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Walter
Guadagnini
GIORGIO VALVASSORI
“In an age plastered with imagery, I want to raise questions
about the many meanings of the work of art, about need, about
precariousness. About the countering of light-heavy, formal-informal,
hard-soft, reflection-intuition. Resting one’s gaze also
means letting oneself go between two extremes.” These
were Giorgio Valvassori’s closing words in an interview
with Laura Safred, a dialogue used to introduce that which
to this day constituted his most important and complex exhibiting
experience: a series of five exhibitions held in various spaces
in Friuli and Slovenia between 2002 and 2003. Thus it was
a multistage retrospective exhibition, his own career revisited
not only through the works but also through the places that
over the years have seen those works grow and develop, that
have played a role in their aspect as well as providing the
reasons for their existence. This was a somewhat anomalous,
curious yet courageous project, in which the individuality
of the artist had the upper hand on that of the exhibition
spaces, yet which was in turn obscured by the diffusion of
the work, by its journey through time and space which seemed
to belittle the personality of the artist himself, taking
centre stage and stating its own existence here and now (yet
at the same time there and elsewhere) as necessary form, matter
and thought, and as such, divorced from the original moment
of its creation.
Valvassori is not an artist willing to make concessions over
his work just to open doors, to satisfy a thirst for recognition
which might guarantee his acceptance insofar as it would entail
his art more or less consciously turning into a profession.
This may be seen not only in his life and career choices,
but most of all in his creative behaviour, his rejection of
a single, stylistic hallmark, and his ongoing pilgrimage between
the various suggestions of the outside world which are all
translated into unique works and shows, each one enclosed
within itself and able to occupy a period of reflection and
action. It is for this reason that Valvassori is so hung up
on exhibition spaces, and it is for this reason that each
of his shows has a particular meaning which goes far beyond
the mere display of a recently produced work.
And so, also the current exhibition at the Museo Revoltella
is to be considered as a one-off, as a self-defined project
with its own special identity which – while forming part
of a continuum stretching over the last 30 years – has
its own tone and its own body different from any other (albeit
no less important) experiences. Thinking of the work, the
exhibition and the location are all bound up in the same process
as far as Valvassori is concerned. Thinking of these three
elements also means thinking of the dialogue that takes place
between them, of the ongoing, endless link between the single
work and the entire exhibition, or between the location and
the works. This is done with a view to searching out a synthesis
capable not so much of reconciling opposites, but to highlight
the different stages of the dialogue and to give a voice to
the single elements. The reference to the opposition of different
states of mind, of shape or matter is thus of the utmost importance,
especially if we consider this as a starting point and not
a final goal; as a basic operating requirement, as a key to
understanding not the work itself but the components that
make up the entire exhibition, that place in which the opposites
are led back towards a complex state of unity. In this case,
it is the very evidence of the single elements that backs
up this hypothesis: not only do different sculptures and different
materials share the same spaces but also two different moments
of the creative experience: that of the initial drawings and
that of the finished work (if this term still makes any sense
today), the project and its putting into practice, the two-dimensional
form and that in space, the falseness of the surface and the
realness of volume.
Without one having the better of the other, without the spectator
interpreting one as merely preparatory to the other (or vice
versa), but rather making sure that the two moments reflect
each other, measure up to each other, creating an uninterrupted
circuit of sense between one language and another. The metaphor
here of the continuous crossing of boundaries, frontiers is
all too easy to spot, given the place in which the exhibition
takes place and where the artist has spent his own life. And
yet this would seem to be the image best suited to describe
the underlying essence of this occasion, in which the border
is clearly that of the disciplines, of the working methods.
(Although we should not underestimate the fact that the sheets
belong to very different periods in Valvassori’s history,
and thus we find ourselves faced with a sense of temporal
trespass, brought home particularly by the sculptures which
by contrast all date to the last two years of the artist’s
work…) Once again, we are dealing with dialectics: one
over here and one over there, yet in the end the distinction
disappears, or rather the differences and the identities remain.
However, this does not imply a closure, but simply the desire
to cross over.
Now, if it is true as the ancient masters would say that the
drawing withholds the very first idea of the work in nuce,
it is only right to investigate just how much of that idea
may be found in the sheets on display here, which date back
as far as the early ‘80s and go right up to the present
day. The first element that comes to light on examination
of the sheets is the progressive transformation of the drawing
from a clearly planning approach to a deeper level of the
creative process, which entails an alteration in the pencil
stroke itself. In fact, while the early sheets show the desire
to treat the folio as a space in which to voice the full elaboration
of the form – also in technical terms – the more
recent ones, on the other hand, are characterised by their
air of travel notes, of an immediate extension of the shape
as thought, destined to achieve its greatest expression only
during the production of the work itself, only in the concrete
incarnation of the object, the sculpture or the installation.
This becomes evident following the passage from the analytical
precision of the drawings relative, say, to the 1981 work
“Annunciazione” (a genuine preparatory study in
the style of the ancient artists) or to the 1979 work “Pelle
d'orso” (in which even the mechanisms of stasis in the
work provide the basis for a graphic tour de force on the
themes of the hook, the knot and the tension that comes into
play in this particular physical situation) up to the deliberate
fragmentation and approximation of the more recent papers.
Here, not only is the stroke shortened, but the details are
lost in a continuum of merely hinted forms, of syntheses of
shapes, as if his expressive urge were inducing Valvassori
to make use of form in its most unforeseeable and least compromising
variants. In other words, as the relationship with the space
and the location of the event grows stronger, it is as if
drawing becomes the notebook on which the thoughts are impressed,
even more than the forms or the motivations underlying a technique
that, despite this, maintains its role in centre stage, albeit
a role deferred to the moment of production (which is often
also a ‘staging’) of the finished work. It is no
mere coincidence that some of the most important sheets are
those concerning entire installation projects, in a manner
that makes the variant the dominant theme of the drawing.
The virtual space of the folio is doubled by the drawn space
of the room, in a sort of sequence that serves to sound out
the solidity of the space and its nature. This is not so much
a question of planning, but of imagining various possibilities
through a composition of signs that may even become a genuine
form of writing in its own right, reinforcing the idea of
the diary, the notebook, mentioned before.
Thus, once again, Valvassori sees the whole work in its entirety
like a path leading from beginning to end across various stages
of experience. This is a path that unfolds along the thin
yet highly resistant line of the dialogue between the approach
towards and the essence of the method, of the transformation
of the image into something else, of the triggering of a series
of relationships that are established as soon as the first
stroke is placed on the blank page. Because in the end, it
is always a matter of images, of figures moving from reality
and back, albeit through various surprising stages of material
and conceptual metamorphosis. These are of course images and
figures that belong to Valvassori’s own personal baggage
as well as to the collective baggage of his potential spectators:
from the wing to the well, from the tree to the human figure,
from the labyrinth to the cage. The artist makes use of easily
recognisable image-forms that belong to the community, not
just to the individual. It is the slight shifts in meaning,
the accentuation or the elusion, the couplings or the materials
themselves that transform that image, that form into something
else, which force the spectator to stop and rest his gaze,
to let himself be carried away by the game of associations
and deviations, of hints and suggestions. I believe it is
no chance that Valvassori wanted to focus the current exhibition
(apart from on his drawings) on two images such as those of
the labyrinth and the acrobat walking along a tightrope. These
two images share three underlying factors: that of movement
(the acrobat walks, and to get out of the maze one must travel
along a path; the difference lies in the precise and predetermined
direction taken by the former and in the randomness of the
latter); that of risk, of the unforeseeability of the outcome
(one watches the acrobat with bated breath, and one moves
through the maze without knowing whether one will find the
way out); lastly, the sense of vertigo that these two situations
share. A bit like in the drawings, a bit like in the lead
shapes, the artist and the spectator find themselves sharing
a deliberately ambiguous situation, an endless test of the
reality of that which is being seen and that which is being
done, where creating a work means putting it to work and not
simply elaborating a form, in a constant and deliberate reference
to the rhythms and ways in which time goes by, both that of
nature and that of the mind. Putting it to work because, as
Valvassori himself claims, “once the work is finished
and put on display, it becomes self-sufficient. It does not
identify the artist with a particular style, a way of working
or a technique, but acquires its own autonomy, its own character,
a sense of objectivity which does not reveal the subjectivity
of the artist”. Who might be closed off inside his studio,
plotting lines across a blank page, or lost within a labyrinth
(in which it is not even clear how he managed to enter), or
he might even be poised on a wire, suspended between heaven
and earth…
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