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Alberto
Boatto
"Nervous
System"
Successive
cultures have been conscientious in indicating the epicentre of
human existence, placing it in multiple and ever differentiated
parts of the human body, in the solar plexus or in the heart,
in the lobes of the brain or in the pneuma, the breath or in the
murmur of the lungs. I mean "epicentre" in an eruptive and dynamic
sense, like writing about the " epicentre of a earthquake".
In this way a detailed topography of the body is configured; as
if opening out the topography of a city with is crossroads, its
one-way streets and its underground passages.
There is no doubt that what is insistently indicated as the centre
today is the nervous system, a very diffused and concentrated
order, spreading to the periphery and gathered together at several
points. As much as this kind of topography cannot be identified,
today as in the past, with an anatomical topography tout court,
a play of crossovers and exchanges remains active. In saying "nervous
system", I imagine an anatomical-centre, the brain or the spinal
cord - and a band of delicate and vibrant threads that are spread
throughout the living body.
The vibration is like that of seaweed or, with greater similarity,
the metal wires of a piano, beaten by hammers wrapped, very much
to the point, in skin. Placing the epicentre of man in the nervous
system means gathering life around its senses and its movements,
discovering, revealing, stripping, sectioning, skinning and exposing.
An operation to which any measure of indulgence is foreign, but
which belongs to its opposites, bearing the hard and accentuated
names of lucidity and cruelty. Antonio Marchetti places us in
front of a monumental topography of this completely uncovered,
exposed and dispersed universe. Closed fists, with the thumb fixed
firmly to the index finger, that move between hyper-realism and
the spectral, holding out and stretching long black rags. Just
as mankind's nerves are stretched and distorted by the violence
of reality, its pressures and stimuli. Or how a painter spreads
the brushwork and strokes of his spatula. Today I feel like a
limp rag, is not said by a character out of Beckett, but a commonplace
of everyday life. But from this extremely miserable and self-pitying
psychology, Marchetti has extracted a very objective blow-up.
He has created a monument out of a metaphor around the obscure
reactions of the nerves.
The vivisection is conducted between the physical claims of the
material and the abstract chromatic temptations present in the
clear and dissonant relationship between black and white. The
"lines of force" that draw a great temporal arc in the development
of modern art, have been transformed into nerves, fibres, tensions
and spasms. And the elegance that, in spite of the wounds and
gaps, enclose this widespread ache, is the sign that lucidity
constitutes the secret thrust of Antonio Marchetti's nervous and
creative system.
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Virginia
Cardi
Construction
of Pain (text for the catalogue of the exhibition "Construction
of Pain", Ravenna Art Gallery, Santa Maria delle Croci, 1996)
Entering
into the merits of Antonio Marchetti's research, and in particular
the present, leads me to add an initial consideration about the
author: a difficult artist who needs to be understood in terms
of the long development he has undergone and for greater attention
to his matured experience and commitment to a constantly sustained
coherence. Construction of Pain, pursuing meanings to which the
exhibition is anchored, is a lasting commitment and a challenge
that these dark times render even more deserving, aimed at an
ultimate and even necessary resistance.
Pain is an indescribable experience. Marchetti's works make the
bonds, the points of erosion and the strains to which our existence
is subjected, appear in a context of allusions. He entrusts this
metaphor to potent presences and signs that scrutinise space with
their decisive and clean forms. The laceration, the wound, like
the recurrent presence of sharp pain, were already for some time
the terms of that personal grammar, a pursued inspirational motive.
Even the Nervous Tension work, created a year ago and part of
a trilogy, was in some way already intuited in previous works.
In particular, Double Bind: two faces, created in white marble,
in profile, pulling at a flame-red silk drape with their mouths.
Marchetti's research, even in its variety of expressive means,
is coherent and carries the weight of a choice already present
at his Pescara debut in the Seventies. Faithful to his youthful
love of Nordic expressionism, whose contrasting tones and pure
colours he had assumed from the start, Marchetti privileges pitiless
spikes and the leap of signs that have, since then, already established
his extremely recognisable style. Frequenting the Lucrezia Di
Domizio and Mario Pieroni Galleries in Pescara during those years,
on the other hand, was a moment of formation. In that extraordinary
accumulation of material and conceptual experiences, new inspirations
were born. The masters to whom he looked were, without doubt,
Beuys, Pistoletti and Kounellis.
The basic ideas to which he linked himself are, in part, theoretical:
an ideological art aimed at profoundly re-discussing the human
and the social but within a poetic full of vitality, in which
elegance and play, even in experimentation, remain supporting
figures. As background, therefore, a certain expressionist avant-garde,
Duchampian suggestions and the crucial elements of the aesthetics
of the Seventies. Not less characterising, his reading: Bataille,
Junger and Cioran, difficult, contradictory authors, some of which
became the point of departure of a debate that Marchetti gave
voice to during the direction of the Stilo review, an art album
of unpublished work and conversations.
All this can be found again today, in a phase of maturity and
maintenance of elaborated experience and in an able and knowledgeable
ability to articulate languages. But, returning to the exhibition,
and taking into examination these works that are entitled Pesanervi
(Nerve Weights), where if, on one hand, the warm breath of Artaud
leads the artist to reflect once more on that tragic pain machine
that is the body, constantly present for some time in his research,
and aimed at interweaving epidermis, cracks and veining to discover
points of resistance; on the other hand, the memory of the Duchampian
mechanical device, which has also inspired Marchetti in the past.
Celibate machine the former, single machine the latter, wanting
to join to the present, some of the experiences of the second
half of the Eighties, that had identified an original range of
expressions in the idea of the Single. So, the Single, a dense
and allusive term of autonomy, a certain radical theme, at the
same time pure form and lost object, crossed by a healthy and
a slightly cruel narcissism, now opens the door to a more articulated
composition.
The idea of construction in space, of architecture, is created
by thinking about the work as an original project. Constructing
is a committed action, because it strips us, it makes us come
out into the open; and in this it is rooted to a fundamental experience:
pain. Understood as an expanding, meta-historical, but also immediate,
acceptance. The work opens in an existential space and pain becomes
the central moment of consciousness of reality. In accepting this
condition, the cardinal idea in contemporary thought, one might
think, disenchanted, of the loss of construction. The Heideggerian
theme of the discarded being and the extraordinary image of the
Angelus Novus, where Benjamin sees in the fall the chance of redemption,
are the guiding ideas of this exhibition. On the other hand, Marchetti
has elaborated these themes and made them his own, by also studying
Hebrew mysticism. But the artist seem to want to tell us that
pain is also something else, the proof of our ability to feel,
of being alive.
Junger wrote: The flowers that grow in the cracks of death
do not fade in our eyes.
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"Pesanervi"
Legno, metallo, cera. cm. 245x244