Su, ricama il cielo a nuovo,
inventa e metti in mostra nuove stelle,
così che, graffiando freneticamente i tetti,
verso il cielo si arrampichino le anime degli artisti” (V. Majakovskij, Ehi!, 1916)
The artist asks him/herself often anxiously whether there are enough grounds for speaking before painting and professes anxiety because s/he doubts that words can indicate which path to follow. Painting has a language of its own.
That which comforts the artist, the sole vindication of the artist, is the opinion that the task of speech on painting should somehow be to intensify the painted signs.
However, the artist knows that the task of clarifying the phases of the creative process through words is arduous and impossibile. The artist knows that s/he will never evade the vague, rebellious paintbrush which, ruffled and silent, drags his/her agony along. It is vague because often, during the development of a work of art, the artist does his/her best to avoid description, designation, mimesis, and symbol – the ulcerating remains of some type of realism. For this reason, against the traces of representation, the artist proposes and opposes on canvas the undetermined effects of strokes of the paintbrush deliberately dislocated, transfigurated, vague, and deferred.
Mesdames, Messieurs
The line of recovered truth – twisted and redressed through wording squads – is dressed in the blue rags of need, an evening dress. Miserable human roughness, disguised behind the mask of rationality, aims to build a world now gasping as it collapses into the idea.
The human being repeats himself, and his possession and accumulation of boundaries/borders, identities, capital gains do nothing but irremediably conduct him to a fall. These days, cultural decline is far too vast, violence is on the increase as the horrors of war spread wider and wider, and the world is more and more nostalgic for peace.
Art rebels, tired of submitting to the master and of being thrown into the condition of human gangrene in contrast with the vital outburst of creation, of artistic invention.
Argh, this is fun! Settled into the present, encrusted with rubbish, idle and inexpressive in narrow and stiff schemes, life is often sleepy boredom, addictive triviality. Where the human eye stops mutilated, the difficult task of the artist, against the optimists, is to affirm that this is not the best possible world.
DEVASTATE THE BOUNDARIES OF REPRESENTATION!
Hey drip, c’mon! Pluck up your courage for your inevitable return to dullness. Forget the world. Abandon your certainties for once, your wallet, your advantage, your beloved point of view and the comfortable corner from which you picture this world, put down your master’s eye for a moment and distract your mind in the uncontested vision of artistic creation.
Down with the masters of life, down with their love, down with their art, down with their religion, down with their regime, down with their idols: down with representation!
This is not intended to be an academic, procedural, conventional encouragement: stop clinging to convictions and old values with therapeutic aims – often humankind makes the common mistake of being content with “the role one has to play”.
The artist dozes as s/he paints sceneries. But like an adventurer s/he is able to get out of trouble and is, perhaps, happier than the one who does not create, the one who cannot free him/herself by creating (Paul Klee). The artist knows more than one way not only to exhaust the common reader, but above all to find a means to desert humiliating representation by discouraging it, shaking it, unbalancing it, challenging its stiffness, now unbearable and asphyxiating.
It’s now time to break the barrier of representation and to transform it into a rip of evoked otherness; it’s now time to create an aperture, a gap, a crevice: to make an opening beyond the present. Any effort to reach a final representation of what cannot be depicted is vain, and always will be.
Ah, hang the fake third-rate aesthetes who puffed up with Culture think of Art as a charitable shamming of the aesthetics of representation. The artist shows complete indifference to the “contemporariness” of art. And the artist is even less concerned with art as imposed by reality, held by the leash of authoritarian and logocentric ideologies in turn outcomes of the deformities of a capitalist world.
The artist is neither inside the channels of representation, nor of the “modern” processes for the commercialization of creativity. The artist grinds his/her teeth at the sole thought of the time lost to earn money; the true job of the artist is in the clouds, in a corroborating, immaterial search for estrangement, a search uprooted from any grip with the “real” – nor does the artist search for a political advantage from such an attitude.
Art shrinks from visual framings because they will slacken its high-spirited pace and interrupt any efforts to disrupt the logic of the universe. In order to brighten up the colours of the world, the artist must operate through shifts, rips, and gaps, through disconnected syntaxes and at once through relations of interdependency: writing out of the ordinary visual. The artist shows painting in what cannot be represented, in a sequence of uncompleted signs, of lines and points that must be linked together; a painting that does not mirror the contemplator of art, but that offers itself free through marvellous unpractical fragments always ready to upset the prototypical image of this world.
It is impossible to represent a painting that can neither represent nor be represented. However, it is possible to expose this painting because it is already and inevitably exposed to the task of depiction, without the possibility of evasion. Through depiction the artist renders a text whose texture is not the mere record of reality (mere transcription). Only in this way can the artist enter writing, doubled and demultiplied writing; writing that resists the assaults of gagging, the prescribed texts, fixed words and images.
Painting becomes writing – performed by orchestration, in instrumental alternation – stillness, and vision, description and rewriting. Thanks to its dissonances, painting conducts representation to its downfall; painting creates depiction, a kind of contra-image, of contraidola, a never-ending and undefined protest against the rules of representation.
And painting renders stillness instead of noisy silence, always again.
