«What we call passions is not spiritual energy but only friction between the soul and the outside world» (Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker, 1979)

The boundary between public and private in art, especially in last century, is a very definite question, it is an attractive social interzone[1], although not without risks. We do not intend to emphasize the legal aspect of the matter (this is not the location), but to grasp its phenomenology with its aesthetic and philosophical significance. The relationship between art and landscape, in recent history, critically disregards the intuition of Rosalind Krauss[2] in the cultural debate related to sculpture, now proposed in increasingly massive forms and linked to the surrounding environment: focusing on the Tuscan territory, the case is certainly worth mentioning of the Galleria Continua and its relationship with the city of San Gimignano, as a cultural machine of a private nature that enhances and is enhanced by a public stage that moves in synergy for an economic and social impact on the territory.
Relevant are the areas related to outdoor locations, given the homogeneity of the landscape of the region, typo by the Grand Ducal organization, since it is from these situations that we can deduce the formal subtlety between an institutional context and a reserved promotion, with a decisive pride for this. the latter often having to rely on autonomous resources. The Poggio Tempesta project conceived by C.F. Contemporary Fire and curated by Caterina Fondelli in the estate in the locality, of Poggio Tempesti (near Florence), with a lot of sponsorship should therefore be read along the lines of an independent production. The launch of the project, scheduled until 24 July 2022, stages a collective of young artists, Oliviero Fiorenzi, Nicola Ghirardelli, IPER-collettivo and Francesco Pacelli. The domestic ease has certainly rewarded an expressive and interpretative freedom of the context, however the opportunity for a dialectical integration of the individual works, which isolate themselves and do not correspond to each other, has been missed. Nonetheless, good curatorial behavior and pertinent artistic choices are evident, quite random, indeed, tested for an environmental effect: on the aesthetic reasons, it is worth discussing the individual artists, to broaden the cognitive spectrum and articulate the contents.
The work of Nicola Ghirardelli (Como, 1994) communicates the will of a heroism of the sign, to which the sculpture proposes itself as a means of celebrating not a form or a material, but a practice. Ghirardelli does not represent, at most he somatizes scraps of images in an exaltation of the fallacious: the sliding channels of the metal casting, as in previous works he did with false and coarse casts, are proposed as a grandiloquent declaration of the realization process, to translate the process itself as an aesthetic goal. The form, therefore, and the scenic apparatus are triggers for a poetic collaboration with the observer, where the mystical and symbolic suggestion of the proposed sculptural complex is the result of the effective organizational balance between the artistic object and the host environment, in a happy lyrical suspension not too far from that «cognitive intuition», daughter of individual experience, considered in Benedetto Croce’s Aesthetics[3].
The organic traction of the ceramics of Francesco Pacelli (Perugia, 1988) generates a semantic tension between two counterpoints of various meaning (artificial / natural, matter / spirit, external / internal) where the main attraction is the particular or punctum[4] with respect to the perceptible reality in which the artistic object is located. To distinguish Pacelli’s research from those of the other artists present in the collective, it is a regard on the changes of state (and conscience) of his work according to the temporal conditions in which he finds himself: the daylight and natural light that contrasts the nocturnal neon, but above all the jellies placed on metal trays placed on a suitably inclined surface to make the inexorable melting action of the summer heat intervene. Reinterpreted under the lens of Time, the ceramics scattered around the estate raise that semantic tension mentioned above to a dynamic implosion of a realization process in which the mise-en-scène is in perfect continuity with the physical creation.
Starting from a pictographic language, the works proposed by Oliviero Fiorenzi (Osimo, 1992) have an interesting relationship between the repetition of the represented subject and the area used as a location: on the edge of an isolated bamboo reed, Fiorenzi places a series of small sculptures in ceramic portraying irreverent cat heads (sometimes winged, all with a smiling grimace) placed on cylindrical pedestals at different heights. The repetition, rather than technical investigation, rather follows a narrative and dynamic quality that stands out harmoniously with the «graphics» of the surrounding pipes. Without denying himself to a theatrical matrix, Fiorenzi exceeds and deforms the image from the starting model, consuming it yet marking it precisely in the kaleidoscopic exacerbation: like any myth, the cat in question exists as a form of variants. The key to his path is play, understood as the meaning of spontaneity, an element necessary to drain and extinguish the images absorbed in language[5].
The last intervention is undoubtedly the most intricate in its dry and compact presence, as well as made by a recently established artistic team called IPER-Collettivo, composed of Marco Conti (Prato, 1988), Giulia Landini (Prato, 1992), Lorenzo Romaniello (Pistoia, 1988) and Lorenzo Vacirca (Prato, 1988). By modulating perforated cylinders of flamboyant plastic, residues of winding in the textile industry, the quartet re-proposes these essential shapes characterized by a pattern that echoes the textures of the fabrics. The interactive purpose of these objects sensitizes an animated environment, meaningful only through a fruition exchange therefore intimately linked to the function, as, on the other hand, the plastic material[6] alludes: a memorable essay by Roland Barthes, focuses precisely on the implicit character in becoming of plastic, accentuated by IPER-collective in the formal incompleteness of the installations like a puzzle, in a clear playful and interacting intention.
In conclusion, all the acuteness of the individual artistic productions emerges and the curatorial choice of proposing a formal and synergistic variety of artists is welcomed, realizing how much the versatility of the current panorama is adequate to represent the urgent reconnection with the environment. natural, even if of a private nature: individual knowledge, like a Relational Romanticism, leads to universalization of artistic thought. We cannot deny, however, the surrender of a two-speed path, where the convulsive dynamism of some is not coordinated with the indolent and solemn motion of others. Not that the two cannot coexist: the Lares, the protective deities of the ancient Roman houses, were dancing domestic spirits and yet they expressed comfort and welcome. Certainly the excellent skills of each make Poggio Tempesta considered a promising start to a long-range project.

Luca Sposato

Info:
AA.VV., Poggio Tempesta
curated by Caterina Fondelli
11/06 – 24 /07/2022
Via Francesca Sud Poggio Tempesti, 115, Cerreto Guidi (FI)
From Thursday to Sunday: 10.30 – 13.00 / 16.00 – 20.00; from Monday to Wednesday: only by appointment.
Contacts: info.contemporaryfire@gmail.com
+39 3349874881

[1] The reference is to the lysergic world of the writer William S. Burroughs, to whom the Interzone became a literary topos of his own creation.

[2] The well-known definition of «expanded field» is a coining by Rosalind Krauss to delineate contemporary sculpture circumscribed in the double negation of non-architecture and non-landscape. The temporal and spatial questions, as well as the formal and experiential idiosyncrasy, are impeccably resolved in the concept of simultaneity: «phenomenology and structural linguistics, which both make signification depend on the fact that a form contains the latent experience of its opposite: simultaneity always contains an implicit experience of succession». See R. KRAUSS, Passages. History of Sculpture from Rodin to Land Art, trans. Elio Grazioli, Bruno Mondadori, Milan, 1998, pg. 12.

[3] «So that poetry can be called neither feeling nor image nor sum of the two, but “contemplation of feeling ” or “lyrical intuition” or (which is the same) “pure intuition”, as it is pure of any historical and critical reference to reality or unreality of the images of which it interweaves and captures the pure heartbeat of life in its ideality». See B. CROCE, Aesthetica in nuce, II edition, Laterza, Rome-Bari, 1979, p. 7.

[4] To deepen the distinction between punctum and studium, please refer to the essay by Roland Barthes Camera Chiara (1980).

[5] With due distances, the role of play in the theater of Carmelo Bene evocatively recalls, as he said to Mixer Cultura, in 1988, about stage writing: «Game is childish. So a theater of the subject, of the child’s omnipotence of the subject … play … Children don’t joke, they play…».

[6] The essay is included in the collection The Myths of Today: «Despite his names as pastor Greek (Polystyrene, Phenoplast, Polyvinyl, Polyethylene), plastic, […] is essentially an alchemical substance. […] it is the very idea of its infinite transformation, it is, as its vulgar name indicates, the ubiquity made visible; and precisely in this, on the other hand, it is a miraculous material: the miracle is always an abrupt conversion of nature. The plastic remains completely impregnated with this shock: more than an object it is the trace of a movement». Crf. R. BARTHES, Plastic, in Myths of today, Einaudi, Turin, 1974, p. 169.