Patrizia Ferri On the Exhibition “Corda del Cielo” at Banchi Nuovi Gallery, Rome 1991. |
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Città, 1982 |
The art of sculpture is a sort of cruelty.
By rotating her statue, today she is proud to show a relentless recovery after the forgiveness she regained after the original blame of a tangible three dimensionality after coming into a physical possession of the space, betted in the infinite reproduction of the style and repetition of the shape. It was a problem noticed with anguish by an artist like Pascali, who worked against the establishment of a style of unrepeatable uniqueness of this art in the development of the representability of the art of sculpture. The recent redemption through the reduction to ascetic evaporation towards the clearance of the shape goes back to the first half of the Eighties until the last wave of cooling. In other words, the result of the reflection on postulates of the conceptual constellation, above all, on the Minimal Art while extinguishing the linguistic dimension to the tautology, marks a true disengagement compared to the previous sculpture. The reconstitution of a statue of complexity of the plastic object e the consequent activation of the space to increase the staging occurs in a construction climate as it were the edification of the affirmative tensions and acts of force that does not exhibit itself in a straight manner, but rather involves moments of darkness and cancellation. The art becomes an activated space for occupation, for an overall amplification and therefore, a material subtraction to space, since the conceptual reasons of the plastic existence is totally translated in space values. |
La città, 1982 |
In this sense, the sculpture becomes a constructor of a free universe with gravitational and material dependency which constructs pure space relations which allows the sculpture to inhabit stably in the world, not as a piece of furniture, as much as a plausible presence. The structural aggressivness of certain sculpture art is an expression of a sign of revolt against the long lasting dominance of the painting in changing territories and the redounding of a qualified artistic environment. By conquering an adequate space for creation which in recent years have seen a combination of sculpture and painting united in a more significant declination. The base of the sculpture is really the demonstration of how the artist tends to define in a totally autonomous manner the space inhabited by shapes as “the place of things”. The constructive orientation of the sculpture of the first half of the Eighties is re-proposed today and taken as a launching pad for the involvement of environmental space as a “Representation”, in an inherent tendency to offer a spectacular appealing with an immediate overwhelming sculptural and architectural expressivity. The “Representation” represents, in this particular case, what Arnauld thought to be his original sense, that is to say the employment of an environmental multi dimensional volume, so as to feel a generating experience of its own space. A “Spacing” as a creation of a notion of space that appeals to a particular idea of time in the depth of the artistic work penetrating through the eyes deep into the psychic requiring the considerate involvement of the admirer while abandoning to it motion in addition to intertwined relations between the creative images. If it is true that the critique is the double of an artist. For this and other reasons, the art of sculpture naturally relates to the theatre as a place where the threat of repetition is well organized than other place. The sculpture has always developed an ambiguous tension never renounced, but rather underlined the latent paradox of duplicity that draws what it folds. A duplicity that retreats it as same as the theatre that is to say about the life, while regaining the dimension of the fiction, of the artifice, in the delimitation of a circular space, which in addition reproduces in itself, never overlapping but rather embracing that of the daily life. Also, the object is a tool of the collective stage or a private scenery where the artist as the acrobat and the juggler (philosopher or soccer player), realizes his own existential stunts. |
Sonoro, 1978 |
The closure and the circular internal limit out of which the repetition of difference multiplicities indefinitely, means the space of the game. This is the movement of world as a game. A game that represents the cruelty as a unit of necessity of the case. In fact, this vital game is the art. The cruelty exhibits with pride from the art of sculpture and thus exactly as Artaud meant to be in terms of rigor and necessity. As for Ettore Consolazione, the instance of the game identifies itself with esthetic act that permits to establish and maintain a positive relationship with the world where the reality as the game represents the utopia of reality. His handiworks is a revival that passes the depowered places in the game, the theatre, the irony for which the world fabulizzato is an object of an affable irony but effective as it already raises a distancing. It is a cruel art of sculpture in a rigorous and formal shape that embraces the existential necessity, instituting a multiple, complex, stratified time able to merge with contrary instances in the extension of the space limits. In the first half of the Seventies, this procedure used to happen through the identification with illumination with white and soft fabric and foam rubber in the representation of persons of fantastic legends on the scenery of symbolic shapes. While controversial in their own manner, such arts were captured in a suspended dimension between fairy tale and a dream, exalting the strong elements of the work of arts compared to the processuality of the weak art and its various forms of dramatization in the reinvested object as an energetic figure of a material already full and over symbolically determined that occupies a space for irradiation, waiting for fetishism of mass consumption of the pop art, with the desire to rediscover and express and Italian identity of a metaphysical order that emanates from Piero Della Francesca and De Chirico. The stage is exactly that of De Chirico, dreamlike, casted by an illumination that blocks the absence and the distance in an amazing silence. It an evidence of the complete shape able to attribute itself to the fantasy and the evident artificiality; the demiurge of Mr. Consolazione’s mature ability to rethink, reshape and cast a fantastic projection for this puppetry. Therefore, it is not casual that the artist chooses this period of his work as source of inspiration, the most scenic art of all the Italian Renaissance culture “Il Sogno di Constantino” of Piero Della Francescea. An artist who opted in synthesis the theorem and empirical spaces for the theatric solution of a mobile screen game which embraces and reflects the light. However, the cries of conceptual artists for classical works such as Paolini and Ceroli, is so frequent. The will to shape is exerted also as something that is constructed with the virtuous skills of a “feminine and laborious” hand that works with grace and lightness creating images of a dreamlike world dreaming for a contact where the metaphysical illumination takes compactness and dematerializes conferring that of the same “consistence of which the dreams are made of”, in other words a fairy tale airplane in a flubby momentum. |
Sonoro, 1978 |
The contradictory vocation of the momentum and the fall out, - that of freeing itself in flight and falling to the ground – from the an abyssal altitude – agility and ataxia – of the white and black inhabits in the sculptures of Ettore Consolazione, as the fusion of concurrent instances attributed by Baudelaire in acrobacy or clown performance, a Starobinki archetype of the artist in his problematic agility. The great love for the show and its cathartic effect that shapes the real end in his most distressing phenomenon is not other than a mighty game of exorcism against the ghost. A ghost represented in a direct and candidly undramatized manner by the artist of “Ghostbusters”, which provides the elements for structuring an ant theoretic of the antirehotric of the monument such as the “Shaped Canvasses” of Pascali. From this first collection, it is evident a precise interest for the installation in the space to come out from the floor as the only possible event of physicality, that is to say a total involvement of the spectator in the artist’s game. The dramatization in which the art always expresses itself, implies a story, even though potentially, in which the scenic element needs to conform itself in images which in certain cases are amplified or contradicted by the sound which creates a specific precise weight such as in the art works produced till the end of the Seventies such as “L’inteVento” of Ulassai in 1979. The enlargement of the art work in the environment does not mean an evasion from reality, but on the contrary, the assimilation of the surrounding of the internal of the art itself. Then there is the work of Mercurio “I Capelli Alati” – while assuming an element of agility par excellence through the light impulse of the feather and the feed marks an upward momentum of conquering the space as images filled with energy and flexibility far from the flight toward abstract region of pure idealism. Ettore Consolazione passes continuously from one material to another, combining them into surreal landscapes of cloth and clay with colorful curious and erotic vegetal concretion elaborated in the first half of the Eighties which marks a particular moment for the artist. The moment of association with Filberto Menna marked by a series of exhibition referring to those then nascent problems of linguistic order theorized by the critique is an object of the critique proposal that emanates agreeably with the intentions between a critique and an artist. Then comes along the passage to a “more constructive procedure” where the dominant factors given by a designed intent oriented towards the realization of the work of arts as a complex machine, as a mechanic device. The “Spectacular element” – continues Menna – does not come less even now. These works of Mr. Consolazione, certainly, in more constructive way looks like assembling a complex machinery and put on the stage in which every element contributes with its particular configuration, the putting on stage of a scientific space, again a theatre of the art of sculpture. But this time, the protagonists are not the heroes of a chivalrous novel who finds themselves to confront the conquest of a castle, but rather it is an art in which every component presents itself a black device, aggressive structurally as a war machine. |
Paesaggio, 1986 |
In reality, in these art works there is the abandonment, even though for a short period of time, of the polished and spectacular component. A renounce that marks a matter of extreme interiorization, as a momentary removal, cancellation: infect aft the white color (the light, the soft), the choice concentrates on the black color (the shadow, the hard). It is a blackness underlying emotional and psychic values, stratification material obtained from overlapping dense color a conductor of underground instance that leads to the search of totemic symbols. The geometric shapes end up by recharging itself with almost esoteric values, as such material such as the oxidized cement and the metal, are employed in their capacity of transmutation, for which the analysis exactly relates to those processes of transformation in the scrolling all horizontals of time. If in the previous handiworks, the game of the light and the shadow were resolved within the same art work, now the shadows make an integral part of the machine of representation. Any how, the pleasure of telling and narrating remain intact even though with a language stripped to the extreme: the handiworks and the representation as well as the animation of the environment through structures and gear scenic stages; even though with a contrary values which makes change the nature of some elements used previously as signs of force, traction or entry that tend to be absorbed, until they declare their weakness and disappear. There is a simultaneous interaction on the level of narration, imaginative invention and construction. The linguistic volatility and the work against the founding of a style are in favor of the specific formalization of the sculpture: It is the heredity that Mr. Consolazione inherited from Pascali. A smooth and closed line, curved and fluid, all sews all together whether the art work in question abandons itself to the charm and the deceptions of the preferentiality, or by synthesis, slowly dragged towards the abstracting that reminds the reality with irony, always in a sense of inventiveness that rejects any approval. All the latest art works on which the exhibition is dived into during the Eighties and the Nineties are a fruit of staging that consents the decomposition and the dissemination, the risomatic flow of models and the strong projection from the walls. They are formal machines that contain the idea of construction and the joining of a complexity to be continuously constructed and dissembled similar to the toy. The sculptures have enough thickness and a chromatic flavor emphasizing a vitality given by the use of the curve line capable of gaiety and lightness, similar as creating a show for a childish look. The idea of the handiworks as an opening device of an opening scenic space has the consequent necessity of the referencing: not by chance these tend to generate it – besides in the paradoxical challenge tend to fold the floors and the surfaces until the fuzzy yield of the nuanced folds of the flow of the foliage. In an operation the involves the secular undramatized dimensions with which the artist approaches the myth which, once returned to the surface, reminds the childhood as its original place for such works as the “Migratori dale esili gambe”, “solco di luce”, “l’arcobaleno delle 5 vocali”, “luna di quarzo”, “angoli di cielo vuoto”, and “passo di sogno”. These handiworks that combine the experimentalism, the search for a fairy tale, where the artist engages himself with an experimental game with the intent of opening the way for a knowledge founded on the enjoyment and generate knowledge. The knowledge which is not that of the end but rather that of street. The dramatization of Ettore Consolazione remind Arnauld for the perefernce in terms of the poor materials employed and the interest it generates which anthropologically could be defined as primary, primitive, original and mythical. However, Mr. Consolazione’s art have little to share with the deep ontological dimension which goes far beyond any form of representation: “Il teatro delle peste” is realy a strong self analysis with the intent of leading the spirit to the “Radici dei conflitti”, through an experience that can only go beyond that of the scenery. It could be admitted that Artaud could be anywhere but certainly not in a theatre and the performance of which he is talking is an absolute totality. All these have little to do with Mr. Consolazione for whom the theatre is identified with the separation and fiction: which confirms the positivity, not its inhibiting power, should not deal with reality, but open the text, that is to say the work of art to the multiplicity of literature. For these latest works it is rather true to talk about of a number of theatrical devices pertaining to tool making circus (stems for juggling, platforms for acrobats, auctions for Funabol, templates for knife shooters etc.), finding in the circus an orderly justification.The difficult agility which Apollinaire used to talk about by hinting to the acrobat, the artist and the critique becomes a firm epistemological as in the real works titled “fare anima” elaborated by Starobinsky – a cruel but necessarily rigorous work. Therefore, basically the unique relationship between Artaud and Ettore Consolazione, remain that concept of “Cruelty”, a word that becomes manipulated as a plastic object which you can feel its sculpture, an art whose significance of necessity and rigor should be evident. |
InterVento |
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