in allowing images with some consistency to emerge. The intensity of this crisis was just as strong as the one I went through 10 years before in San Francisco.
I must say that it was similar but also quite different at the same time since I seemed to possess a greater vitality than before. The way I managed to overcome this crisis was quite different too. In fact, I now felt the need to succeed in creating my pictures in a more spontaneous way without having to include any preconstituted element whether it be Sassetta’s little boat or a figure from Tiziano or any trace of drawing which would inevitably produce in me a profound sense of impatience.
I tried working on paper, something which I had once considered far too inconsistent. Now, instead, the sheet of paper stimulated me to look for an image knowing full well that I could easily just screw it up and throw it away and start again on a new white sheet.
I started from the line, from coloured lines which intersected and through their movement created a form without closing it in or rigidly defining it. This structure would be contraposed by a more solid one, defined almost geometrically in the background by black lines. Some of the works on paper completed in the year 2000 are here exhibited because they allow one to understand the paintings which came after.
Many have asked me the meaning of the black letters. In reality I really don’t know but I can say that the idea of incorporating them followed straight after the one of working on the line and was suggested to me during some preparatory group work with a number of amateur artists for a collective exhibition. One afternoon, entering the studio where we would meet every week I noticed a group of a wooden letters which were piled in the corner of the room. And all at once I envisaged them as black, pitch black. We tried to create a sculpture with the letters which somehow did not come off. So I decided to use them in my images.
Perhaps on a conscious level I felt the letters were an important presence. That is, on the one hand I wasn’t keen on introducing figures one could clearly distinguish, on the other hand I was anguished by the idea of abstractions. The letters however were not figures and they had a symbolical value, a sense, without being exactly figures. Anyway I felt that I needed their presence in my new compositions.
The works which are exhibited here do not certainly represent an end point, but constitute the beginning of a research I have yet to define...I must add however that the path undertaken has opened me up to something completely new.


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Lesson at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera

Meeting the artist Franca Marini
“The artist’s experience from Siena to San Francisco and New York”
Milan, 17 January 2003

First of all, I would like to thank Professors S. Esposito and N.Braga for having invited me to speak about my work. A brief introduction to my professional training and my work as an artist.
I attended the Istituto d’Arte di Siena and then the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze. I undertook, as many of you I imagine are currently doing, the classic studies any artist who is sure of his/her artistic vocation from the very start undertakes. Once having completed my accademic studies I travelled and spent one month in London, and then almost by chance I found myself in San Francisco at the end of 1987. Perhaps I shouldn’t really say by chance as the truth is that I was going through a really difficult personal moment which wasn’t helped by the fact that I was in Siena, the town where I was born. It’s certainly a wonderful town full of art and surrounded by gorgeous countryside....but perhaps it’s too beautiful and this can create a kind of dependence. I felt oppressed by its provincial atmosphere which I blamed for making me feel terribly isolated. Furthermore, the thought of becoming an artist in Italy, where I imagined it would be impossible to receive recognition on the sole basis of one’s work, scared me. However I didn’t make a conscious decision to head for the States...it happened almost unconsciously and was spurred on by my desire to make a clean break as I longed for a change that would not only be physical but above all, personal.
In San Francisco I decided to attend the San Francisco Art Institute which was certainly the most avant-garde art school in the States where I came face to face with the art scene of the city. This proved to be an important experience giving me a first-hand insight into the culture of American art. The next important chapter of my life started when I moved to New York in early 1991 and where I stayed on for ten years.
The slides I am about to show you are a synthesis of my work starting from 1990 in San Francisco to more recent work completed in Siena.
A few observations about my work...as you will probably see for yourselves painting is my medium and my main interest is the image. I start creating an image as a result of a stimulus or an intuition and never know how it’s going to end up looking. From the first idea to the final image which is at times produced through an extemporary elaborative process whilst at other times it is the result of more or less complex elaborate processes that may take up to weeks, there is always something new and unexpected which takes me by surprise. It’s as if every image created must contain something important, a “birth” if we are to consider it an artistic image; that is it’s got to contain an element of originality which can only be found during the process of constructing; that material process to which I attribute great importance because it is in this very moment that, probably thanks to a momentary suspension of consciousness, the artist comes into contact with a more unconscious dimension without which the creative process would be impossible .
If he is to work well the artist must “lose his mind”, he mustn’t think but simply rely on his artistic know-how and his intuitions.The greater his professional capacities and self-confidence, the more he will be able to really let go and not let rational thought dominate him.
As far as I’m concerned, my best pieces of works are those where I have struggled harder or better still, where I have got completely lost.....and understood in that precise moment that I had to question everything from scratch and go into the painting knowing full well that I was risking everything I had constructed up to that point. If I could find a way to “re-emerge”, then this work was bound to take on particular significance. If not, I was obliged to start all over again.
I am fully aware of the fact that choosing to paint nowadays is an unhappy choice....one risks being labelled “retro” etc. Nor do I believe that it’s the only valid form of expression. I would be crazy if I did. All I am saying is that it’s congenial to my sensitivities as an artist and I continue, partly also due to laziness, to choose it over other mediums. Although I must confess that I have started getting interested in video and hope to try it out in the future.
As I was saying, choosing an artistic form is important but not fundamental for an artistic result. Everyone must choose an artistic medium most suited to him/herself. What I find preposterous is this fixation on having to produce something new at all costs; a prevalent attitude that characterizes a large part of the international visual arts scene which I imagine you will all come across and have to deal with in some way. This attitude results from the repetition of many banal versions of a sterile repetitive thought strictly conceptual in nature (far from being new we can locate its origins to the now famous “Orinatoio” by Marcel Duchamp in 1917) which, given its rational nature, is unable to bring about something new. What bothers me about this stance is that I find the work resulting from it to be arid, given that it is an exact mirror-copy of the idea that precedes it. There is no difference between the moment of conception and the moment of the realization of a given work since the process of constructing an image has been abolished. There is, in fact, no creative process.....during which an artist can risk “losing himself”and in so doing succeed in creating something “new”. Let’s make one thing clear, painting alone doesn’t make you an artist...there’s a lot of painting around which doesn’t fall under the heading of art but represents empty virtuosity based on a conceptual theme of sorts.
I believe that we have to look at the contents of a work of art, regardless of the expressive medium adopted. That is to say that if a work can be considered deep (and here I’m referring to a psychic depth not a pictorial consideration of Renaissance-derived perspective depth) and truly constitutes an expression of an artist’s unconscious and internal image, then it will result as original and will most likely contain new forms, even if these may not be apparent to the eye at first glance.This naturally does not exclude researching new ways of expressing oneself as long as we don’t fall into the trap of putting all our attention on its exterior capacity to shock or provoke the spectator and in so doing sacrifice its real value which is related more to content and its evocative capacities.Only when an artist’s work is the result of a process of the elaboration of profound images which the artist constructs outside him/herself can we call this a work of art. Only then can we expect to find characteristics of a universal kind capable of speaking to all.
The things that count in the process of achieving this are, as I have already mentioned before, mastery of one’s expressive form, which can be obtained thanks to years of training and must in no way be underestimated. But no less important is the artist’s unconscious life which provides the vitality and fantasy necessary to the formation of the artist. This vital energy with which the artist must imbue his/her work must be constantly rediscovered and renewed. Which brings us to the difficult task of figuring out how this can be done given that we cannot rationally will this into being nor find a mechanical solution of sorts.
One characteristic of my work is that it goes in phases lasting around 2, 3 years or more during which I explore an idea or an image until I exhaust it. Each phase is also characterized by the development of a particular style which somehow necessarily accompanies the work of producing new images. This is quite an important point to consider and the history of art testifies to this fact confirming the point that a work of art is successful only when ideas and images are successfully integrated into the process of its execution. .
Between one phase and the next it is not uncommon to find periods of difficulty and restlessness ....difficulty in finding a stimulus or an idea which will lead me somewhere new. There is a precise correlation between my capacity to produce images and my subjectivity and life experiences...what I mean is that it’s really not possible for me to paint wonderfully when things are not going right in my life! I would go so far as to say that the darkest moments of my life have been characterized by this total inability to create images. This of course raises interesting discussion points for another occasion!




THE PROJECTION
Something that has characterized all my work from 1990 to 1999 is the way I incorporate Medieval elements from the Siennese pictorial tradition of the late Middle Ages. I’d like to briefly explain how this attraction first came about. (...) Around the year 2000 I began to do research into something completely different and took the line as my starting point.(....)
The last series of work, Condensation, began in 2002 and is still in evolution. This time I started off in quite an irrational and ad hoc way, exploring the way a collage is constructed. For some reason, still unknown to me, I found this process congenial. Or maybe I could add somethingabout this choice, if I can call it such. Realizing that an image is formed by putting together a quantity of small pieces of paper prevents one from thinking up a precise image before starting. It is something that forms itself gradually and does not follow a pre-established path. Furthermore, the piece of paper itself, torn casually in myriad forms, became an important support, that is it became a physical element to deal with and from which to accept suggestions.
A link exists with my previous series of work, Dream of a new world, in so far as their construction is concerned. Both have been constructed in the absence of a pre-conceived project and without an initial drawing. But each research project presents differences. The line, which was a vital element in my previous project, almost disappears in the latter where the image forms itself with difficulty as torn pieces of paper are put together side by side. It’s almost a challenge to make an image arise from the chaos of pieces of torn paper; an apparent chaos however because, if we look more closely, they follow a precise movement or else they are used to construct and accentuate the forms which step by step begin to emerge from the surface of the canvas.* A long and laborious process given that the image must form itself from an extreme fragmentation, and is the result of fragments that are often attached and then removed, one substituting a bigger or smaller one of a different colour, all for no apparent reason. The final result is a three-dimensional stratification of fragments, pieces of paper that together make up an image which is often not perceivable or identifiable unless the viewer stands at the the right distance.
A crisscross motif springs up quite often made up of multi-coloured small irregular forms, a harlequin shape which first made its appearance in some of my paintings in 2001.
As I mentioned previously this series of work is still underway so I’m not in a position to offer a critical analysis of it....I hope this may be possible once I have received results which may be deemed interesting.


*The collages I began with subsequently became large and medium-size canvases where I adopted the same system to construct the image with very few pictorial episodes. (November 2003)

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Reconstruction in red New Works

Reconstrucción en rojo Nuevas Obras, catalogo, p. 57
Galería Nacional, San José, Costa Rica, 2005

I have been asking myself what meaning there could be in exhibiting my work in a country that I hardly know and above all in a country whose cultural and historical roots are so particular and diverse from those contexts where I am normally used to showing my work.
I have been wondering what meaning there could be for me and for those who would have come in contact with my works.
This is how I started constructing them, starting off from this series of questions.
My attempt has been to avoid that these works simply spring from a need to express myself, but be potentially addressed to a public, no matter how vague and indefinite it might appear to me. Only in this way perhaps would I have been able to represent contents that would go beyond my individual experience to embrace those unconscious, non-rational meanings that we can universally attribute to man.
I am not sure I have succeeded in my intent. I am however happy to have accepted the invitation that I received, a sort of challenge to which I have tried to respond.

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