vittorio spigaiartworks 1981-2008

exhibition: SPIGAI – CHOSEN WORKS 1981 - 2008(in preparation – Padua, Italy. May 2013)

Seven Questions to the artistInterview of Massimiliano Condotta – 16.12.2012 Interview hold during research activity about semiotic taxonomies carried out incollaboration with the Getty Research Institute of Los Angeles.Translation of Elisa Spigai.

1.Where is art heading today?

What art is or what it should be today…, and in particular the plastic and figurative arts, it is hard to say.Personally I believe that art, in these times we live, can’t be satisfied with denouncing or surprising, like we often see in many forms of happening or recent exhibitions, in which it seems enough to strike the audience with a good idea, a bright idea: where the artist is contented and those who watch and listen receive, more or less amazed or convinced.I believe it neither has to be a statement of dissent, an ethical, social, ecolo-gical denounce or a political message. Or anyway not only this. Clearly with all due respect to the effort and the sincerity of who dedicates himself to this kind of communication.I believe that in any case a piece of art, even if intense and meaningful but careless and roughly-made, could maybe persuade in some ways, but is not liked intimately, it doesn’t bring you to fall in love with it; I think that the piece of art can be valued also for the devotion/dedication and the care of its maker. That an artist can feel satisfied if his creations manage to give, besides the message they convey, even only once a moment of serene contemplation, abandonment and pleasure.I am convinced that the plastic arts can aspire to an evolution that allows going beyond the current state of total absence of rules and expression structures. I don’t mean a rationality of art, like Kandinskji professed, but a slightest common syntactic construction. To make it clear, to be able to reach the level of music’s expressive constructions, which have ripened in centuries some conventions of composition that allow a good level of inter-communication between artists, the experts and the public and in teaching.It is not by chance that music is considered the most advanced of arts.

2 – Do you think then possible a connection between the Arts, in particular between painting and music?

Music is pure form, an art which often communicates a message that isn’t very direct, that conveys mostly feelings; not by chance often it is combined with spoken language. The good music convinces and is engaging even if it transmits ambiguous messages or not very significant ones per se. Think of the banality of the majority of the lyrics of the most wonderful songs or the li-ghtness of words of many amazing and unforgettable songs. Music conveys form, harmony, atmosphere, a precise rhythm, a pleasant colourful mood and sonority. It is the only art that is really abstract… and abstract painting gets, not only for this reason, very near to music! Form by itself, that, with its structure and its rhythms, gives relief and plea-sure, even in the more narrative or violent and dramatic of the sequences.

3 – Which are the main themes of your research of plastic and figurative arts?

For what I have just said, the first theme is that of the visual form and of its structure. Of form itself and its rational beauty, of form’s structuring in the relationship between music, plastic arts and architecture but also outside this relationship. This is what is dearest to my approach to painting and low relief.It is then an ancient theme; but I believe it is old-fashioned as much as actual. I’d say it is nearly necessary, in this moment of great proliferation of means of expression but also of uncontrollable confusion, swarming of arts, information surplus and media interlacing. The second theme is a recurring reference to Renaissance and the Renais-sance’s concept of form as nature’s imitation. Then the theme, as classic as utopic, of the ideal form, of form as nature’s imitation. Myth around which circled the interests of the artistic period that I personally favour among all: the initial phase, revolutionary and explorative, of Neoplatonic theories and the invention of prospective, in the early Renaissance. Still today, maybe even more in our epoch’s the contradictions and in the excess of messages and relations, it is a theme which I personally consider bringer of an incredible appeal but mostly, beyond this, of the need of pea-cefulness and calmness.

4 – How can we define it, …a sort of feeling of nature?

There’s no need to have intimate knowledge of biology and chemistry or to be passionate observers of nature, to perceive and recognise the subtle and inimitable beauty of the world’s forms. A beauty that remains in all scales, from the infinitely small to the infinitely big, from a cell’s section on the mi-croscope to the most remote and unreachable galaxy.Since I was a boy I have always been part of small groups of friends, incu-rable observers and adorers of the natural world.Often the majority of people don’t observe and perceives this quality, and anyway ignore it, attracted by more direct and macroscopic phenomena; while on the other hand an entire mythology exhists, a publishing and me-dia proliferation of this beauty, often extremely superficial, trivializing and cloying. Let alone the thousands of ecologists who know nothing of nature and would not be able to know a hornbeam from an oak; but above all who don’t feel nothing, if not resentment – nevertheless right – towards those who contribute to destroying it.This aesthetic quality, for those who can see and seize it, is unquestionable. From what does it arise, in what does it consist? Is it the inexpressible ratio-nality and perfection which underlies the world of nature? As this immanent rationality, becoming perceptible through our senses, in this case sight, it becomes sensation, aesthetic perception?

5 – Since ancient Greece, from the invention of the golden section to the Fibonacci Sequence, to Le Corbusier’s Modulor, in every artistic periods artists have searches some answers…

We all know that since Pythagoras and Plato, to the roots of Western thou-ght, and through the centuries up to Fra’ Luca Pacioli and Piero della Fran-cesca, in music as in architecture, a great effort has been produced in or-der to search for the laws and measurements of this perfection; which has always tried, from Egyptians to Hellenic philosophers-sculptors, through the artists’ work at various times, in all epochs, to imitate these presumed per-fection rules in man’s works.In this tradition, in a first period starting in 1970, many of my works have at length experimented, following the trail of classics but also moderns like Gris, Villon, Ozenfant, Severini, Burri and other painters, but also od many

great notable architects like Teragni and Le Corbusier, on the proportional relations in the composition’s control.In fact the hieratic proportions od paintings, scluptures and architectures composed according to those relations establish already a reference point. Not the shortcut to compose well but an aid which allows, especially with the first steps, to control one’s compositions; but this was already known, even if there isn’t unanimous agreement. On the proportional relations in composition I have spent indeed the first years od experiments and tries, in painting, parallel to what I was doing in architecture, with many works in the 70s some of which will be exhibited for the first time in the next exhibition in Padua (Viaggio 1970, Bourgeon 1979, Petite Foudre 1980).

6 – Is this research still going on?

Regarding this my research later went quite further on, with some surprises.I am referring to a long sequence of paintings, since ’79 up till now, that has produced paintings and low reliefs with representation and enlargement techniques with the help of transitions to photography, of collage, of moul-ding, of cutting and of incision. Deformations and transformations that at the moment continue with digital studies, subject of the next exhibitions. It is an all-fields investigation on the transformations of shapes and structures and on the lingering of these in the form. That is to say it works on perspective deformation, breaking down, fragmenting and overlapping starting from for-ms (natural shapes, pure forms) given initially.In fact, it is one of the many ways explored high and low from the works of Paul Klee. After having studied him for years, I consider him the most impor-tant, and more coherent, of the major rationality’s innovators grown around the Bauhaus. In some artworks and in the exercises that he introduced to his students, Klee worked on the topological relations and on form’s altera-tions, on the controls of part’s relations, between the composition’s protago-nists. His patterns, aren’t only strictly Euclidean-geometrical structures but structures more broadly speaking, in a linguistic sense; that is to say logical relations, univocal and necessary, between the whole’s parts. In simpler ter-ms, it is about more sophisticated and evolved ways to control the reciprocal positions of the artwork’s actors regarding the meaning of the painting’s action. In some of his works this formal coherence appears like a wanted and accomplished fact (Thürlemann 1982): the represented narration’s lo-gical structure coincides with precise formal structures and signs’ choice.

Not by chance reading a work of Klee made through the semiotic brings to identifying the legibility’s characteristics and of internal coherence that is vey hard to find in Kandinskji or Mondrian, to quote the most known authors of what we could define the rational abstractionism developed in France, Germany and Russia between 1912 and 1945, the most revolutionary thir-ty-year period, and grounding at the same time, of western art history.

7 – In many of your artworks I seem to find, also in the titles, a kind of repres-sed energy or of uneasiness. Is this a right impression?

Recurring patterns in my works come, lie for the majority of authors, from patterns in my life and in my childhood, important as for everyone, of which by the way I feel quite embarrassed to talk about.The crucial years of my formation have been those just after the war that I lived in beautiful places: between Volterra, Livorno and La Spezia, in a wild life, that my parents were able to support. The Tyrrhenian, the Lunigiana, the Apuane Alps and the magnificent Tosco-Emilian Apennines. An environment of sailors and soldiers (father, grandparents and great-grandparents in the Navy) and profoundly Catholic, with its good and solid aspects but also with its hypocrisies, the etiquette, the priviledges… Anyhow a happy childhood, a loving family, very long holidays in the woods, the mountains and the sea.With this background, finished high school in Livorno and in the last year of university in Rome, the experience of the ’68. And all that ’68 has represen-ted for my generation, in the good and the bad; that would we today, us in the first place, admit it or not.I say it indeed for those of my generation, for those who have lived all their youth, adolescence and ended their studies under the old regime and the old traditions, doing the altar boys and the boy scouts. That some years later shrugged off themselves the out-dated conventions and rebelled, or-ganizing in a spontaneous way the very first shabby Italian “occupations”; changing the way of dressing and of living daily, of relating to others in friendships and in love; maybe refusing the privileges of their middle-class environment, going away from home and arriving at treating badly very good parents who had the only fault of belonging to the previous generation, and so on. Bastard Sessantottini who have then continued to persevere years and years grown wild in the protest… often paying even a high price for it, in their private and family life and in work and professionally, in university, and so on. (Self-Portrait 1980).

These reasons of uneasiness and rebellion, are present quite too naïve and explicit in various of my artworks between 1970 and 1980, but that explo-sion, rupture and liberation feeling remains constantly, at times interlaced with inevitable recalls to expressionism (Der blaue Reither, 1981) and to futurism (Boccioni, Balla) and to post-war cultural movements (Fontana, Po-modoro and Burri), artists whom certainly everyone who paints today, aware of it or not, owes them something.The three themes, objection and protest, form’s structuration and nature’s spirit of the classic world, constitute the main motifs and motives of the majority of the thirty artworks exhibited in Abano. Three motifs that coexist and reintroduce each other, often in a violent opposition that makes them reciprocally stand out. In some paintings and low reliefs it is tension, the so-cial and cultural motifs prevail (Contro 1977, Violence 1979, Pulsione 1981, Rosso 1981). In others that bound to the Reinassance and the classical world (La Battaglia di S.Romano 1985/2006, Via Sacra 1985, Timeus Icona 1987) and at last the dearest subject: the form of Nature, the theme of chil-dhood, the most intimate and contemplative (Bretagne 1978, Due Animali 1981, Grillon 1987, Le Livre Vert, 1995).Finally other paintings narrate very special stories which have marjed my life (A&A 1982, Toulon Julie 1985, Storm Friends 1987) and that probably of interest only for myself, but that, having been narrated and composed – if the parallel with music, for what has been said, is legitimate – inside of the formal principle and of the same concerns conferrable to the three descri-bed main themes, probably manage to recall feelings and moods of a more general value. Padua, 15th of December 2012

Vittorio Spigai comes from Tuscany, born in Volterra in 1943. Migrator by origins and choice, he has lived and worked in Volterra, La Spezia, Livorno, Augusta, Taranto, Rome, Guinevere, Trieste, Venetia, Algiers, Bassano and Padua, where he lives at the moment. Graduated in engineering in Rome I 1969 and in architecture in Venice in 1971 – author of several book in the fields of urban planning and architectural composition – he has been professor of architectural planning, from 1971 to 2011 at the IUAV university of Venice. Voluntarily left teaching in 2011, today he works mainly in the field of architecture, painting and industrial design.

vittorio spigaivia Portogruaro, 6

35142 Padova, Italy

spigai@spigai.191.it