“Sandro Visca is the young man that accepts the choice; this last textile is on a path searching for human values. His pictorial form delineates, unquestionably, since 1961 : the vision is expressionistic. The human figure is willingly dismembered, broken down to its elements; from vast chromatic patches flow forth raw sensations. They are for the most part brush strokes reactions without pause, but always leading to problems of tales, of situations, of human moments, of tragic events,. The material joins from the organs of information,- types of print and Visca does not take anything away from the initial communicativeness; if nothing else he revises the questioning that motivated- but did not explain- the disaster or tragedy. If the reality is manifested through the black ink of a developed photograph on the shininess of weekly patinated paper to a big press run, it will be the remnant of the photo to tilt in the picture. Nothing will be able to make more vibrant, more sensitive, -and therefore- more accessible- the problem.
A photo as chosen however is the subjective questioning of the event in the carried out work of art. In a certain sense the artist acts as the trait d’union between the original and reactions that the picture in itself generates in man. Tom Wesselmann, extracting billboard elements and placing them elsewhere does not behave differently. The experience of collage, born from a need to relate the most plausible possibility to reality, acquiring, in the first months of 1963, a consistence more clearly material that traces out a broad possibility of research in a Neo-Dada direction. It is a work that reminds us of Schwitters, the great collage Merz but here the subject cannot be refused like in Merz and rather denotes an impossibility to act in light of the evidence.
In cycles- the work of art is focused on one problem that is about time after time a car accident, and airplane crash, a mine tragedy ect.- rags, nylon and wool appears here. In the group dedicated mine tragedy –six enormous paperboards on which windows were cut- the collage tells of a human tragedy strangled moment by moment. It is the fruit of the news that rapidly adds from every corner of the earth, it is the wave of human breath that fills the air and makes it breathable only in the form of a desperate yell of the human victims of their own society. The act that discourages is manifested. The crisis concerns society, contemporary man.
Visca realizes that the battle must be conducted with man. It is the cycle of crocefissioni. Every work becomes the summary of one of the previous cycles: a moment will be translated in the broken up interior and the reconstructed exterior of the guilty man. A new story flows forth, a new figurative reality; the religious theme is in second order: the fourteen stations of the Calvary of Christ are fourteen human moments burdened with pain, sensations, chain reactions; a new presence of man.
It is still a search conducted with the collage, the color is alive- as much as the problems- drained and widened in stains; the sign is clean and shiny and tangibly etches out a human story relived until the pangs.
The figure however (burned, torn apart, crystallized) points to disappearance: it is the desire for the subject, the contemplation of the plasticity of the same desire (a new question in light of reality?), The necessity of a new special component, of the composition.
Visca listens in silence, sensing a human pulse: it is his very presence that communicates and that flows from the work that he himself forged from materials he chose.
(Emidio Di Carlo, “Present Encounters” 30 anni di pittura e scultura a L’Aquila,, Editions c.c.3 m. – Text from the presentation in the catalogue of the personal exhibit “Sandro Visca” at the Grand Hotel et du Parc, L’Aquila, 1/15 November 1964.)
WHAT INTERESTS ME ABOUT VISCA’S WORKS
The first thing I like about him is his figural inventiveness and extreme brightness of execution: the latter being a quality that exposes invention the more it conceals it, by making it appear gradually to the lingering eye.
I am talking about variations on a theme – I have some photographs of variations on the theme of the queen of hearts here on my table – his inventiveness, then, consists in details (a pupil has the same shape as a heart; the colour of the heart changes from red to green, like a traffic light; the embroidery on a corset takes on such a shape that the corset ends up looking like the face of the person wearing it). The essential aim is to allow these details to be discovered by the spectator. Thus his brightness of execution can be seen as the necessary step towards a slow and gradual discovery.
But there I am already saying what interests me. This slow and gradual discovery is nothing but the focus of attention, which, as it focuses itself, makes the detail become more important than the whole design.
This is precisely what one looks for in a variation on a theme, I would like to say, using a famous expression of Picasso’s, that here everything is done in such a way so one finds before actually looking. Finding, first one, then another detail, each of which constitutes the changing fabric of a metamorphosis: and finding each one without actually looking for it, simply by obstinately gazing.
Meanwhile, this Mattissian queen of hearts, which sometimes appears between the giant size blades of a cigar cutter – a sort of guillotine that is about to cut off an elongated head, is an object, a puppet. (no more a puppet, however, than certain women by Picasso: do you remember the one that has a plate for a hat with a pile of crockery on it?).
Being a modern, Visca knows that today man (and by man – need it be said? – I also mean woman) has been reduced to an object, that is, he has become interchangeable with the objects he uses. (this interchangeability of man and object had its initial representative – excuse me for insisting – in Picasso). But Visca also knows that figurative artists of past ages were considered as manufacturers of objects, and that it took a long time for them to be considered – together with poets – as imitators (that is, if one thinks about it, as interpreters) of human action (which requires development and movement). It is therefore, on the basis of this twofold awareness, that Visca finally conceives (and it is clear that various tendencies that are current today can be found in him: pop art, op etc) painting, which is vision (and aims at being a vision of human action), as theatre, it is and always has been vision (as the world itself proclaims), having always since its origins proposed to render human action that has already been performed, present and visible. Thus, at a certain moment, the variations of the puppet of hearts become real cloth puppets, and “mounted” in various positions between various objects (advertisements from magazines, furniture, their original forms), are photographed and then exhibited one after the other. The resulting effect is caricatural and hallucinatory, similar to the style of Godard (the film director nearest to the origins of the theatre).
No, I would not evoke Bay as a model: Bay is mischievous, not theatrical. However I would advise Visca to pay more attention to his choice of furniture (especially the chairs), that – in my opinion – must be as realistic as possible and offered for use, so realistic as to seem mysterious presences, while the puppets – resting like dejected acrobats – grow in the hyperbolic exaggeration of their reality.
L’Aquila, marzo 1970
Nicola Ciarletta
From a tendency for linear and synthetic representation, Visca no longer gives an aesthetic content to his ‘figures’ that are now the product of a mature, ironic and complex language, whose colours and signs, decorations and flowers (these two terms must come as no surprise) are nothing more than an eccentric alphabet. The evidence of this artist’s maturity lies in the fact that he has managed to liberate himself from those “inventions”, and continual “trasformations”, that are the limitations of those (and there are many) who cannot say anything without first having listened to other voices, or write anything without first having read a page of other people’s writing, or paint without having absorbed – almost always mentally – the solutions of those who really work within art and clearly understand the importance of its dynamic function for civilization. It seems to me that the hallmarks of Visca, in their repetition and variation (but in varying they are only enrichened, they become more and more themselves) are truly exemplary because they poke fun at the world, and make the spectator feel embarassed – others would say the “consumer”, but since we are concerned with characters the term spectator seems more fitting – and function as a revulsion from conformism – and from the conformist – that sometimes goes as far as to show off the faded symbols of the avant-garde bourgeoisie.
The truth is that these “puppets” do not want to be taken seriously and continually threaten to rebel against their own creator as a result of the powerful irony they possess: therefore, they also become extremely serious and dramatic, though indirectly, after they have completely wiped out all sign of an aesthetic mythology. Because, finally, the “puppet” is an anti-myth which occupies an empty niche in order to show us that there has never been a divinity or that it is something that can be substituted, or even found elsewhere, perhaps behind a frank and amused sexual boast or the cold heart of golden tinfoil.
Pescara, giugno 1971
Benito Sablone
THE MAGICAL METALANGUAGE OF VISCA
(The Journey Through the Alchemy of Man’s inner Self)
1. If it is true that some of the most recent interdisciplinary experiences constitute a useful lesson for the interpretation of the contextual significance of a work of figurative art, it is also true that there is a lack of opportunities in which to put them into use for a mutual contact with the current systems of verification.
Why, then, do Visca’s works also seem to represent this kind of opportunity? To what conditions will they attract the attention of experts of different fields in the future?
In fact, this painter has been elevated to the privileged position of rediscoverer and experimeter of the new sciences with his figurative works once before. At the origin of psychoanalysis, Freud discovered man’s internal world through the artist, to the point of imagining, in turn, hypothetical dreams of Leonardo to interpret psychoanalytically.
From a similar hypothetical “parallelism” between the study of the prospective evolution of the contemporary sociocultural situation, on the one hand, and the study of figurative art on the other, can be seen a significant discrimination; the discrimination between painters who, today, ‘only’ mark the end of a sociocultural era, and the ‘others’ who undertake either to discover the hidden models implicit in language and translate in code experiences to transmit regarding the future systems of humanity, or to
predict, in order to anticipate now, the systems of future experience and knowledge.
Visca seems to belong to the latter category, or rather, to be among the first of the ‘others’.
2. It would be out of context here to construct an interpretation of Visca’s contextual significance through his works (an interpretation drawn from the contemporary sociocultural evolution and the role of figurative art).
In Visca the author there is probably the intention, however of presenting his works in today’s “shopping centre”, almost as if they originated from the extreme outskirts of an empire whose vertical technology was such that it provoked the separation of neo-medieval islands within its internal boundaries. That is, personal islands in which the concentration of semi-isolation is partly enforced and partly willed. A semi-isolation, finally, in which the psychocultural condition is to some extent that of a particular kind of parapsychology and magic, drawn from the self-implosive “return” of the most hidden “regional” subconscious (originally non-peripheric), profoundly shaken by the agitations caused by the “civil” epicentres in the underground community.
In this sense, threfore, it may also be extremely significant to evaluate Visca’s works in terms of the sociocultural context of figurative art, precisely because Visca appears almost as a “barbarian” who conducts his conquest – his own work -’ in the very centre of the turmoil in which the work functions and is proclaimed as a “conquest”.
3. In contemporary painting the line of evolution along which the “return to magic” passes is the very same as that which should perhaps be called “the discovery of man’s inner world”. From the moment in which Freud theorised the “unease of civilisation”, there came a corresponding “escape from reality” in painting which led some painters, through progressive forms of abstraction, “elsewhere”.
With Mondrian, the figures which represent the objects and the situations of the real world were to disappear. With De Chirico began the appearence of the “discovery” of the figures of the internal world. From that moment there was an increasing acquisition of a new language with which to represent the world of individual unconsciousness and the masses; by 1943 this became the “magical vision of life”, and painters such as Pollock, Rothko, Tobey and others from American abstract expressionism, were perfectly aware of the origins that preceeded the themes of their works by twenty-five years.
4. Visca’s magical language betrays origins less dateable and more remote: therefore subterranean and less selfaware. Visca’s “cultural medium”, however, is more direct and coherent with its own origins than the American abstract expressionists whose origins are to be found in European culture. Besides, Visca’s works contain many “cultural” cross-references from contemporary Western culture. One may observe, in fact, a complex recomposition of mythical elements (Woman, the the biological body, the underground etc) with “ritual” elements (decomposition and composition, miniturization of certain coded signs as a result of a sort of horror of nothingness, a process of progressive abstraction which each individual object undergoes almost to the point of elementary distillation, etc).
Finally, a new “cult” model may be seen in Visca’s works: the objects represented are simultaneously and reciprocally “internal” and “external”.
In the world revealed in these works, the head, the heart, the neurovegetive system, the uterus, the cloud, the underground, fire, gold, silver, and the colour red acquire a complex syntactic value from which is derived an aichemic process, that is the transformation of the profound self of the explorerobserver through study.
Jung (psychology and alchemy); Klee, Klimt, Hundertwasser etc; the dadaistic techniques of “collage” and “assemblage”, taken up after the Second World War by the “informalists” and the “materialists” (eg. Bum) and object-tracing, which also derived from the dadaists, adopted at the end of the 1950s by the American Pop artists (Warhol): these are the artists and experiences that immediately come to mind in considering possible associations with Visca’s works. Of course, these are only superficial references and this presentation does not examine his works closely by means of an exegetic strategy. Nevertheless, I considered it reasonable to offer them as a hypothesis to be verified in a (hopefully) future study on Visca, and which one hopes will be an adequate examination of the most complex meanings behind his works.
Torino, 3 gennaio 1973
Lucio Fraccacreta
Art as memory, as a celebration and rediscovery of life, enticing memories with expedients and operations that derive from the silent rites of creation, and tautologically repeating ancient honours and rites that are modified to occupy a fundamental position within the emphatic variations of their epiphany.
These are the first and most resistant approximations that come to mind when one thinks of Sandro Visca, an artist who not only has his roots firmly in the Abruzzi tradition but also in that of L’Aquila. And in the Abruzzi the many Islamic influences that have given romanic art figurative contents and codes, geometric and heraldic patterns, schemes, abstract morphologies, and hosts of monsters and wild chimeras can be easily found.
The principles that regulate the land surface and space of L’Aquila cannot help but recall mosques and Arabian buildings: its spaces grow upon numeric structures, elaborations of squares, which by an association of portions (square portions), that are morphologically different from one another, create a meaningful tension in terms of spatial expression.
It is precisely the contamination of such abstract and chimerical codes that animates Visca’s works.
These traces are recomposed, according to definite procedures by associations of fractions, by groups that allude to oriental algebraic and polygonal formulas.
A composite dimension built upon ancestral structures by a series of episodes caught by the memory in a theatre that is naively tragic as a result of the extreme bitterness of its performances.
Elevations of mnemonic rites whose origins point out the demoniac-angelic that is in the very essence of life.
There emerge the taboos, fetishes and naive revivals of a very “cultured” sorcery, and of extremely wild, passionate and paradoxical fables that are the propitiatory explorations of the passions of the territory of an ethnic community that goes beyond the Gran Sasso towards the desert.
Let us imagine something about the artist in order to discover further profound meanings and values of the profound. Maybe he is in search of ideals or ideographs. But the enchantment that refers to these rites is, after all, the reason and the most authentic inviolable region of this creating while being and being while creating which is the activity of the painter.
In this way, the saracen and exorcist enchanter, Sandro Visca, a bitter but privileged decipherer of far off and mysterious thought processes, confers a splendour of authentic poetry to his existence.
Roma, marzo 1974
Gino Marotta
A RED HEART ON THE GRAN SASSO
Visca’s “heart” is undoubtedly polysemic, because it is red and travels on the Gran Sasso. It could also be given a famous title, “The Future Has an Old Heart”, that recalls Levi. If this were the case the object-images of the sequence would seem to be depicted in a post-atomic outbreak. A “cupio dissolvi”, a dissolution, disappearance and pain, a constellation of categories in which a procession moves fatally and melanchonically towards the mountains; a pathological procession because without myths. In this scenario only the vitality of the body with its obsessive meta-historical, artisan manual skills seems to survive. The signs of survival are obvious: man, his symbolic selfrepresentation, his delimiting a protected space, his attempts at formalisation (ie the heart), his forced social life, his preparing himself before leaving, his lining up, the trial of his climbing, his ritual initiation and the resolution at the top with the final abandoning of the heart.
It seems like the structural lexicon of any popular traditional pilgrimage, that Visca knows and has partly lived and partly re-lived as an artist. Everything is accompanied by a magical, reasuring and invented language.
Go up a height of at least one thousand metres above sea level on a feast day at dawn
When the cock crows sew a heart of red cloth of the length of about two canes and stitch it with string from nettles
Tie a red silk band around the foreheads of the carriers
At night set it down carefully on a stretcher made of wooden rods from an ash tree and strings from palm leaves
Take the heart to a height of about three thousand metres above sea level and leave it out for three days and three nights in bad weather.
On the third day bring it down to the valley and leave it there without turning round.
The meaning of this procession will be clear to those who know Visca’s variations on a heart: an unexpected diversity of materials, naive, artisan, sophisticated, pathetic, silky, papery, infantile, fantastic, iterative and manual etc. With a heart, that has been so exploited in the laboratories of Barnard and Houston, that it desires to appear in all its symbolic and persistent continuity.
The journey of Visca’s images seems to me to be a really desperate one, even more suspended in the hopes that we contemporaries may still nurture. Even more violet in the black and white of lammarone, a classic of anthropological photography.
That is to say, of man, with his little suits and scapulars, like those of bygone peasants, attached to his automatic and vital body.
Roma, novembre 1979
Diego Carpitella
HIS IMAGERY
Sandro Visca is one of those “secret” artists that eludes the critical standards of consumer art, or rather of the art of consumption (in the perspective of a type of aesthetics which has rightly been called “sporty”). In fact he has been working for twenty years, alone and according to his own coherency which corresponds to a very personal imagery, which is not “outside history” but above all within its “own” history, (seeing as history consists of the creative dimension of each person), and within a “parallel” history, of a anthropologically well-defined cultural area, at the remote sources of which his imagery feeds itself, probing their deep recesses. (I remember him as a very young and restless witness of the of the already epic period partly because of their unattained independence – AlternativeAttuali (Current Alternatives) of L’Aquila in the Sixties).
Not that Visca is a folkloristic painter. In fact he delves into and updates the anthropological patrimony, reinventing it according to his own imagery which is entirely centred on meaningful symbolic evocation, in a continual swinging between the narration of symbols and iconic synthesis, sometimes almost aggressive in its emotive-imaginative grip on the reader.
His serious anthropological dialogue is, on the other hand, naturally cultured. In fact, Visca works with symbols of marked representativeness whose consequent narrative development, which tapers like the Romanic friezes on the churches in Abruzzi, acquires the maximum representative and impressive emphasis; in fact, in their own way they are stimulating, almost terrifying (definitely anagogical) if that imagery was not actually composed of evoked sweetness, of sensuous lyricism, in faroff echoes of amorous relationships. On the other hand he also expresses himself in sumptuous portrayals loaded with vague Oriental seduction (perhaps he glimpsed a stretch of a distant magic land from the high marine horizons of Abruzzi); in a dense portrayal that charges everything, the symbol as well as its context, with the extraordinary intensity of images woven together.
This contemporaneity of the symbolic signs and textural microsigns is all the more richer, often being conceived in a variety of materials (there is always a visible echo of these experiments in his paintings and the extraordinarily representative constructions of totemic figures of a symbolism full of magic and fascinating and estranging power). The narrative system of his paintings is enriched as the symbols unfold in solutions which are absolutely new, in a whirlpool of propositions which continually renew the imaginative solutions. But for years his themes have centred on magic-amorous substantiations. Ten years ago in Rome he exhibited some “paintings” on the theme Ligamenti d’amore (Ligaments of Love) and this year in Pescara he came forward with Fuochi d’amore (Fires of Love). In 1979-80 he carried out the project Un cuore rosso sul Gran Sasso (A Red Heart on the Gran Sasso), climbing the majestic mountain with a huge red heart: a lost symbol of human memory in the immensity of sovereign nature.
His world is magic and therefore every element, symbolic image and context of the “painting” (just like in the sumptuousity created with the charming and seductive use of different materials in the constructions that I call totemic, but which are also perhaps huge affectionate “exvoto”) has the exquisite function of magic symbolism in all its density and evocative ambiguity. It is almost as if there is a formulating of magic evocations of possible behaviour, where the human – remote and topical – is the term of comparison, but where the passing from natural to artificial (or rather, magic) is continual. In this case, for example, between fire as fire (lightning, flame) and artificial fire.
Naturally his is a sounding of the interior depths of the perennial anthropological structure of man, not interpreted in anthropology though, but in the relevance of dialogue: I mean, conscious of the clamorous extroversion of our times, of an overwhelming imagery of the masses (hence his cartoonlike schematizations).
The result is a horizon of images that are festive and playful (Visca in fact speaks of recuperating a “lost festiveness”) where the game however is not at all alienating liberation, but evocation, invention, testing of the possible, vitally significant connections. The goal is the imagination as a constructive power for a richer world, different in its animistic dimension where every sign is therefore also something other than itself, just as every one of its elements in the field is an allusion to a determined symbolic figure and is also charged with further imagery by the intensity of the expressive “decorum” of its own makeup, sumptuously handled and therefore never inert, never purely descriptive (although in the relaxed simplicity of an extreme figurative synthesis). The iconology of everyday objects is animated (animistically) because the source of the magic is the proximity of the domestic world and it manifests itself in symbolic power and unpredictability. From this the beginning of Visca’s typical syncopated narrative is born.
The images are obviously disturbing in their limpidness, to the advantage of the symbolic explanation. The symbol is the instrument (and the goal) of the narrative enrichment; of a penetration of the everyday into the imagery, of remotely possible elsewheres which turn to magic every presence, every evidence, every particular – not only of the principal image, but also of the context in which this manifests itself, within which it appears to us and tells us of an inalienable reality of (and of an inalienable right to) the fantasy of elsewhere, of otherwise, of remote senses which charge life with its inexorable fascination of a dense patrimony of memories.
Roma, dicembre 1985
Enrico Crispolti
ANTROPOLOGY AND ART
The language of Sandro Visca forms a pathway which is marked by mythical events, stony realities, festive processions and metaphysical findings; it is a cultural “tratturo” (sheep track) that registers the transhumance from the Adriatic ocean to the Tibet of the Gran Sasso. The Saracens who landed at Ortona, the Slays – horse merchants of Lanciano, the Albanian warriors of Villa Badessa, bear, on the saddle-cloths of their mounts the echoes of Byzantium and of the Scythians, the opulence and the blood of empires and the wars that built them.
Visca’s lens focuses on the images and, from exogenous factors, transforms them into iconographic history; he makes suffering and rejoicing from them, he reproposes them through the filter of superimposition and comparison. Only in this way can one enter into this “sewing”, as Visca rightly calls the intense work of tearing apart and constructing.
He sews the monastic art of the Benedictine abbeys, the shadows and fires within the naves of Saint Liberatore, the “Chronicon Casauriense” with its Carolongian counterpoints. These shadows and fires are not of places but of seams crashing together. The banners of violence transferred form France with the Duke of Guise, facing the gold and red of the Duke of Alba are strips of the cloth of history which enfolds the Abruzzi in its poverty and in its splendour.
The villages are crossed by these moments of madness, these representative dominations. But inside the secret houses the cloth of the community is woven, the emblems of a pastoral and farming culture which adds elements of its own antiquity to the Catholic iconography.
The saints with the serpents of Angizia round their necks walk through the quarters; the oxen kneel in church and defecate; the naked gypsies slide down the precipices of Pacentro, wounded yet victorious, to be covered with the sacred cloth. The banners embroidered with pictures of miracle-working teeth, the wolf skins the actors wear in the eternal performance of the wild/cultivated drama, the virgins covered with lace and gold, the tablecloths and blankets spread on the way of the procession are all part of the cloth of history that the people draw from their past to trace those paths of language on which Sandro Visca collects material to introduce into his sphere of work and of ethnicity.
This path does not only wind through cultural and human landscapes but goes through natural phenomena too: rocks and water, storms and rainbows, clouds swollen with rain and flashes of lightning and cirri hung in mountain skies, sheets of snow and gilded trees, leaves of the woods and night fires.
I do not intend to narrow the representative world down, but nowhere else but in this land of the Abruzzi, of past and present, of mountain peaks and chasms, of oceans of water and of wool – would Sandro Visca have been able to become a “craftsman” and singer of such depth and wisdom, of so much mature contemplation and emotional colouring.
The hermeneutic operation seems to contrast with the endeavour to introduce history into mythology and reality into fantasy. But actually perhaps it corresponds to that truth which is glimpsed in the Good Fridays of Chieti or in the Resurrections of Sulmona.
The hermeneut Sandro Visca does not mean to historicize events, but he interprets them for us and stiches them onto a canvas prepared over thousands of years. The sewing forms part of the genetics which explain permanencies and changes in a conscious and systematic participation in the stages which regulate the mysterious rules of the psychological reconciliation between present and past.
I remember, as an example of his splendid coherence to his choice to build and live his ‘belonging’ to a tribe, the procession Visca devised in 1975 to transport the huge red cloth heart from Saint Stephen of Sassian to the top of the Gran Sasso; this was an initiation test of the body and of the mind and a challenge to silence and indifference. I took that ritual to be a gesture of retrieval which, starting from the domestic unit, from the emblematic straining, annulled the temporal space of the myth. This was an attempt outside of habitual logic to force the reawakening of a place in the south following the traces of its own gestural communication almost like a non-materialist reading of the social facts, a desperate attempt to break free from the set patterns of written anthropology.
I should like to include Visca’s work, his “research in the field”, in the open world of visive anthropology. There has always been a certain mistrust towards those who write anthropological texts well and towards those who supply visive anthropology with beautiful pictures: who knows what will be said against those who dare bring this undertaking within the framework of the research and synthesis of anthropology!
Levi-Strauss’s “Sad Tropic” is not merely a document but also a fine and permeable text, the fabric of comprehension for the socio-cultural situation to be represented on and for the recognition of his own condition as a witness. When Jons Evans films China, the beautiful pictures derange the stereotypes and invade the field of research and scientific communication.
Visca’s personality doubles, it does not split: telling interpreting, rereading – suggesting, his participation is complex – removed from folkioristic handicrafts, it renews criterion and limits for affirming the explicit beauty of popular art.
The work strives towards the erasing of recurring fashions of a mercantile bourgeoisie which creates its own primitive fetishes and celebrates its rituals around the ‘ex-voto’, the Neapolitan nativity scenes (Praesepe) and popular songs.
This sewing, knowledgeable of all that which has passed over the “Continent of the Abruzzi”, composed of all the newspaper clippings, containing all the relics, opens up a microcosm with universal dimensions and places the popular operative moments on the supporting axis of History. This history is of all sorts: that transfixed on the swords of armies, on the sickles of the farmers, on the crooks of the shepherds. That history which is woven into the linen tablecloths, into the lace of Pesco Costanzo, into the cloak of the transhumant shepherds. It shows fury, outrage, courage, happiness, imagination, waste and poverty. Sandro Visca’s sewings are the banner of this nobility, embroidered pages of the dictionary of the castes, maps of complex cultural territories.
The commitment is to make art a part of visive anthropology, to explore and bring out its microcosms like Duby and LeGoff do for history; because the seeds of the tree of the world lie in this.
“Birth of an Asparagus”, one of the most recent “sewings” is a significant indication of the wealth that explodes from a lump of matter into a continuity like that of the seasons.
The lesson is not only in the cultural fact, it is also in the manual event. Because of its repetitiveness sewing is not a solitary gesture, in farming communities it has always determined the extent of the network of relationships. People sew on the doorsteps of the houses, on the threshing floors and in the yards; the sewing conveys the word, it is a means of communication with which Visca transmits the archaic
techniques of ecstasy to us from the territories of popular culture. Like a shaman, he sews words and cloth, constructs ritual objects for his “flight” and, from the height reached, scrutinizes the future in the folds of history.
25 aprile 1986
Tito Spini
THE TAPESTRIES
In the mid-Seventies Visca started making handsewn tapestries which are actually “assemblages” composed not only of cloth, but also of various other objects. This is his first exhibition of the tapestries and they are collected in this publication. They are real ‘pictures in cloth’ and certainly not mere decorative derivatives.
The tradition of modern tapestry is very rich and follows two almost opposite trends. The first (from Lurcat to Cagli) retrieves, and at the same time almost provokes, the courtly tradition of tapestry weaving. The second, instead, allows space for experimentation and has led to much ease and selfconfidence in the use and mixing of various materials, not only textile; exploiting, however, the maximum mobility and articulation of the latter (from Depero to the recent success of avant-garde weaving).
Naturally Visca belongs to the second group, which counts the presence of famous Italian avant-garde artists, starting with the futurists. If Balla painted his tapestries on special cloth, probably for economic reasons, this did not however detract from the fascination of those huge creations of his; and Prampolini, like Pizzo Rizzo, designed tapestries and carpets and had them woven with a high heddle (at least the former did), Nizzoli preferred to embroider his tapestries, whereas Depero devised a techinique of assembly of pieces of very colourful woolen material in keeping with the bright chromatic effect so widely used as a background in his paintings (in a technique which is now called ‘patchwork’).
Tapestry therefore became practically something like a picture painted with various textile materials. It asserted the presence of its provocative and proselytistic (for the futurists) image within the everyday domestic space, invading and conditioning it but also getting caught up in a much less ideal materiality which was nevertheless much more immediate and accessible than traditional “painting”. Hence a different possibility for painting.
I do not, however, believe that Visca’s original and motivating interest in the stitched and assembled tapestry was of an avant-garde nature. It seems instead, to be clearly anthropological as there is no striking evidence of an idealogical assumption behind the image or the figurative language, but rather a passionate interpretation, with intense emotional memorial participation, of a patrimony of ancestral domestic manual skill, reaching down at times to levels of infantile emotional impressionability, developing his own completely independent intimate iconic-as well as object-dialogue, in the dimension of the image and in that of the material, the cloth, the object, as much as the stitch itself.
The fascination of Visca’s tapestries depends, in fact, on their fantastic conversational nature – on their intense suggestiveness and magic preciosity, which speak in symbolic and allusive language of elementary and very often cryptic (being private and intimate) symbology, with hints at stories which are fabulously disconcerting. A conversational nature which is not only of the image, but also of the material, of the texture of the material, in an extraordinary and really magic variety of compounds, materialistic, chromatic, sign and object so as to sustain the continual fascination, which is as much of the icon in general as of the extreme preciosity which supports the “texture”, highly distinct in each episode, in each iconic component of the story, according to its function.
These tapestries belong – in Visca’s repertoire -between the extraordinary object-constructions made of cloth and other materials; magic, precious and passionate domestic totems originating from the theme of the dolls as fascinating and insinuating fetishes at the beginning of the Seventies; and the vivid fantastic intensity of the synthetic narrative openings of the paintings which span the Seventies and Eighties. The tapestries inherit directly form the objectconstructions what I call a manual conversational nature i.e. the dialogue with the significant material and objects and the sense of the objective physical presence of the image, so intensely fantastic in the imaginative bewilderment which the bold preciosity of the materials and the manual virtuosity of the work provoke. Whereas, although the tapestries sometimes share iconic solutions with the paintings – like certain stylistic elements of narrative synthesis, they are actually distinct from them exactly because the uniqueness of the material wealth (especially textile) which distinguishes each tapestry creates a density of presence which, in my opinion, is superior to the graphic extension which the paintings take on in their chiselled mosaic of precious, clearcut surfaces.
In the tapestries, the manual skill triumphs as an experience of private recollection, an adventure through sewing, retravelling itineraries of memory it creates its own iconic and material method of continually surprising fantastic emphasis and continual magic insinuation which are realized within multiple levels of ancient attractions, steeped in primary symbology of remote affectivity, relived in magic amazement like an enthralling tale conducive to a dimension of absolute dominion and submissive listening to ancient senses and lost magic. The fact that these tapestries are sewn by hand is essential to their expressive nature. This manual work is, however, not executive or repetitive, but is instead heuristic and sometimes almost ritual and devotional. Sewing here researching and building one’s own magic and fabulous dimension – drawing on various memory levels, it means enjoying materials, objects, memories, references and fantastic projections both sensitively and sensually. The work is, of course, slow because each step is motivated, in fact it is necessary to find elements contributive to building the story from the icon which is the end result, but also from the passionate manual work undertaken to reach the definition of that image. Not only is there a fantastic image, but a really fantastic journey and traces are found in the richness of every sign, of every stage, of every element, material, object and stitch. The conclusive image, in its richness which is often suggestively striking, comprehends and exalts this vitality of the workmanship. There is real experience of handwork as dedication to an ancient manual ritual, arising from lost atavic depths and remerging from levels of obviously personal childhood memories.
In this sense it is clear that in Visca’s tapestries the original anthropological motivation plays a vital role, related to the specific patrimony of his native Abruzzi. Visca, however, transposes the proud archaic rusticity to a different level of magic which is unattained and almost unattainable, almost to prove that it is possible to achieve it only in the dimension of fantastic and fabulous exaltation, i.e. displaying a magic and slightly sacred dimension, inapplicable except in a total devotion to the intensity of imagination. This is a completely private and intimate fact, like creating one’s own alternative horizon. Therefore Visca is not archaeological in the folkioristic sense, but magic, in that he achieves an unusual preciosity of (above all) fantastic satisfaction which is magically sensual.
Wishing to trace an inner vitality, in more than ten years of work, there is definitely more totemic concentration in the first tapestries of the Seventies carried out on a very large scale, and more narrative tendency in the later ones, of much more limited dimensions, and in a certain sense more related to Visca’s painting while the first are more marked by the experience of the object-constructions made with various materials. For example, a recurring theme is the “landscape”. In his first tapestries it is more enigmatic, more mysterious, while in the others it spreads out in a fantastic yet essential story which is definitely more eloquent in the description of its various elements.
The tapestries are, anyhow, always extremely precious objects which transpose the image to a level where the valuable, both material and iconic is magic and fantastically involving. The typical qualities of Visca’s imagery are enhanced. Circulating with the same suggestive authority in the various experiences he has been through and at the same time in which he is always present. Visca is an artist who works freely with various types of handmade objects, yet manages to maintain the same tension as the fabulous disconcertion, which, however, is manifest in different intensities in the various operative opportunities he chooses to take advantage of.
Roma, agosto 1986
Enrico Crispolti
AN ALPHABET OF TWENTY FOUR SYMBOLS
It must immediately be said that every man wishes he had the air of a mature Sean Connery, a likeness that Sandro Visca calmly and serenely carries about with him. But I, in
particular, would like to live in the clean, neat and strict order of the studio in which he draws, reflects and creates his works, an order that completely contradicts the disordered pseudo-creative furies of many so-called inspired but fake studies, and so many depressing and discouraging ideologies of creation at all costs. Such creations should, by necessity, emerge from disordered rooms, from cluttered floors, and walls stained with apparently useless “creative” signs. The space that surrounds Visca is clear and simple, his instruments are treated lovingly, protectively and are inevitably arranged in a hierarchic order, the only real order that sanctifies a level of aristocracy. The most noble instrument is the one being used at the moment and, as such, dominates over the others. In the expectancy of being substituted by a needle or a thread or a piece of leather, the pencil waits in its proper palce. Later on the gouge, the chisel or the drill will have the dominanat role, thus modifying once again, with functional precision, this mobile social scale of his instruments.
I do not know if Visca would be pleased with this comparison, but his study reminds me in every detail of a huge garage in the northernmost tip of Canada where a young woman lives apparently alone. We had to turn to her after our caravan broke down. She had all her instruments in an immaculate order, every type of screwdriver, drill, level… she reminded me of Calipso who brought Ulysses, who was sitting on the shore desperate to leave, all the instruments he was to need, and which she herself seemed to own and conserve. A solitary goddess at the extreme tip of the human and divine world.
I would like to know what journey Sandro Visca is about to set sail for from this gangplank of his that is so geometric and luminously uniform and honestly lived in. And since one needs maps and roads for a journey it seems to me that these three rooms are the place for the evocation and representation of worlds to visit, not to conquer. To love, not to posses. I am convinced that it has to do with journeys and maps, even if this conviction may not correspond with Visca’s intention. But firmly and definitely integrated in the idea of the journey is a sense of the possibility of living, and hence of a generous and self confident attitude that it is worthwhile to be on the move. That it is worthwhile to follow the signs of the currents and the profiles of the mountains. And, if this is worthwhile, it means that to live is worthwhile.
The other endearing aspect about Visca is his calm awareness that things could be infinitely better, but that it is not worthwhile shouting, waving one’s arms about, getting agitated, or casting allusive eyes full of “indignation”. The task he has set himself is to trace, both for himself and for others, escape routes, safety exits, to open doors and windows that all too often have been left closed, to add to cheerful and positive adjectives other cheerful and positive adjectives, to carefully trace the altimetrical contours of a town that is only dreamed of. In a certain sense moving about heroically, calmly and silently making others see the infinite combinations of happiness, without making a show of it. He is a diligent explorer who actively participated in the geographical and human reality of South America, a reality he knows very well, as Atahualpa Yupanqui sang in his desolate song “Camino del indio”: “Caminantes, no hay caminos, se hace camino al andar… “Therefore, his routes, maps and graphic and plastic texts also contain moments of discouragement, sudden sadness, horrible details and tiny letters (Borge’s “disgraceful tiny letters”). Just as there are examples in the multicoloured and solar pages of Marquez of desperation, announced suicides and mortal silences, so among the stars, the amusing bronze asparagi and typographic lightnings, one meets a lost bird, a hooked claw, a fire that only burns itself. In “Map and Mirror”, Sir Ernest Gombrich describes the complex cultural phenomenon of the map and sees in it a hybrid form suspended between the alphabet, painting, poetry and pure “representation”. Thus, bogs are drawn as bogs with infested plants, woods are so thick with trees you cannot see the terrain, and cities are formalised with a bell-tower, a bridge and a gate. At tithes one even finds a shade, the reflection of a river, or the half-open gate of an orchard. But next to these is the number, the measurement, the scale and the name.
Similarly, Visca’s maps have this quality of a written text with a simple and clear alphabet and a few symbols. By constantly examining the images he has painted, etched, sewn, fused and embroidered (because Visca also embroiders), I have noted about twenty-four hieroglyphics. It seems to me that he writes using twenty-four symbols. If they are enough for him, they are enough for me. I will not list them all here but they are so endearing and so familiar and it is so pleasant to meet up with them one after the other and recognise them in their continual metamorphosis, that it is a pleasure to make a sort of abbreviated dictionary or vocabulary of them.
Angle: at times it seems the very same angle as those in geometry schoolbooks. With its good old little circle stuck on top of it, at other times it even emerges from the arch of a circle which, if you look at it closely, becomes more and more of an “arch” and elemental geometry melts away and dispears and the arrow can, finally, be released. But suddenly, the angle can easily become a sail set a little aslant on a sea that both Klee and Euclid would have liked.
Lightning: this is typographic lightning. Real thunderbolts with zig-zag edges and sharpened points that plunge into the sea, the lightning of the child and the hero, the lightning of the weather forecast. Sometimes it comes down from rolling clouds astutely scaled with various shades of blue, sometimes it comes from below, from fireplaces, away from schematic and brightly coloured flowers. It may be pink, or bronze, it may be black or only made of air, cut out as in a negative from its mother cloud, as in “Little Tempests”.
Asparagus: unmistakeably a fruit and vegetable. The exegetes who will struggle to give it phallic connotations will have to take into account its absolutely immaculate vegetableness, its little green-brown leaves, its dazzling stalk and its red and violet pointed tip. Sometimes it is shown alone, other times in a group, some of which are rather barbarian and covered in leathery scales. Others are depicted as wooden or Germanic, or slide sinuously as in their
reflection on the oily water of a port. They seem to be insensitive and silent, and almost arrogant. But there are also others that are powerfully and irresistibly drawn to a little far off bronze star and reach out towards it, jumping obliquely and curiously out beyond a blanket of mathematical waves. You almost meet a clan of “apsaragi” but, in the “Garden of forbidden fruit” the asparagus is king (of the chess pieces). These archaic, essential, but very edible vegetable creatures remind me of the episode narrated by Brillat Savarin in his “Meditations Of Transcendental Gastronomy” in which a well-meant joke is played on Canonico who is so proud of the asparagi he grows in the orchard behind the church. At night time, his friends go to pick them and substitute them with false asparagi that have been convincingly designed and coloured and that they “grow” night after night they make “grow”. Until the final mock wooden banquet. The real ones having been celebrated in another provate banquet to which Canonico is not invited…
Spiral: right-handed or left-handed, thin or rendered in a baroque style together with a host of signs and colours, it can be alone or accompanied by others. It may emerge from a sort of chimney-pot or, rather, from a spiral cone of a French castle to which it is attached by a small plug, or a hidden hand that keeps it in its place, preventing it from flying away. But, in other cases, it is the same route of the Little bird (see below) that pulls it along in the racemes and interlacings of the memory of a piously scholastic calligraphy.
Little bird: this is probably the only living creature that is almost always present in Visco’s maps. It is a little bird that is a cross between a quail and a magpie and a sad chicken. One that, to be clearer: “returns on its way…” as soon as it stops raining. Sometimes it is a storm of them that set out on a heroic flight without returning or that return after the umpteenth migration. Sometimes it is curious, alone and half-hidden in the emerald green of a brightly emroidered meadow (but rather badly in the blades of grass) waiting for the hunter to be distracted. But the next time it has landed, maybe dead, killed by the deceitful trap of a bronze disc suspended on four shiny claws. As in Garcia Lorca’s “Hunter” where “four doves fly in the air carrying their four shadows” already dead. What this means for their creator or companion, I do not know. But in this harmless, indestructible, frightened and fearless creature is expressed a constant desire for survival, for wanting to see, understand and exist such that I would not exchange it for an Eagle, a Pelican or an Arabian Phoenix.
Star: this is invariably pentagonal and without stellar symmetries, a little badly done, with irregular rays, thrown there by accident, almost as if it were an option on the part of astronomic Creation. More graphic and infantile than scientific and sidereal, it establishes around itself a gentle and relentless gravitational field that attracts colourful points, smoke and heads hopeful of asparagi and other stars.
This dictionary, or vocabulary of the individual signs in Visca’s works could continue and it is indeed pleasant to reevoke them after having isolated them from their world, jotted them down and put them in a non-alphabetical order. What is moving and seductive is almost always the invisible forces that are contained in these symbols and in these words. A star bows down towards an asparagus, a spiral creates an intense green wind in a field full of asparagi that follow the breeze and that, if they were not firmly rooted to the ground, would be blown about in the air. A star, maybe a marine star (perhaps even a refection of a star) floats on a bronze wave and on one side there is a sharp but rounded tip, shiny but not hard, that suggests the depths of that sea alluding both to its dangerousness and to the wonders of navigation.
But there is also another curious presence that is hidden and made transparent by its self-irony. Here and there one sees curious shapes in perspective: some pictures have them sketched in a corner to immediately forget them in another nearby one. Sometimes a pedestal begins to articulate the names of its mouldings with an infantile and almost scholastic precision: an inside out throat, a ledge, Scotland, a bull… but then stops halfway, perplexed. In others there are windows, openings in a slanting cube that would have delighted Pavel Florenskji to see his “Inverted Perspective” still enjoy, amongst us non-believers, a rare but consolidated success. Underlying this there is, I believe, the School and what Visca thinks of it. Listening to him, I was surprised to find that, unlike almost every secondary school teacher I have ever met, he never spoke badly about school. He certainly smiled understandingly under his beard at the endless weaknesses of this fragile institution of ours that is always on the point of collapsing. Therefore, but this is a personal opinion, the Little Bird seems to me to represent the school. Crouching so as not to be shot, crafty and quick so as not to be caught, careful and patient so as not to end up in an oven. Continually on the verge of extinction, but never having disappeared from the atlas. Sandro Visca did not stoop to the inevitable level of insulting the school, or of condemning it, or making it a target for his scorn. These few examples of his activity as a drawer, his sparing hints at perspective, the awkward and pompous profiles of his vaguely architectonic pedastals, the small reminder of an institutionalised chromatic contrast, all lead me to suspect that Visca is a patient, ironic and kind teacher. One of those people to whom, on meeting them along a road twenty years later, you can put your foot down from your bicycle and say: “Well then, how are your asparagi getting on?”.
Genova, maggio 1995
Ruggero Pierantoni
IN ITINERE
As Crispolti observes: “I do not think that the origin of Visca’s interest in tapestries is of an avant-gard nature.” But if is easy to see how it is connected to an important experimental trend of contemporary art, which includes the revival of a poetic approach in working with fabrics as seen from Cagli to Boetti for example, not to mention the various experimental deviations from Depero to Baj, to the more recent instances of Ghaada Amer or Louis Bourgeois. It is, however, also concerned in underlining the artistic value of textile material ‑ with its strong communicative and social connotations ‑ which, however varied in expression, it has such a magical power of conveying and interpreting.
Visca’s inspiration behind this ancient art is in turn also ancient and ancestral, and springs from a confidence in his own roots as well as the apparent desire to explore the borderline between ontogenesis and phylogenesis. His aim is to piece together scraps of memory, and fragments of history in the attempt to reconstruct and recompose the very texture of life as it narrates the complex scheme of experience and ethos not only in a sequence of highly imaginative images, but also in a tissular film of reality that reveals the epiphany of its inexorable occurrence.
Handmade products, which were once considered minor, surrogate forms compared with the socalled “mainstream art forms” are in reality a more sincere revelation of the profound impulses that have brought about the historical evolution of culture, which, at the beginning, were determined simply by activities that created forms and produce images, and were not as yet mediated or dictated by the conscience, but were still spontaneous and virginal in their obedience to the original laws of creativity, which is constitutive of man’s existential task, as Heidegger suggests, of “constructing, living and thinking”.
Alois Riegl, one of the major exponents of the “Viennese School”, detects in these works the fundamental characteristics of Kunstwollen, the artistic desire which is intrinsically connected with the artist’s vision of the world, and in Alt Orientalische Teppische (1891), he lays the foundations for a scientific approach to the study of carpet weaving, a handicraft that is as ancient as it is full of cultural significance and in which he includes both floor and wall carpets.
Two techniques with the most diverse typologies correspond to these: “for wall carpets the tapestry weaving (Wirkerey), for floor carpets knotting.” The firs method is the most primitive and definitely the oldest form of weaving.
Used “for covering, protecting and enclosing”, the primordial products of weaving were used, as Gottfried Semper points out in his monumental study Die Textile Kunst (1878) ‑ both for clothing the body and for erecting temporary barriers against the outside world, thus creating an enclosed living space.
“This latter aim” ‑ continues Riegl ‑ was achieved by quite simply hanging woven tapestries a certain height above the ground on a pole, or on two, three, four or more poles like a tent”.
Thus from the primitive method of mat weaving tapestry weaving began and spread throughout all the ancient civilisations, and its handicrafts characterised both western and oriental culture; from the Peruvian Incas to the Egyptians and Indians, etc.
After its most important development, which began at the end of ancient times and lasted till the medieval period, this ancient method, which was a point of departure for western gobelin weaving, was, by the XV century, already widespread in central Europe from France to Germany, where it was practised professionally, while in other European countries it was for a long time entrusted to domestic rural activity.
In Italy these two areas of development seem to have existed side by side, so much so that “even now” writes Riegl in the 1891 text quoted above, – “almost four centuries after Raffael, there can be found flourishing in the rural domestic activities around Macerata the production of striped coloured cloth … an inheritance which comes from a remote past”.
In the light of these considerations on the textile activity around Macerata a century ago, the exhibition of Sandro Visca’s tapestries promoted by the Cassa di Risparmio of Macerata comes as an event of great interest and again underlines the peculiarity of one of the bank’s main institutional functions as a sensitive and subtle sensor, particularly aware of the art world, both in terms of style as well as of the spirit of the times.
In the contemporary world of artistic experimentation, Sandro Visca’s works represent a particularly significant alternative, in that although they are strategically precise in representing the current artistic system, ‑ characterised as it is by a widespread consumption of the artistic product ‑ they above all restore it to its original communicative form and in doing so convey a powerfully valuable aesthetic and ethical message, and one that can also be easily found among the most common everyday objects.
Assembling as he does the most varied and heterogeneous materials of the most diverse contents, with special attention to certain recurrent images or emblems, Visca composes a sort of metonymical glossary of a highly imaginative collection of findings and that characterise and measure out the rhythm of life along a road full of iconic sediments that the artist gathers and interprets according to a very personal code of representative forms, heraldic figures, emblems and symbols, interconnected through a playful and subtle irony.
In this way he seeks to retrace the borderline journey where man’s impact with the world has always relentlessly taken place, at the origin of the creative act which gives a meaning to existence and divides reality into the symbolic signs that are entrusted to artistic activity. Visca’s images are always functional, even in their most apparently refined and gratuitous forms, and in this way he reclaims the autonomy of his activity, in contrast with Burri, for example, whose influence nevertheless remains an undoubtedly significant moment in his artistic formation.
But with his “woven” signs, Visca also scrupulously and patiently pauses to describe the wandering nature of signs when they are dissociated (before they take on a final identity as a recognisable form or shape), and draw on the enchanted source of primitive feelings in order to feed the slow process which, item by item, moves towards the making of a cloth, and on whose background a possible form, fleeting idea, or urgent desire can stand out, that is both representative of something and highly imaginative at the same time as well as a metaphor of a phylogenetic process of a much greater consequence that has characterised the weary, slow and wandering history of mankind.
To introduce this elaborate collection of experiential works, which culminate in the construction of “mental objects” conserved in the memory as substitutions of experience itself, Visca refuses all the technical strategies of embroidery in order to interpret, in a system of signs that are stitched and ‘embedded’ in the cloth, simplified but intense iconic codes, which are charged with ethos, and which he has the magical ability of revealing, collecting and presenting, often humbly following the compulsory logic of a story line whose apparently naive configurations and shapes in reality conceal an extremely powerful symbolism.
The big chequered tapestry on the wall of the Palazzo Ricci in Macerata is an extraordinary example of Visca’s work. It can be seen as a sort of synthesis which, whilst taking stock of his experimentation, also betrays a parallel and indirect intention with respect to his immediately artistic one. This is seen in the projection of the world of high technology into a special, isolated world, where time is suspended by the slow activity of the artisan who welcomes the opportunity for intervals and pauses in order to conserve the empathetic more than mental speed of the lightning process of his intuition which captures and connects elements that are far from one another in time and space. This is the world which has always been the undisputed domain and private niche of the artist and in which it is easier for him to reveal the kaleidoscope display of his imagination.
But the artist does not arbitrarily invent forms, if anything he makes them recognisable as essential parts of a collection of images, like those which Sandro Visca reveals and expresses with an unmistakable poetry of his own in his weavings, tapestries and embroideries. Whether his works be abstract or narrative, they are all characterised by extremely warm and radiant colours, juxtaposed with colours that are equally pure and nocturnal in their coldness, as well as soft shapes, like the materials he uses which are organic by nature and therefore alive, subtle and necessarily encouraging for weaving and “embedding” certain symbolic frames, in an infinite sequence of highly imaginative works, like those which stand out here, in this original story board where the secret meaning of life is jealously hidden, impressed with the indelible signs of a human activity which is in harmony with the world.
Macerata, gennaio 2000
Paola Ballesi
The Golden Shadow
(For Sandro Visca, a “rounded” artist )
Immersing oneself in the work of a respected artist, deeply reinventing art with every encounter, digging deep within the moist black roots of inspiration, discovering and filtering the mysterious sap of growth, praising like bold bursts of joy the new gems that rage. They are or will be colours and all the flowers are destined to be fruit…Enigmas, queries, illuminations that crowd and embroider all of his life, and most of all the work of art , like stars that mime a “Great Firmament” to Summer…
Sandro Visca, sixty-three years of age was born in L’Aquila, but for many years has resided in Pescara.He has a cosmopolitan heart and a piercing stare and was renowned for years in nearly all artistic circles as being one of the most talented and rising characters of his generation. I’m fascinated by many of his good points and virtues: his fearless journey, and most of all the rigour of every choice that he had ever honoured, consecrated in his pure and secular faith in art.
There are many things I would like to ask him, even just to pinpoint the details of “In itinere”, but I limit myself to summarise them in a single point: the capacity that he has always had to caress, cut, sew, glue, to basically deflagrate art like destiny – and this is not a simple fake gnomic activity but a decorative one…
To recognize and distinguish the years of his career and the completion of his projects, they seem decisive – like in a summary or biography – the various, marked chapters of a life spent entirely (even in art) becoming what he already was or wanted to be… that aggregate and tune into a novel never before written: the Novel of Matter…
This never ending, transparent novel, when you come to think about it, is in reality the only true journey, query, poem, language, mystery… that has donated, assigned – inflicted- to Art its Modernity.
Certainly not since then, it is true that in Baudelaire times building some Corrispondence in all of this was almost revolutionary, and also elaborating the tradition, admiring his “Lights”, signified praising and running through, again and again, a sub poetic species, like “an oblivious river, an indolent garden” (Rubens), “an obscure and deep mirror” (Leonardo), “a sad hospital full of whispers” (Rembrandt), “powerful ghosts in twilight backgrounds” (Michelangelo), or a “carnival where just like butterflies / many illustrious hearts wander about in flames” (Watteau), but often even the “nightmare full of unknown things” (Goya) – in short an echo propagated by one thousand labyrinths…
In the labyrinth of a shape, and matter, we know that the modern artist, loves to lose himself basically to find himself: “Maybe it has always been this way but today I believe that there is a lot of material in poetry as much as in previous times.” – Boccioni wrote and swore by this actually in 1907, in his confessions and fervid Taccuini futuristi – Form changes and artists inheriting religion of the form are becoming ridiculous conservatives. The world begins a new era and wants substance. In other words Art must become a function of life and not be kept disdainfully apart… Proof that the artists didn’t carry out the process of transformation lies in this, that while scientists study and create, pulsating with their souls the universe that surrounds them, artists create dead things, not only to the majority but also the minority from an unknown language. It’s impossible that the era of art is over and that the era of science has begun and that humanity does not need to sing anymore. There is always an infinite joy and infinite pain rather that laughs and cries. Which will be the formula that bring human inspiration?”.
The form changes…but thinking back – today – in all of the surprise and judgement which followed Sandro Visca, there would never be a touch of doubt or the sensation of a minimum of conservatism; a religion of form or style, in what we could say traditionalist, or nevertheless overworked.
Visca has always searched for the cosmogonical matrix inside himself and in the meantime even outside himself . The synergetic ductility of this change, a movement that for years has been called Art, is demanding metamorphosis, depth, precise fantasy, finally – yes this – devoted religio in the bold form, communicating in progress…So never stopping, feeding on his own big and small targets, and not even on his sacrosanct, which intimidated his emotive goals.
The form doesn’t conserve the Form other than ignore it, testing it out, always inseparable, transfused in every shadow or light of its times.
Here, Sandro Visca had always studied and created palpitando con l’anima universale which surrounds him…that is to say with his materials, his fibres, his existence –and his elements: in a chemical and physical sense. He was like this since the beginning of his early studies at the Scuola d’Arte of L’Aquila in 1961.In the atmosphere there were torments and epoch-making ways fume in full vehemance: Tom Wesselmann with his pubblicity extracts , Schwitters and his great collages of Merz, the New – Dada, the materic…However Visca searches for and finds
direction of fervent opposing trends. It is in 1964 that the cycle of the Crocifissioni: “ a study made with collage and vivid colour – just like problems, – it drips and expands in blots;” -reveals Emidio Di Carlo – “ the sign is clean and shiny and tangibly engraves a human story relived in all its pain. However the figure (burned, torn, crystalized) hints at dissolving: This is the pleasure of the matter, the contemplation of the sculptural quality (is this a new question to be faced by reality?), the necessity of a new spacial component of composition”.
It is also in this partial dissolution, in this faded and dark, impetus, reconstruction, until even a figurative rebirth – which reveals a constant line of his work: both materic and iconological…
It is for this reason that we are obliged to speak about his relationship with Alberto Burri. It began in 1969 the time of his artistic collaboration with the Teatro Stabile of L’Aquila. The photos, fervid and sweet, revisited today, show both the staging and mounting of the gigantic theatrical scenography for the performance of L’Avventura di un povero cristiano, by Ignazio Silone, directed by Valerio Zurlini, for San Miniato, appointed in 1969.
I was contacted by T.S.A. because no stagecraft laboratory in Italy was available to realize these scenes. What was needed to be done was the combustion of two plastic items, one was white and the other red and also a sack. It was necessary to realize three backdrops, ten metres in length and seven and a half metres high in relation to Burri’s three small models. I went to Milan where the theatre had reserved a large space in the fair’s pavilion where I made the two combustions. I was able to complete this work constantly working day and night and without sleeping for 15 days. I was only 25 and anything was possible.
I remember the splendid lyrical prose that Leonardo Sinisgalli – a poet, unique and also an expert art critic – he dedicated L’età della luna (1962) to his friend Burri ), visiting him at work, in his flickering blackened by smoke yet sublime studio, quite arcane, seeming like a futuristic cavern of a sybil…
Burri is waiting for us in the large underground room of the Salaria Burri with his cat eyes wearing a t-shirt. He lives like a vagabond, a madman hiding from nettle. From the corners of the walls he shoots against two plates of lead or breaks the bottom of a bottle. Hanging from the walls are ripped flags, widows in mourning, fetid underwear, ribbons of medals. He has a bin of bitumen in the room, sacks of plaster, needles, tacs and flat brushes. A Soldier of a lost war, he doesn’t whisper nor sing. He sews and burns.
Naturally the true end of art, the relationship, the artistic collaboration has even made itself a human landing place, a humanistic regard, we could say, which is friendship: and here we mention Visca and Burri, both are passionate hunters, both immersed in cosmogony in their tours in Umbria or in Abruzzo. From Burri’s studio above Casenove of Mucignano and the splendid chestnut woods which surround it…
I knew a different Burri. He was different to that misanthrope that everybody spoke about. He was very open with me and in our free afternoons, after returning from long periods of hunting, he would tell me with passion about the period that he was a prisoner in Texas, and about his first paintings and the difficulty he had in the concentration camps finding colours, especially red. He also told me with quite an amount of rage, how hard he had tried to find his brother who was missing in Russia, but most of all we spoke about painting and also about my work.
It is a true Romanzo della Materia. I repeat ,it is what Visca explains to us right before our eyes, abducted and inexhaustible, always saving himself, never reshaping himself with strategems but with spring water, age – old yearning for Art…
The inert matter… to sew, burn, combust…and then the most vital, eclectic and encyclopedic relationship, we can say using these materials…from the Laboratorio Metalli of the school of youth, to the large tapestries…This is his stubbornness, his sublime need to “recuperate colour through matter”… and most of all recuperate the Informal with the pictorial appearances …
In 1964 when his heartfelt series of the Crucifixions – was underway; the 14 tragic human moments of the Stations of the Cross – even here as usual, Visca turns, and avoids ideological implications, resetting, darkening and humiliation of his creative fertile beginnings. *While all of the materic movement (basically all of Burri’s followers,) made the matter into a singular logos and ethos – until awarded – in their own expressive search. Sandro uses, sublimes and selects leftover waste material, (recycled paper, fabrics, rags, glue, enamel, welded iron) to combine, interweave, shape and plant neo-humanistic representations.
It is where the humane – but not its residual and torn apart drift, exploded from within, and we are not talking about the post-humane – would have been well centred in the work that is made divine in a new qualifying outcome.
From the darkness, Visca seems to tell us – as the perfect, original and emancipated student of the best part of Burri – the light is reborn, implodes and rises again … From the burned lacerations of a social plot – and of the creating matter – new colours come out like miracles: new because just like in Proustian times, they were lost and then found again.
Collaboration with the theatre flung open an alternative opportunity, a blood related and, at the same time, varied: la piece by Zurlini da Silone… and most of all Un cuore rosso sul Gran Sasso, an art film that Visca realized in 1975 at the peak of a bizarre, fertile estetic hermitage season in his mountainous Abruzzo, always more bitter, ancestral and apotropaic, embodied in stone like an immense tectonic monument, a secular and gigantic cardiac sanctuary, a porous mausoleum of Nature.
Thinking about, mutatis mutandis (here we are not threatening the mountain peak of the Gran Sasso, but her sister the Maiella), the splendid description D’Annunzio creates in his Trionfo della Morte (1894) where he recites like one would do for an ascending summit risen by its own steeping sides, summit that is deep-rooted and vegetative for the atavistic strength of its own traditions, for an unutterable furor anthropologicus:
His country and his people appeared to him changed, taken beyond the time, with a legendary and impressive aspect, weighty with eternal and mysterious nameless things. A mountain rose from the centre like a huge master trunk, in the form of a breast, covered with perpetual snow; and a sad and unsettled sea baths the falcate coasts and the capes sacred to olive trees, on which the sails carrying mourning and flame colours. Streets as wide as rivers, covered in green grass and spread with boulders and here and there marked with gigantic footsteps, descending the hills leading to the migration of the flocks. Rites of forgotten dead religions survived; incomprehensible symbols of power, decayed a long time ago, remained intact…
Like a big master trunk… The artist’s fascination for the mountain leads us very far (perhaps to Ceccardi Roccatagliata, to Jahier, to Dino Campana and to a certain Rèbora and even to the poor Antonia Pozzi!): but also with Visca this can’t be seen as just an experience, which could be called naturalistic – but like a human ascension, a hanging anthropological oxymoron-like immersion… “over the non baptized mountain ” and its mass of images – said the great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.
Every descent from the summit celebrates, after all, a new start rich in oxygen. The return, the gathering together and going downstream along the rivers and even along the hostile streets of Reality.
“In the work of Sandro Visca, taboos, fetishes and candid restorations of cultured witchcraft emerge and show themselves,” – writes Gino Marotta, without doubt, thinking about these great tours all over the world – “ferocious, passionate recognition of collective ethnics, passionate territories that go beyond the Gran Sasso, towards the desert”…and elsewhere he will love to depict it as “the Saracen, charming Exorcist,” a “bitter privileged decoder of arcane and distant mechanisms of thinking”…
Here is one of the most interesting chapters of Visca’s life – and therefore of his art as well – that may be well accredited to his long trips to the Andes, in Peru and along the Amazon River…It obviously brings to mind a kind of lyrical light from Pablo Neruda – no less sweet than bitter or less mocking and pure than his – perfectly transferred not just into his famous poems, but perhaps even more properly in some of his prose and diaries, where the strong South American nature seems to raise itself, changing into a bitter or imaginative artist, able to paint and sculpt all lands, foreshortening, gulf or horizon with his colours and shapes; behold, the unrepeatable, the interjected murales of the “L’autunno dei rampicanti” [The autumn of the climbing plants]:
The yellow and fugitive passing time decapitated leaves and it advances towards the other side of the earth, heavy, making the fallen foliage crunch. Before leaving, it climbs up the walls, gripping onto the spiky tendrils and illuminating the taciturn climbing plants. They wait all year for his arrival because he dresses them in crepe and bronze. It is when autumn ends and the convolvulus are decorated, filled with joy, possessed by a last desperate resurrection. It’s a time full of desperation, where everything runs towards death. So you forge on the damp walls the dark fury of the climbing plants. Blue motionless spiders, yellow and purple scars, bloodied medallions, the Northern winds’ toy. It is here that the wind forms every embroidery and where the water clouds will complete your work.
Even nature invents its glorious supreme palettes! Fetishes and taboos… Collective ethnics…
We have to imagine and respect that younger Visca of 1970’s, happily in tune, linked to this profound choice of life: including, fortunately, all the in and abouts of political choices, which were and still are, for the same reason, also humane. “In those years” – he told me, as if he felt like he was balancing on a tightrope of an ancient discomfort of affection or even of an incarnate impulse, off course, but not totally shared – “the categories should always be an alternative proposal…I preferred to recuperate certain stratifications of experience…It’s a progressive recovery, and that must be clear, not an archaeological one…I better aimed and investigated the relationship between the inner-man and outside-man – which is the real collected need for living. Maybe, why not?, using as a model a culture of belonging; and escaping from the Market mechanisms, or from the Power of the Critics, to save myself. ”
Therefore, refusing to give himself up completely to trendy critics or to a gallery entourage was deciding – instead of reasserting (primarily inside of him) his anxiety for a creative freedom and for a peaceful existence: the choice of teaching at the Academic Department of the Liceo Artistico of Pescara , beginning in 1968, helped him and protected his work like an oasis. His relationship with young people, greatly extended his own youth and allowed him to have many unexpected collaborations and some emotional but also expressive transfusions. Meeting, in 1972, a student like Andrea Pazienza – the brilliant designer and cartoonist that became the symbol of a generation just a few years later, and just as quickly, burnt out – well explains certain illuminating and predestined developments both artistic and existential (From Pazienza’s archives, it emerges that Sandro Visca, the beloved and caricatured teacher, adapted in dozens of cartoons, was just the “real” character and was the most designed character by Andrea Pazienza…).
This was the time when we finally were liberated – and we came out very battered – from carrying the great, hegemonic weight, and basically blackmailing of ideologies. Their providential and inevitable decline – which is like saying to crumble, break, implode – favoured and generated a subtle but urgent need for some other comfort, styles, archetypes and targets.
Trend after trend, than came also that of Nature – eternally coming back like the Alma Mater [Mother’s Soul], mysterious and primordial. That was just an honest need for many people, an urgent need to read into themselves, and to carefully listen to themselves especially as the Anima Mundi [World’s Soul]. Sandro Visca was immediately among these, with such an analytic profundity, necessities, fervour and denials. So the naturist belief purged and redeemed souls, which were still hurt from the sterile malaise and from the, much too numerous, terrifying avant-garde skirmishes – and especially hurt from the inexorable, terrifying civil, political, poisonous and factious tribulation… The year 1968 profoundly betrayed his dreams and needs – the 70’s darkened in mourning. “Gli anni di piombo” [The years of lead], so they called them, because they weighted and killed just like lead with its “autonomous” people’s P38, the reactionary smoke bombs of the police, the Red Brigades, the kidnapping and then the gloomy, delirious assassination of Moro: a tragic, unnecessary holocaust for a System that certainly remained vilely the same, that as effect has nothing but the acceleration of its own consumerist instinct and propensities, the fake democratic dictatorship of the Capital…
Pierpaolo Pasolini shouted and warned about it, but he ended up as a beaten corpse, found tumefied and massacred in a waste dump in Ostia’s hydro port, which is in the extreme outskirts of Rome (which he loved anyway), after one of his squalid homosexual rendez-vous. From his idolized Ragazzi di vita ended in Death. He had indeed pictured it, filmed and already put it into poetry in his mind, in a visionary nightmare that made him sense it and that made him suffer for all the new emergencies and for the world wide scenario, terribly seething and agonizing with its unstoppable Third World to the 2nd power, 3rd power, exported as an endemic virus, colonized as a necessary other-hell, a condemned purgatory and a functional system:
The Fifth Pain is to know
that billions of living
one sweet morning, wake up
just like every morning of their life,
In the simple sun of a future Europe,
its mulberries, its primroses,
— Or in the depths of India
where the sublime smell of cholera lingers
on small naked bodies just like spirits,
— Or in shameless Africa
increasingly modern
on the bed of death that will be its frame
to the mad gift of life,
— Or in this Fiumicino sun river
which has a feast with the odour of the mud
of poor immortal latina…
Everyone dreamed, searching for his own antidote, shaped for his own needs.
Everyone escaped from himself, towards himself, inside himself: and after that, a moving, longing mythicization of Nature.
The western world, everybody knows, follows fashion, trends: here are those books like Tolkien or Hermann Hesse and his Siddartha, where India is evocated and invoked. A nirvana that no metropolis is really able to give – outside of mere literary tricks or symbolic flicks…
“Nobody would ever think of bringing into question the authority of the Centro Permanente dell’Amore when it affirms that it was necessary to refuse all forms of contact with the rest of the universe. Activated …a word written in black letters dripping red ink…” – that drunken wise man, who was Jack Kerouac, was raving in that weird, unheard and pungent science fiction novel of those years, cityCityCITY – “you could see the word ACTIVATED written on the hyper-sterilized toilet walls of cityCityCITY with obscene sketches.”
Swimming upstream, towards the other side of the Earth, Sandro Visca instead, comfortably continued his work, being, listening to himself and actively working as an artist, architect of a genuine, inborn desire for expression.
He, who never chose nor accepted the metropolis, with its consumerist liberal-democrat fake dictates, or even worse, the rebellious alibis and the dark utopias of good, or the dreading and seducing real socialisms…
His new productive period, in the middle of the 70’s, admires and enchants with his wisely naive works, uncorrupted, flowered with almost alchemic figurations. It is never outmoded décor, but hard-fought, oxygenizing horizon of enchantments, suspensions, rarefactions or analogical plots, tirelessness iconography and polychrome tapestry of the soul: or perhaps, who really knows the unwoven, varied and finally decoded map of the “Centro Permanente dell’Amore”…
But what we are interested in this dear shaman, who sews words and material together, is his relationship with the 1900’s modern classics (and even the 1800’s: consider Jugendstil, Klimt, Vienna’s secession or William Morris’ neo-medieval fairytale – like abductions and his “Arts and Crafts” movement and not only): post-futuristic artists like Prampolini and Depero of course but, most of all (other than Burri) Fontana, Afro, Mirko, Cagli, Munari and many others can be mentioned: from all the Forma 1’s Italian “abstract artists”, to the performer artists, Body art and Land Art (see Christo)…
In the same way that Visca’s infinite theatrical-like chances intrigue us with his images and installations that he proposes and flings open; we would like to say: he displays and exudes en plein air…
“The spectator makes the work”, that is what Duchamp theorized and profaned. Again, with Sandro Visca, his work chooses, elects and trains his own spectator – or, better, it seems like it indoctrinates and talks to them…Like in his puppet theatres when he asks the spectator to animate them, giving them words and emotions, thoughts and refracting and reflecting the soul’s images; or like, earlier in the “Pupazza”, who is the real counter-daughter, the princess of smiles, dreams, mirrored and different, cheerful and peaceful compared to the terrible Ubi-Roi, who is absurd and metaphysical, troubled and satirical, astonished inside our ridiculous and tremendous modern History, that opened it and reigned through all the 1900’s, from Alfred Jarry and on…
Some disquieting puppet theatres were invented by Visca in 2002, but are still amusing and exorcising, beyond any measurable and “tottering” gracefulness:
“Il teatrino dell’amore” [the puppet theatre of love], “Il teatrino dei fiori” [the puppet theatre of flowers], “Teatrino orientale” [ the oriental puppet theatre], “Il teatrino del martin pescatore” [the king fishers’s puppet theatre] – and even the “Aparago in posa” [the posino Aparago], “L’istrionismo del guitto” [the beggar’s histrionism], “Ripostigli segreti” [secret closets], “Caduta di un personaggio” [a character’s fall], “Salvataggio estremo” [extreme rescue]… “Inquietanti” [disquieting] – Antonello Rubini is right when he affirms: <because beyond the vibrating preciousness, iconic and Materic, you can often forcefully get some precariousness and emotional upheaval: architectonical structures fall apart, chaos imposes itself and those easy and joyful deductions lose some of their lightness; figures sometimes appear frozen like in the instant of their destruction. In all of this there is no dramatization> …
This brings to mind the graceful and concentric James Hillman (the famous psychoanalyst and Jung scholar, as we know he was a bitter critic of western culture rationalism. He insists on identifying the psyche with an archetypical image, substituting the concept of unconsciousness with collective memory) which invokes and regrets the Puer aeternus [The eternal child], who lives inside of us and are risking to lose, exiling him elsewhere:
…the figure of the Puer Aeternus is the vision of our first nature, our primeval Golden Shadow, our affinity with beauty, our angel essence like a divine herald, like a divine message. (…) The Puer however personifies that damp spark on the inside of any complex or behaviour that is the original dynamic seed of the spirit. It is the calling of things to achieve perfection, the calling of the person towards himself, to be faithful to himself, to maintain contact with his eidos that is divine creation. The Puer offers direct contact with the spirit. If one breaks this direct contact the Puer falls like broken wings and when it falls we lose the urgent sense of our goal and we instead begin a long processional march through the palaces of power towards the Old King, ill from a hardened heart. He often dresses up and is indistinguishable from an old invalid wise man.
Materic cosmogony, chromatic weaving, dislocation of the form, emotional architecture…. How many operations work out, coexisting and even rubbing together in the works of Visca- in his continuation and obstinate molding and perhaps remolding, reflecting itself, developing a fondness but also abstract in and from the pure matter! A poet like Sinisgalli, was right, this time dealing with works by Lucio Fontana: “All of his work is under the sign of cheerfulness, a creepy cheerfulness; a bit gruesome. He wanted to bring the sky into the rooms….I see him as a brother in the anti-rhetoric, anti-mystic, calling. He needed to impede the way of the academics, and of the “firemen”. His ‘concepts’ are blocks, obstacles, barriers. They had a great deterrent effect. They made the Philistines fear.”
Under the sign of cheerfulness…bringing the sky into the rooms…impeding the way…a deterrent effect…
What a coincidence, right on the eve of one of the ugliest years of our history, 1976, at the Biennale in Venice, Sandro Visca will work, like he always does, with a passion and inspiration that never leave him, to reconstruct Fontana’s atmosphere.
With these adorable and disquieting puppet theatres, Visca, immerging himself in it, introduces us more and more to a real metaphoric parade or an unmoving dance of things. If Marc’s, Kandinskij’s and the “Blaue Reiter’s” motto was, in 1914,
<not to copy the world any more, but to make things “visible”>, now, things become absolute protagonists, restorative emblems, humanoid ambassadors; the symbolic thingsification seems to be the only conceptual and expressive antidote against massive dehumanization…
There were many, too many things going around in those years of intriguing and intricate emancipation of modernity, from modernity, inside and beyond modernity… Abstract Expressionism, Tachisme, informal, action painting, geometric abstraction, optical art, naturally a flood of pop art (Rauschenberg’s combine paintings, pointillism paintings and Lichtenstein comics, Warhol and his silk screens in series and selected images, and media iconographies oppressively repeated).
Everything or almost everything, in short, had already been done or attempted: from the “DADA DADA DADA” poster, a continuation of choppy colours, meeting point of all contradictions and opposites, in short from the “disgusting Dadaist” Tristan Tzara, to the “ready-made sculptures” by Giacomo Balla; from the self portraits with red and blue ballpoint pens by Dubuffet, and from the utopic fascination of L’Hourloupe, to the sarcastic series of “Generali” of the “Modificazioni” of “Maccani” and of “Dame” by Enrico Baj….nor forget, more or less contemporary, “Lirismi Alchemici” by Vladamiro Tulli (as if we would leave out his “Veleni in rossa e materasso” or “L’arcobaleno stroncato?”), the delightful, showy Mozart of Luzzantip is still more allegorical, the jolly “Fantasie Teatrali” by Daniela Remiddi, with her puppets, the masks, the costumes of immediate and polychromatic fragrance…was also awakening- not to say looming over, to explode soon- also the success (merited and piloted together) by the Trans-avant guarde, in which champions, from Chia to Clemente, from Cucchi to De Maria to Paladino) according to their critic and “prophet” Achille Boniti Oliva, “overcoming the ideology of linguistic Darwinism (…) recuperating the reasons of manual skill, of the subjectivity and re-establish painting, sculpture and design categories. Cultural nomadic and stylistic eclecticism guard the work of a refoundation of sullen art on the Manneristic principal of the citation”…
These are already games and tricks from the second half of the 70’s… youth, generations go by in a hurry, and each person only seems to be rushed to fire and substitute its predecessor… and the 60’s, not that they were not easily filed- neither by us nor anywhere else!….
In Italy, let’s say between 1959 and 1968, around the Piazza del Popolo’s cafés, other than the solitary and celebrated undertakings of great safeguarded deities (from Burri to Fontana, as first and from Capogrossi to Rotella, ect..), had grown, especially in Rome, an impudently young, impetuous school of painters, kind of renegade, unanchored, annoyed by traditions, even by the modern ones. This school helped to give the birth to a sort of talented, quick and vaguely hedonistic Italian version of Pop-art. Everybody knows the names: we can start, with two fine distinction and nuances, from Schifano to Festa, from Angeli to Ceroli, to Mambor, Kounellis, Tacchi, Marotta, Pascali… Paola Pitagora who, in those years started her carrier as a promising and anguished actress for Bellocchio (but also known as the Lucia Mondella in the television version of Promessi Sposi), find herself the fiancé and muse of one of them, Renato Mambor. Many years after that, in the pages of her dairy-like and novelized Fiato d’artista (2001), she told us about those anxious dreams, fearless like the trajectory of one of their fast motorbikes and about that breezy, crushing and anarchic bohème, and that bad economic boom with lucid and acute accents:
“Why didn’t you get involved with some director or producer?” I asked myself. It surely would have been easier for me than with those ‘masters of pain,’ they were imposing a vision of reality that often contradicted my everyday needs, that were vital, for growth. Without realizing it, I was drinking a precious nectar from them, that of liberty, free creativity. “From those useless arts” wrote Brecht. In my eyes their works were really being born from a necessity, not even that of Beauty: you did not pronounce “beautiful” in front of a painting or sculpture, instead you had to overcome this ‘being caught off guard’, because it was another version of Beauty, a different language that they were experimenting. Fascinated, I aimed that iridescent wheel and I forced myself to understand, but if the word Avant-garde makes sense, only today can I love their work.
Here is Sandro Visca in 1969, smiling and mocking, captiously self-ironic with his emblematic rag puppets, hand sewn, with unquestionable handcraft skill, and then played with, as Nicola Ciarletta suggested, with a “burlesque and hallucinating effect, Godart-like (the closest movie director to the origins of theatre).”
It is the opposite- and the discriminating factor- of the humanization of the objects (or perhaps vice versa), that allowed the most interesting conceptual acrobatics and archetypical exchanges. Again Ciarletta says: “Visca knows, as a modern man, that today man (and with this term, even if it’s not necessary to clarify, we also mean woman) is reified, it became changeable with the objects he uses. This mutuality between the man and the object had its first representative – pardon me for my insistence – Picasso. Visca also knows that in the old times, the figurative artist was considered – as well as the poets – like an imitator (it means, mind this, like an interpreter) of human actions (that require elaboration and movement). Therefore it’s on this two way consciousness that Visca arrives to the conception (and it’s clear that all the tendencies that were going around in that period flow into him: pop, op and so on) his painting, that is vision (and would like to be so for human actions), like theatre, which is, and always will be, a vision (as the term itself denounces)”…
Benito Sablone – as an ironic and languid poet who, just like all of us, is eternally researching for new balances – will talk about the twofold truth of his rag “puppets” which, after all, “don’t want to be treated too seriously and who continuously threaten to rise against their own creator because of their strong ironic energy. They become like this, even extremely serious and dramatic: but this occurs in a second moment after they have wiped the slate clean of all the esthetic myth residuals.”
It is exactly in this way that Sandro, contrite and cheerful, structured and anti-mythic, succeeded in joining and perhaps tempering together Creativity, Necessity, Freedom and Beauty…
Not to mention the accomplished – and also contradictory, hurray! – anthropological- cultural implications; or, overall, not to mention the so called “Visca’s magical trans-language”, that the sociologist Lucio Fraccacreta found and rewarded (we were in the beginning of the 70’s, when he had just had a personal exhibition in Milan in the “Pace” Gallery) like the journey through the inner man’s alchemy:
In the end, from Visca’s work appears a new cult model: the represented objects are contemporaneously and reciprocally “internal” and “external”.
The world that is showed in these works, the head, the heart, the neurovegetive system, the uterus, the cloud, the underground, the fire, gold and silver things, red things, gain a complex syntactic value that comes from that alchemic process, that is the transformation which comes from deep within the researcher-observer’s self through the research itself.
It is this constant factor, it is this rare and lovable quality of honest mocking, of celebrating ethicalness, of a very serious joke and, at the same moment, sweet, docile:
“the result is a horizon of festive, playful, images” (and, in fact, Visca is talking to me about a ‘lost celebration’ attitude), where neverless the game – noted Enrico Crispolti in 1985 – is not a liberation that would have meant alienation, but it is evocation, invention, radar for possible connections, vitally meaningful. The finishing line is the imagination as constructive power for a richer world, different for its animistic density, where, therefore, every sign is also something else from itself, like every element in the field is off course in a symbolic figure allusion, but also laden with an ulterior imagination manifested in the intensity, expressive ‘decency’ of its own texture, that is always luxuriously driven and, for this reason, never inactive”…
It’s also certain that Sandro Visca – already at that time – was always putting himself and stood out as a “rounded” artist, and this, more than an event, shines on today as an absolute miracle. Talking about his merits, falling back on his talent and his mere calibrated measurement of styles and stylistic features, just a critical attitude is not enough: you need if ever the evaluation of a happy and synchronic poet or the knowledge rite of an accomplished post-Rimbaud-like illumination; or we would even need to mention the munificent and blooming chronicles of the most rare, honest – more Abruzzesi than Roman, more nostalgic than progressive, more attached to the earth than sensual, more elitist than worldly than Gabriele D’Annunzio – more in love with expensive art’s material, with its silky, kabalistic colours, with every imploded weave or poetic material that retells the inspiration, that dresses it, furnishes it, leaves it, seduces it, undresses it, penetrates it with dense love for Language, with the unheard and the every day flirting of words, serious and impertinent at the same time, lucid and evanescent, so antique-like and delightfully beyond time…I know that everything is the only, infinite and eternal substance’s emanation; and also that the terrestrial man is the image of heaven’s man; and that universes are the reflection of the One.
That the Dryads escaped with the Oreads, the Tritons and the Sylvans; but according to me the Sylphes are still whispering in the breeze; that the Undines are crying into the falling waters and moaning into the deep voice of the sea; that the Salamanders shake themselves and shine in the fire; that deep into the caves the Gnomes are protecting some treasures that the sun never saw.
An unmoving journey and also whirling, ductile and coriaceous, moldable and rocky, metamorphic and inductive, is the essence of this “gentle and sure attitude” – as Ruggero Pierantoni, a neuro-science scholar, glosses that – “from this very geometrical, equally lit and honestly inhabited control panel” circumnavigates in a tapestry of 34 metres long and 50 cm high , you can visit all the world – but together with all the possible worlds: with a wonderful grace and with an unappeased precision, an elegance and a consciousness, that really reminds us of some unforgettable words by Italo Calvino, his tarots or his Castelli dei Destini Incrociati, his Città Invisibili, his Marco Polo, in a word of yesterday and for ever, but, over all, for tomorrow.
It is not by chance that Calvino, in the last, rich essays on knowledge – which is in his by now legendary American Lessons, issued post mortem in 1988 – indicated that “Leggerezza” [Lightness] as being the primary virtue for the New Millenium: and just because, as Fabio Pierangeli revealed in his sharp monography (Italo Calvino. La metamorfosi e l’idea del nulla, 1997), “he victoriously contrasts a reality that became too heavy because of the slow ‘petrification’ process which began after the War.”
The petrification, outside of the historical contingency, also signaled by Calvino, represented evil as well: it is the most delicate crossing, the knot remained tangled in the La Giornata di uno Scrutatore. We are in a trans-literary environment, Calvino immediately clarifies this, proposing a parallel between myth and the “writing method to follow” allowing “the mythological images” to compose a speech in literature. You can avoid being captured by the petrifying gaze. Nevertheless, “with myths there is no need to rush; it is easier to leave them deposited in the memory.” The lightness, the nobility of the gestures in which Perseus finished off the monster, cleanly cutting off his head: “He supports himself with that which is the lightest, the wind and the clouds,” graceful and delicate images that announce that metaphoric process in which the first step is the transformation of the monster’s blood: “from Medusa’s blood a winged horse, Pegasus, was born,” so that the “heaviness of the stone could be turned over.”
Something really similar , equally, inexhaustibly happy, is what has made us agile, determined and strong – because it is light – Visca, as a metamorphic artist like nobody else before him, is an original investigator, honest and patient alchemist of his own imagination… From the very black to the white, from the nigredo until the albedo, until the last clairvoyant finishing line and level of every work that coincides with life, refracting and summing it up.
With a complete and total artist like Sandro Visca, powerful and delicate, whirling and apparently concentric, accomplished and primigenial like a metaphysical First Driving Force, fortunately, even the weapons and the abused tools of the art critic appear blunt, we can say limiting: maybe it is more correct and reasonable the flying-across, sempiternal poet’s intuition, the knowledge of a pain that once translated, metabolized, which comes back instead to feed us, it establishes and puts roots to the deserving retaliation of a smile, it fights and risks for real aura happiness of the mind and only after creative fulfillment.
In every atom or cell or molecule or drop of water, you can find the matrix in the deep, the essence, the reference or the remembrance of the entire world, the life formula itself – as the biologists, physicians and scientists swear. Every Visca’s picture or installation, tapestry or rag doll, puppet theatre or collage – sun-like and moon-like at the same time, like a Golden Shadow – languishes, macerates and then revives as a gem, and so the art’s joyous bet starts its life like a cesarean, the tiring harmony of being. The nature which we belong to and which claims us, baptizes us and shapes us like men, always new from the old, the following auroras, sunset-like but inexhaustible. Balancing acrobats between mirror-realms of sun and moon, explored just for a mere word transparence:– just like images, surprisingly blood related, here very imposable, but actually just thought of by Dylan Thomas, on the maternal womb of art.
Perché colui che ora apprende il sole e la luna
Del latte di sua madre possa fare ritorno
Prima che le labbra avvampino e fioriscano
Alla stanza sanguinante della nascita
Dietro l’osso di scricciolo
Del muro e ammutolisca
E il ventre
Che generò
Per
Tutti gli
Uomini l’adorata
Luce infantile o
L’abbagliante prigione
Si spalanchi al suo arrivo.
In nome di tutti i dissoluti
Smarriti sopra il monte imbattezzato
Nel centro delle tenebre io lo prego
Roma, marzo 2008
Plinio Perilli