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Not
only time is missing
Raffaella Formenti’s
work has accompanied us for about fifteen years of our art, with a very
particular characteristic: it cannot be arrested. Of all poetics that
are proliferating and prophesizing infinite semiosis, hers does not
appear to know either obstacles nor moments of pause. Everything expands,
continuously and incessantly, her origami-shaped pixels are invading
the planet, and they are a metaphor and concretizing of the electronic
ones. Without any clamor, the artist is appropriating all the reality
she needs and, if we are to judge from appearances, that is really a
lot. Actually, her practice, magnificently united to theory, is substituting
the world, or at least that is what it seems to be doing. Her accumulations
are not, as in the case of Arman, companions or examples, they serve
the sole purpose of covering the surface of earth.
No space will escape, the felicitous occupation will only cease in the
face of victory. Papers, boxes, bags, containers of every kind, scrap
paper and cardboard: a bloodless cruise has set out from via Ragazzoni
in Brescia, and it will by no means be easy to stop it. Indeed, it is
hard to imagine anyone who could counter a flood of these dimensions.
The papers are in fact spilling over from all over the place. Now that
also many museums host Formenti’s installations, it is clear that
the time has come for the paper invaders, also from these venues. If
we ever doubted that the future of the world will be a kind of African
shantytown, an African township in the style of Nkumanda, well, now
every uncertainty is dispelled.
The important thing is that the mark of art always remains. The world
is not a rubbish heap, but many rubbish heaps put together. It is better
to invent a play where the term recycling has a positive significance.
We must not ask ourselves the question of how to save the environment,
but instead create another that is similar, and therefore not identical.
The choice seems to be that a city of art is always better than a metropolitan
chaos, a suburban low-income high-rise erected as urban model for a
forthcoming and certain End of the World. Formenti is optimistic and
left-wing, and so she still believes in significant rather than petty
messages, she believes it is necessary to give a meaning to a world
that has not just lost it, but does not even feel the need to find it
again. Her refuses are orderly, correct, they do one good. This does
not allow them to entirely escape a fraternal, if not friendly, destiny.
Sure, they are metaphors, but their materiality, often with brilliant
colors and forms, give depth to dreams, provide an alibi for those who
have not found one yet. The sense that is created is based on an allegory,
and thus a linguistic figure, but it becomes an active part of the modus
operandi of contemporary life, that solves nothing, discards everything
without consuming, consumes everything without obtaining nourishment.
The world, being a Merzbau, requires no language. It is a language.
This is why Raffaella Formenti may call her works Research Engine or
Provider or www.raffo.3000.it , because they are in any case works that
belong to this moment in time, and not another, parallel one. This is
their strength, and this is also why we hope these works truly succeed
in their attempt to absorb reality, the fragmentary but very rapid one
we are so familiar with, to replace it with another one where the pause,
the time that slows down, the forgetfulness of forced and creative accumulation,
the weak points of the digital universe, the catastrophes of entertainment,
the non-places of globalization, the stammering of mass rhetoric and
other things may combine in a simple and happy alchemy, a paradox of
simple and immediate masterpieces like a cascade of soap bubbles. In
this lightness the art of Raffaella Formenti finds the time and space
that is lacks in the everyday life of others. Formenti is a construction
company that is always working, day and night, on building sites that
remain open at all times, like a Postadamer Platz where the workday
never comes to an and, that never sleeps, that constructs edifying and
pretty buildings.
Inside
In this interminable
collection, to quote the title of an excellent piece from 1998, there
is something that is present, obsessively, and it could not be otherwise:
the word. We are by now accustomed to a strong and omnipresent verbal-visual
language, not only because multimedia communication is essentially a
logo-iconic language, but above all because all linguistic and communicative
problems that have been posed between the Sixties and Seventies have
centered on the presence of the word in a non-linear manner, but with
strong formal characteristics. Not only the exploration of concrete
poetry, analogously with Max Bill’s concrete art as presented
by Van Doesburg’s Art concret magazine in 1930, singing the praises
of de profundis to the sonnets of tradition, but first and foremost
the Anglo-Saxon conceptual experience that, above all in terms of results,
of international visual poetry, that has proven able to develop a concrete
discourse on the problem of the information society and its control.
But it is also clear that, if we look to the same period, and I am especially
thinking of Rauschenberg’s New Dada, mainly by virtue of its ability
to redeem the fragments of social communication and advertising, abandoned
to a fate of refuse. Yet, this being said, it is clear that Formenti
does not need to look anywhere else. Her work is in any case forcefully
contemporary, because it is not interwoven with quotations. The word
is fundamental, it is no coincidence that a work of hers from 1998 is
called Newsstand, but it is also used as construction material, as a
building block of that architectural structure, made of paper and of
various materials, that is being scattered across the world. The verbal
language undergoes the typical contextual alienation that upgrades its
semantic content, but it is not the main subject of its discourse.
To be sure, in the more classically verbal-visual production as postcards,
artist’s books, posters and so on, the bond with the neo-avant-gardes
is evident, but the structure of her discourse within the language makes
it a part of the flow of the electronic world of images and goods. Art,
stripped of any aura, reduced to a hyperbole of discard, is driven to
the extremes of dissemination to occupy the territory of the world,
as in a famous tale by J.L.Borghes where the perfect geographic map
coincides with the countries he wanted to describe. Formenti does not
want to represent anything, even if she knows how to give the representations
of reality an ironic touch. With or without Baudrillard, she has in
any case succeeded in inverting the theory of the simulacrum, to render
it sterile as to dominion, and active as to art. The artistic production
becomes pollination. It is not a blind and senseless production, as
the one aimed solely at wealth and power. It is a counter-power, soft
and ironical, light as paper, or violent like every denunciation. The
parallel world of the artist “sets out from Brescia”, venturing
beyond her home-workshop-museum-warehouse and spreads its seeds called
pixel, all over the world. This entails incessant work. And this is
wonderful. The work as mission and religion is replaced by something
analogous, but with very different purposes. In a kind of infinite post-production,
the expansion of the organized discards superimposes its logo-ironical
language on everything with which it comes into contact.
From this point of view it appears clear that the spaces of art are
insufficient, and even detrimental, even if one has to make a living
somehow. On the contrary, public spaces, rediscovered places, are more
scenic and re-appropriated; occasions, a watchful eye on those possibilities
where it may perhaps seem idiotic to hang paintings on a wall, but where
making gigantic garlands or lines of shopping bags on the contrary becomes
a highly cultural operation, that must find a place in the interstices
of society. In the final analysis, the spaces of art are already occupied,
by definition: it is much more interesting to measure swords with architecture,
with history, with geography, with chance. The very idea of language
leads to this all-encompassing embrace of things, of the world. In actual
fact, as we know from the worthy Wittgenstein, “the limits of
my language are the limits of my world”. And so, Raffaella’s
ana-esthetics, combined with the language she champions, knows no limits
as to dissemination and making other gems of paper germinate. Come to
that, also the “environmental photo-tears” are forms of
appropriation of what is taking place, that is to say, true ready-fake,
falsities organized against the order (disorder) of art wanted by the
invasion of the ultras. Fortunately, it is always reality that eventually
comes to resemble fantasy.
Digito
ergo sum
Curiously, this
immense paper universe, a substitute of the external reality in every
aspect, is recently becoming a kind of anthropological model of the
digital reality. This exoskeleton of real life is, from every point
of view, a replacement in terms of faith of the first, but above all,
it seems to possess the ability of abstraction, and it is therefore
possible to mistake it for the other, and experience it as if nothing
else existed. They eventually come to resemble one another, within and
without.
But what is the technological element in Formenti’s art? Probably
there isn’t any. But that does not matter. Rather, what is interesting
is her choice of parody, ironical and therefore extremely serious, of
a critical reconstruction of the world. “Since some years –
writes Claudio Cerritelli – the dominant passion is that of elaborating
shreds of words and images taken from files of virtual memory, a kind
of technological décollage where the appropriation of signs that
are archived every day is deciphered in an infinity of possibilities.”
The way Raffaella Formenti works in any case remains linked to material
work. It is clear that the dematerialization of society, relationships
reduced to a use of mouse and keyboard, a simulacrum mistaken for true
reality, are no part of the artist’s pseudo-technological Merzbau.
But we must not believe that it is just a matter of adapting to the
dominant thought. Rather, it consists of an attempt, on the one side,
to build a world a part, and on the other to simulate the idols of another
world, in the form of absurdity, metaphor, nonsense. Thought advances,
with and through objects. It is the containers, the boxes that play
the main role. A victory of the packed package, a victory of packaging,
but revisited and corrected, saved from the purely commercial function
and oriented towards a semantic axis that is decidedly stabilized on
the center of the world. And so it is not a matter of creating other
linguistic forms, the existing ones suffice to generate in another sense.
But above all, it takes a generalized operation of re-appropriation.
To go digital may also mean to want to say something essential concerning
the reality of modern Man: nevertheless, it is true that it depends
on the sign one places before one, as the Florentine visual poets, in
the frontline of the “semiotic war”, knew well. Formenti’s
spam, her providers, her research engines have the abundant material
quality of organized refuse, and both are dangerous, but on different
levels. The transformation, this sense of elementary and terribly artistic
procedure of giving life, is an example of how one must never let go
of the grip, leave off building, because one cannot do anything else
and because we don’t know how to do anything else. Raffaella Formenti
organizes this world of distinct velocities, seeking the acuteness of
a thought that stops and reflects. Living in the moment may also mean
to reestablish distances, extend relations between individuals and the
schematic nature of communication. Slowness, time. Her pixels are slow
constructions, origami creations made with a technology that does not
want to measure swords with the contemporary reality, with simultaneity,
preferring an extended dimension in time.
All her art is a slow motion, where it is possible to zoom in on and
observe the details of the world thanks to this extension of the sequence
in time.
Between main time and marginal time she prefers the latter, because
it also makes it possible to defer every decision, to discuss without
having to per force reach the conclusions that would tend to be imposed.
In a profound re-thinking, virtual reality is phagocytized by real virtue,
that consists of acting without present-day myths and slogans. Slowness,
therefore, is the modus operandi of a constant and admirable work, inspired
by a collective force, the force of a shared construction, like a Medieval
cathedral. One of the best traits of this work, that is patient, slow
and incessant as every research for truth should be, is this sense of
shared belongingness.
Valerio Dehò
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Until
20.X.2002
Raffaella
FORMENTI
Motore
di Ricerca - Search Engine
Livorno,
Galleria Peccolo
At
the exhibition, closing a series of four different events, all on the
same theme: Raffaella Formenti's "Motori di Ricerca" (Search
Engines), like the enormous internet archives, become inviting labyrinths
full of stimuli, which are different from the ones we were looking for…
Anyone who has started surfing the internet at random has sometimes
had the experience of being carried away by one link after another,
offered by the various "search engines". The possibility of
being able to access anything gives a sensation of getting lost and
of risking the silence of excess. This brimming expansion of communication
forms the basis of Raffaella Formenti's latest one-man show, aptly called
"Motore di Ricerca ".Following the subtle underlying theme
of her last four exhibitions which were held in four different Italian
cities, the artist from Brescia is now presenting a large-sized installation,
accompanied by more than a dozen works, specially created for this exhibition
at the Peccolo gallery in Livorno. Already last March in Viterbo, at
the Miralli gallery, her peculiar "search engines" created
a sort of dress rehearsal, based on an installation she presented last
year in Pisa at the San Zeno abbey. Later, in the Scoglio di Quarto
gallery in Milan, the view from above allowed her to make a strong impact
on the sea of information coming from the world, using a particularly
intrusive installation. Now, however, to expand the initial message
there are also Formenti's visual sounds, hosted by the fabioparisartgallery
in Brescia taking place at the same time as the exhibition in Livorno.
Here, the attention is particularly oriented towards the continuous
filling up of and influence, also unconsciously, of advertising on our
daily lives.But in Livorno the subject of the search engine turns and
suggests an enlargement of perspective in order to catch the most beautiful
part of art: the contamination. After the fall of the wall between artist
and spectator it is now the communication which has become the precious
grit which constructs the pearl inside the oyster. So, the effort of
drawing out from simple gestures the substance that will interest the
public, with the hope of making the work belong a little to everybody
- even to people who have never read a book of art history in their
life - this effort represents without any doubt Raffaella Formenti's
most fascinating challenge. In a certain sense, it could not be different.
Raffaela Formenti, in fact, with her painter's eye and real love such
as, for Turner's works, has never been afraid to risk to losing herself
in the torn posters on the city walls because she understood early -
thanks to Rotella - that these forms of expression "are no longer
just intrusive paper, but places for painting". Raffaela Formenti
brings to her works an extraordinary grace and aesthetic sense of the
magnificent opportunity of bypassing different references in order to
deepen her vision. So she is always ready to hear new questions, which
may generate embryonic answers, like pebbles dropped in a pond. In this
context even the ironic yellow boxes shown at Livorno find a place.
These boxes, with their strange lateral holes from which postcards,
advertising or brochures emerge, become colours for a painter who, instead
of going into a paint shop to buy the colours, crushes them directly
out of all the paper jumbles that we find in our daily lives, returning,
without false modesty and useless prejudices, a delicious lover of that
alchemical act, capable of transforming, even today, a split in a work
that brings with it new contents.
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Until
21.V.2002
Raffaella
FORMENTI
Motore
di ricerca - Search Engine
Milan,
Scoglio di Quarto Gallery
Obsessive
gestures of a primitive dexterity which become totem-like constructions
with bright colours: that's the poetry of Raffaella Formenti...
The
first installations made with packaging material appeared in Brescia
between 1992 and 1994, reaching a peak in 1997, with the Information
Tower, on show in 1997 at the Palazzo delle Albere in Trento, within
the exhibition Trash: when waste becomes art, by Lea Vergine.Hence,
it's almost a tradition now for this subject to 'permeate', underground,
the urban territory, and then comes "to surface" in "culturally
contagious" places, such as thematic bookshops (the Ars in Bergamo,
the Derbylius in Milan, etc.).In the iconographic galaxy in which we
are immersed (or rather, in which we navigate, as we like to think),
waste represents a system and poetics: its engine consists of the solid
thought of something discarded and useless which drifts away, stockpiling
images, information, expired material. An inexorable centrifugal force
compresses and tears apart packaging material and advertising leaflets
in a sort of indigestion process which relentlessly overflows and rapes
the edges…That's how Bianca Tosatti starts off her text, published
in the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, in which Giorgio Zanchetti
and the writer Claudio Di Scalzo provide further reading-keys to the
viewer, to allow him/her to feel 'inside' the context of packaging-unwrapping,
or in the transitory magnetic recomposing of Raffaella Formenti's works.But
how did all this begin? It's Raffaella herself who tells us: "I
began almost mechanically to file, sheet after sheet, useless pages
of any old magazine, folding it over itself until it became a sort illegible
micro-film, of which one can only guess the plot (…) The primitive
gestures of dexterity search for insight in the accumulation due to
an automatic repetitionHowever, these primitive gestures repeated with
obsession unleash a sense of vitality and construction, which leads
to the creation of totem-like constructions full of bright colours.
The "monument" challenge is interesting, such as the one in
the abbey of San Zeno, Pisa, where the eternal columns are coated with
today's fragile waste. A comparison? A warning? It's surely not a physical
matching, but a mnemonic one (thus more conscious), of radically different
communication systems, which today are closer than ever. But Raffaella
Formenti's challenge is another one: to bring the emotions felt before
a Malevic painting on the street. Without having to clean one's shoes.
Gabriella
Anedi
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