Download Catalogue - Paola Anziché

volume’, ‘point without a point’, ‘with the body’s
eyes’. These works are installations, sound traces,
drawings – and despite their different expressive
media, they all share the practice, or rather, the
necessity, of rethinking, of de-locating gestures
and thoughts in new, different forms.
The modification process Piscitelli’s projects
are put through, which triggers off transposition
and alteration mechanisms, is the distinctive
quality of his whole series: “There is no path
– he writes – without movement. It is memory
that transposes, by an artificially reconstructed
suggestion. What is a second intention but the
absence of a first one? Or is it rather the superimposition
of the second upon the first?”. 1
Already known works change their status as a
result of different movements: as far as the physical
substance of the sculptures is concerned, it is
a movement towards the de-construction, even
erasing, of the original generating nucleus. Then
it is the movement which, in the two dimensions of
the photographic shot, or of the drawing, isolates,
cuts, puts the image details back together. Finally
it is the movement that offers the sound equivalent
of the objects and actions that have generated
them. And, in the artwork chain sparked off
by these processes, the boundary is lost between
the prototype and its replica. Second intentions,
indeed – arising from the yearning for an original
utterance that gets consumed and lost as soon as
it is formulated.
There are three generating variables governing
these transformations.
The first introduces the domain of self-portrait,
where the artist’s identity and the boundaries
of his physical and mental being seek to be
defined.
The second variable stresses the theme of the
work’s status, the idea that it can only be grounded
in temporary conditions: sculpture, photography,
sound, video, drawing, do not appear as
codified, distinct languages, but as transitional
situations, possible places of passage and articulation
of acts, types of matter and languages.
The third variable has to do with the relationship
between opposites, the oscillation of the creative
focus between center and periphery, matter
and memory, work and thought.
To relate to this artist means to prepare to
meet his works at the crossroads between the
possible triangular constellations of these parameters,
and running down the line of time in
both directions. What matters is the path, not the
starting point.
From the Noccioli in 2000 to Platonic 5 in
2006, groups of sculptures come to being as a
result of a performative process, the winding of
miles of adhesive tape around a central nucleus
– a seed that opposes resistance and generates
movement in the first work, geometrical solids
whose form is progressively obliterated in the
second work. Energy tension and entropy flow
into each other, and that action can be read as
one of many contemporary projects dealing with
the myth of Sisyphus, with a repetitive, non-teleological,
performative quality. 2 However, during
the hiatus between the two actions, in 2001 another
work, Cores Mix 1, was created, where the
physical dimension of volumes is zeroed – or, as
Piscitelli loves to say, ‘disappare’: un-appears – and
the registering of multiple, successive tearings
in the tape generates a sculpture that is entirely
acoustic, and yet is capable of installing itself in
space, invading its every interstice.
In the same years, another work series openly
deals with the theme of disappearance: the photographs
of the artist’s breath in the Bossea
caves (In cieco, 2003) are self-portraits of his vital
rhythm, of the constant contraction and expansion
of a body in its relationship with the environment
it is wrapped in. In this double play of containers
that mirror each other and correspond to each
other – the thoracic cavity, the cave walls – vapors
draw undefinable volumes, follow rising currents
and lose themselves in the dark cavities. While
the emphasis now lies on natural architecture, the
year before a recording of a water stream flowing
inside the same caves was used for a sound
installation in the stairwell of Scala delle Forbici
in Turin’s Palazzo Reale (Seconda intenzione / volume
rosa). Juvarra’s project for the Palace focuses
on the sudden opening up of the two flights
of stairs: the breathing sound of water in such an
environment was meant to suggest new relationships
between natural and artificial spaces. The
foam sculptures Piscitelli later created (Gong, Seconda
intenzione / volume bianco) could be read as
projects set off by looking at Juvarra’s stuccoes
and spirals, and by the passion for the ephemeral
and lightness of the late Baroque visual style.
1.
Paolo Piscitelli, “Seconda intenzione /
con gli occhi del tempo”, in Emanuela
Termine, Paolo Piscitelli. Some Prefer
Nettles, Gangemi Editore, Rome 2007,
p. 82
2.
See Emma Cocker, “Over and Over,
Again and Again”, in Not Yet There.
Writing & Research By Emma Cocker,
http: // not-yet-there.blogspot.com,
27 March 2008
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