Download Catalogue - Paola Anziché

These two work ‘threads’ constitute the double
genealogy of More Work / More Space. Consisting
in an aggregation of 800 modular elements,
this sculpture is systematically built, dismantled
and then aggregated again. It can be variously
configured, geometrically or organically, it can be
shaped like a cavity or a compact block. As I’m
writing this, we can only imagine the shape it will
take in the spaces of the Fondazione Sandretto
Re Rebaudengo.
Labor (as the title of a series of videos made in
2007 reads) has become a recurring theme during
the last three years, i.e. since Piscitelli’s main
center of activity moved to the United States,
more precisely to Texas.
Sign of the Times is the last work of this new
season, and its very first configuration is the one
included in the show.
The starting point was the observation of the
many empty shop signs that, at a growing pace,
show the economic decline of the American province:
warehouses, factories, gas pumps, public
places are closing down and the signs that announced
their presence for decades at the side
of a highway or a main street are removed. Shot
after shot, Piscitelli has found himself putting
together a whole photo archive of such spaces,
which were once reserved for advertising and
communication, and have now slumped into the
silence of the great crisis: “Every single letter
that disappears from a building’s façade – notes
the artist in an unpublished work note – leaves a
trace, a ghost, a shell emptied of its content and
function”. So he has started to search markets
and depots for letters removed from shop signs,
in order to collect and preserve that lost alphabet
of brands and often obsolete types.
The rescued vocals and consonants are anchored
to the walls in random order, placed side to
side, superimposed, or overlapped, to underline the
impossibility of restoring them to a definite meaning,
a recognizable name. The work therefore takes
the final step in approaching the theme of the trace:
as in a frottage, the profiles of each character are
traced in charcoal on the wall, then the letters are
once again detached, and what is left on the wall is
the evanescent print of names and words that have
lost their place, identity and function. “Every single
letter – writes again Piscitelli – maps a lost memory
within a global transformation”.
Greater Torino :
Almost fifty years have elapsed since Edward
Ruscha published a small-sized volume with photos
of 26 filling stations located along Route 66,
between Los Angeles and Groom, Texas. When
recalling, in an Artforum article, the emotion he
felt in 1964 as he discovered the small white book
of the Twenty Six Gasoline Stations in an Austin
library (again in Texas), Dave Hickey notes how,
during that photo travel through America, Ruscha
shaped his idea of road in relation to the “realms
of absence”, “the iterative progress through the
domain of names and places, through vacant
landscapes of windblown, ephemeral language”. 3
The links between Piscitelli’s photo series for
Sign of the Times and Ruscha’s own shots show
the progress of a deep structural transformation
that made literal the sense of emptiness of the
60s – that could then barely be read between the
lines, in the assertiveness of shop signs and commercial
proclamations.
The work that takes those photographs as its
starting point is a sinopia, traced directly on the
wall of the Fondazione, and therefore having the
status of an ephemeral thing. But even more significant
is the fact that, in order to do it, Piscitelli
used, and then immediately removed, the found
letters, i.e. the physical objects embodying the
point of contact between the photo shots and the
wall drawing.
Mel Bochner recently asked himself once
again why, at the end of the 60s, a group of artists
– Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman, Richard Tuttle,
Lawrence Weiner, and himself – began to “use
walls”, as the title of the exhibition at the New
York’s Jewish Museum in 1970 suggested – Using
Walls –, the first event to stress the importance
of that artistic phenomenon. 4 The elusive works
on exhibit, which could not be conceived, nor
touched as objects, but only looked at, opened a
new experience field: “…a wall painting negates
the gap between lived time and pictorial time,
permitting the work to engage larger philosophical,
social, and political issues. (…) It was a dream,
perhaps unrealizable, that this work might somehow
achieve an existential unity between reality
and appearance”. 5
Reality and appearance similarly meet in another
2009 installation. 107 Days / 100 Drawings
could, in the words of Hesiod, bear the alternative
title Works and Days. The rhythm of time and that
3.
Dave Hickey, “Edward Ruscha: Twentysix
Gasoline Stations, 1962”, Artforum,
January 1997, pp. 60-61
4.
Mel Bochner, “ ‘Why Would Anyone
Want to Draw on the Wall?’ ”, October,
n. 130, Fall 2009, pp. 135-140
5.
Ivi, p. 140
english text