Alongside a trio of individual retrospectives by leading figures of Arte Povera (Michelangelo Pistoletto, Alighiero Boetti, Giovanni Anselmo), last year’s Venice Biennale (2017) evidenced a widespread resurgence of Arte Povera- adjacent practices on behalf of artists of the most varying stripe. This entailed less an explicit or express invocation of Arte Povera by younger artists than simply a diffuse penchant for some of its most salient facets: a use of organic materials, with an eye to wider ecological ramifications; an emphasis upon presentism and phenomenological experience; an assertion of “nomadism” over and against the grain of geographical, ideological, and semantic fixity (in sympathy, it must be noted, with a recently exponential swell of exiles and refugees to Europe’s shores).
Alessandro Piangiamore’s work might be thought of in light of this general tendency. Yet while many other artists seek to dissemble this genealogy—or else remain unaware of it entirely, and hence reinvent the proverbial wheel— Piangiamore (1976) acknowledges it openly, engages with it directly, while forging incisive and stimulating experiments in his own right. It is under the sign of Arte Povera’s ontological hybridity that Piangiamore works, negotiating the space between sculptural presence and pictorial distance, between open‐ended duration and the boundaries of the frame, between the sensory and the cerebral. Piangiamore presents here a selection of pieces representative of the different series he has elaborated in recent years, ranging in materials from glass to wax, clay to concrete.
The latter material has loomed large in post‐war Italian art since the work of Giuseppe Uncini, whose reinforced concrete sculptures never fully shook off their pictorial flatness. Piangiamore’s Ieri ikebana series retains Uncini’s medium—and its often quadrilateral format—while setting aside modernist geometries for more variegated surfaces. Taking flowers discarded at city markets or by the side of the road, Piangiamore arranges them over an iron lattice, before covering them with cement. The resulting forms preserve the depressions of leaves, petals, and stems, while also blossoming into abstract shapes and patterns.
The series’ eponymous “Ieri” alludes to the overnight settling and setting of the imagery. The term Ikebana, by contrast, refers to the Japanese art of arranging cut flowers—a practice dating back to the 7th century CE, and begun with the laying of offerings upon votive altars. The term may be translated into English literally—and lyrically—as “giving life to flowers.” We might think of Piangiamore’s series, then, as giving an afterlife to flowers, preserving their formal and physical presence after the desiccation of their organic matter. This conjures up the Western pictorial practice, widespread since the seventeenth century, of the vanitas: still life paintings of objects evoking the inexorable transience of life.
Integral to vanitas compositions are fruits, flowers, and other comestibles destined to expire—metaphors of human flesh itself, of its inexorable mortality. The Japanese traditions surrounding the cherry blossom derive from a similar impulse to acknowledge fleetingness and the pathos of things, perhaps informing, too, the Ikebana ritual. Piangiamore’s Ikebana works bear no religious—nor even necessarily spiritual—allusions. Yet the spectral silhouettes to which nature is reduced in these object/images invite almost existentialist questions about the withering of life forms, and conversely, of enduring memories thereof.
Like photography (another visual guarantor of an object’s afterlife) Piangiamore’s sculptures are fundamentally indexical: their surfaces bear not a representation of the world’s surface, but a direct, physical impression of it. The results of these imprints, furthermore, are not immediately discernible; as with a photograph’s development, the maker must wait for the image to congeal. The Ieri ikebana works resemble not so much photographic prints as fossils, however. Alongside these almost geological effects, the use of concrete evokes entirely man‐made, industrial elements (a factor which, in Uncini’s cement works, conjured up Italy’s post‐war economic boom and the rampant architectural construction which it gave rise to). Such juxtapositions or—to use one of Pasolini’s terms, “contaminations”—conjure up the material, temporal, and textural amalgamations of Arte Povera experiments, from Mario Merz’s high-tech/low-tech igloos to Giuseppe Penone’s more recent conjoining of laurel leaves and glass sculpture.
Hung on the wall, however, Piangiamore’s works retain a painterly orientation—precisely that which numerous Poveristi had sought to up-end. This pictorialism is redoubled by the occasional glimpse of the iron trellises buttressing the concrete. The wire lattices visible under and through the surfaces of Ieri ikebana 050820161 and Ieri ikebana 060820163, for example, evince one of modernist painting’s most prominent tropes: that of the grid. At the same time, the concrete in a few of the works—Ieri ikebana 050820161, for example—appears punctured through in various spots, revealing the wall behind.
This disruption of the pictorial field calls attention to the work’s objecthood. These holes might be thought of in regard to Alberto Burri’s Combustioni, formed from burnt plastics, or Lucio Fontana’s Attese, comprised of canvases slit down the front. Piangiamore has further turned the process entailed in one body of work into the crux of another. His so‐called Belvedere works originated not as aesthetic objects per se, but rather as tools: pieces of galvanized iron used as lifting implements to hoist the Ieri ikebana off the floor and onto the wall. The objects appear now rescued from mere use-value by dint of polished, polychromatic surfaces and paired displays—whether on the floor or on the wall—which emphasize their formal curiosities.
If the Ieri ikebana works bear the imprints of the natural world, the series Tutto il vento che c’è (All the Wind That Blows) incorporates organic matter itself, while staking its conceptual dimensions upon the contingencies of the environment. Begun in 2008, it is described more accurately as an ongoing project rather than a completed work. As its title would suggest, Tutto il vento che c’è undertakes to “catalogue” all the various kinds of wind endemic to the earth’s different landscapes. These range from the Abroholos (a violent squall wind off Brazil’s south‐east coast), to Scotland’s Ban-gull summer sea breeze, to Australia’s rasping Brickfielder wind, which drags sand across Victoria and New South Wales and can raise local temperatures. After scouting out different locales—typically noted for a specific wind pattern— Piangiamore fashions small monoliths from soil and clay gathered on site at each respective location. In collaboration with various individuals, the artist then leaves these objects exposed to wind (but not rain) for a determined period of time.
The resulting abrasions wrought upon the monoliths testify to the local winds’ particular force and rhythm. If some of the rectangular sculptures appear relatively intact, others reveal pock‐marks, scuffs, and whole chunks missing. The works are fundamentally subtractive. For, Piangiamore has submitted units of matter to one element of weather, courting the wind’s friction upon natural substances. The traces left—or rather, the material worn away—serve as indices of an otherwise invisible phenomenon (The artist notably lists “wind” among the materials comprising each object, though it might be more fittingly listed as co‐artist). We experience wind only as something which acts upon the physical world, even as it remains undetectable in its own right. Like a kind of genius loci, each wind bears a local name, and is associated with both natural weather patterns and mythical narratives. Indeed, in Greco‐Roman myth, Sicily—from which the artist himself hails—played home to the god of wind, Aeolus.
In its denomination by the artist as a kind of “archive” of the world’s wind patterns, the project underscores the tensions—as well as the affinities— between empiricism and lyricism, science and aesthetics, enlightenment and myth. The notion of itemizing the totality of a natural phenomenon is posited ironically by Piangiamore; the task’s evident impossibility lends a further poetic dimension to the project. Piangiamore subsequently cast some of the remaining objects in bronze, deeming them—like the original monoliths wrought from earth and clay—“Prototypes for a witness of all the wind that blows.”
In the same spaces as these sculptures, Piangiamore occasionally displays etchings depicting landscapes blown by specific types of wind—images based upon photographic documentation of these weather patterns. These two‐ dimensional depictions of the winds’ effects contrast with the literal presence/ absence of wind through the sculptural works.
From Medardo Rosso’s innovative sculptures at the turn of the twentieth century, to Jasper Johns’s extensive use of encaustic, to Linda Benglis’s wax reliefs from the late 1960s, wax has given rise to some fitful but fruitful modernist experiments. Piangiamore’s Cere di Roma—including n. XXVII, included here—were in fact exhibited across from work by Rosso in the show The Lasting, last summer at Rome’s National Gallery. Piangiamore creates the works by melting down candles, gathered from Rome’s innumerable churches and their respective parishioners. Liquefied in large containers before being cooled on large panels, the wax—derived from beeswax and paraffin, palm and carnauba—ranges in hue according to the candles collected at the time. After the casting of one panel, residual material often remains left over and is thus mixed into the successive work. This creates a kind of continuity between the various Cere, at least in material—and conceptual—terms.
Still redolent of beeswax, several of the Cere appeal to the nose as much as to the eye. Along with warm, earthy tones suggestive of Rome’s architectural patina, these scents conjure up the side chapels of the city’s churches and basilicas, or even the first places of worship by Rome’s early Christians. Such an engagement with sensory perception (alongside conceptual dimensions) reveals a further intersection with the work of various Arte Poveristi.
Consider, in this vein, Marisa Merz’s installations made from paraffin poured inside a steel frame. With dark spots beneath the wax’s pocked surface, her Untitled (1990-2003) suggests a shallow pond in winter with leaves frozen beneath—an effect echoed to some extent in Cera #22.
The Cere’s verticality, however, simultaneously invokes the format of painting. By turns whorled and nacreous, blotted and flecked, their surfaces recall large-scale Abstract Expressionist canvases. The marbled, slate-blue surface of Cera #23 reveals a lambent, golden-orange streak flaring along its right side. With a deep blue‐green pigment pooled along its left edge, Cera #22 conjures up Clifford Still’s outsized images, with their jagged bolts of paint tearing through the pictorial field. Still employs emphatically pictorial means to evoke natural phenomena: the creep of moss, the peeling of bark, the corrosion of rust. Piangiamore’s illusionism, by contrast, is matched by a prominent sense of objecthood, suspended between a painting‐like orientation and a sculptural solidity. The caking and cracking of the wax calls attention to the works’ surface, while the faintly perceptible metal grid which subtends the wax of Cera #22 and Cera #23 makes plain (as in the Ieri ikebana series) the physical support undergirding the “image.”
This reticulated patterning disrupts the sense of illusionism, while inflecting the work with another layer of abstract effects. Indeed, over and against the preordained regulation of the grid, the works’ surfaces are contingent upon the drift of different wax pigments. Loss of control—and the aleatory imagery which results therefrom—thus forms a further crux of the series.
The Surrealist dedication to “automatic” process—from Max Ernst’s frottages, to André Masson’s Sand Paintings, to Wolfgang Paalen’s fumages—directly informed the Abstract Expressionist and Informalist courting of pictorial chance. If the abstraction of the Cere echo Abstract Expressionist imagery, Piangiamore exercises less control over the flow of his material, without the intervening apparatus of the brush.
An even more significant relinquishment of control informs his Primavera Piangiamore series: small, biomorphic sculptures wrought from glass, each bearing a chamber filled with colored liquid. The small ampule within each transparent piece contains perfume collected from an individual who has pledged his or her individual “scent” to the artist. These vary in shade from pink to amber to blood-red. After devising the works’ conceptual premise, Piangiamore outsources their fabrication to artisans, who lend them their final shape. These specialized glassworkers are also capable of securing the glass envelope of perfume, even with the high‐temperatures involved in firing. Reminiscent in some instances of Jean/Hans Arp’s sculptures, the works’ biomorphic forms appear at odds with their synthetic material; for, if crystals exist in nature, they are de facto geometric and faceted. The corpulence and contours of the Primavera Piangiamore works bear almost a sensuous presence, while defusing that same effect, generating a vacillation between a potential smell and the hermetic enclosure of the glass, and hence between a privileged transparency and a frustrating impossibility.
Ara Merjian
Ara H. Merjian is Associate Professor of Italian Studies at New York University, where he is affiliate of the Institute of Fine Arts and Department of Art History, as well Director of Undergraduate Studies. He is the author of Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City: Nietzsche, Modernism, Paris (Yale, 2014) and of the forthcoming Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art and Neocapitalism, 1960-1975 (University of Chicago Press, 2019). His criticism has appeared in Artforum, Art in America, frieze, Apollo, and other publications.