The Denied Image is a project started in 2012 and is a reflection on the artist-spectator relationship.
It revolves around the idea of desire as an essential path to knowledge, reflection on the concept of identity of the work and the political aspects of the author-viewer relationship. The project develops in two phases.
In the first, some works are exhibited in a way that does not allow for a complete view and reveals only one aspect of them. Visitors interested in having a complete and total vision of the work can do so by hosting it for a month.
The overall view of the work is therefore deferred and private.
The viewer can live with the work in the way they choose and prefer.
The key element is the process of waiting that arises when the viewer decides to host the work and waits to welcome it at home. A path of desire that becomes an integral part of the experience of looking which is thus charged with active participation.
Each work travels from house to house for several months after which all the works are displayed in a second exhibition that is finally "open", accompanied by notebooks that collect the testimonies of the guests.
The project has had two editions, the first in Turin, at the Galleria Martano in 2012/13 and the second in Milan, at the Galleria Milano, in 2014/15.
Immagine negata 1
Galleria Martano, Torino, 2012
Chi si ricorda, 2012, maple wood, glass, plasticine, cm 106 x 23 x 23
Chi si ricorda più del fuoco ch’arse
impetuoso
nelle vene del mondo; – in un riposo
freddo le forme, opache, sono sparse
A graphic representation can be obtained from the recording of a sound track. The verse read by the artist is by Eugenio Montale and is taken from the poem Sul muro grafito contained in the collection Ossi di Seppia. The graphic representation, the translation of the sound into an image, is done by a computer.
Thin cylinders of plasticine, retrace the path that sound takes to become a word, becoming a figure instead.
The sculpture is made of maple wood. The plasticine is enclosed between two panes of glass. The doors can be removed from the right and left, left open, ajar or closed.
I Ranuncoli, 2012, Fabric, UV print, wood, plaster, cm 33 x 33 x 33
I ranuncoli is the title of a short story by Cesare Zavattini, included in the 1941 collection Io sono il diavolo. The "storyboard" without images, which I wrote a few years ago as an outline for a video, is inspired by this story and reproduced on the inner sides of the green cube.
The fourteen sculptures, irregular spheres made of plaster, are coloured with fourteen different shades of yellow, in reference to our ability to read different nuances in the world around us. They are sculptures that we do not know where to put because they are not very stable, but they can be arranged at will, making them into a domestic landscape or kept as collections of atoms. They are rather fragile.
L’infinito è in ogni dove, 2012, Wengé wood, plaster, cm 36 x 27.5 x 14
The container of this empty sea was made of Wengé wood, a wood with a fibrous structure, very hard and heavy. Its essence seems halfway between wood and stone.
The object is a breakwater photographed on the Baltic Sea. The sculpture was created by trying to restore the perspective distortion created by the photographic lens.
The void that is not occupied by the material of the sculpture, inside the box, can be observed as much as the fullness of the sculpture.
Natura morta, 2012, cedar wood, apple, UV print, cm 29.5 x 22 x 25.5 e cm 44 x 24 x 29.5
The sculpture with the apple was first produced in a slightly different version in 1991.
The volume containing it in the "closed work" version is then used to store the tablets, which can be taken out, one at a time, for daily reading and then put back in their case. The tablets were cut from the same Cedar trunk so that the words would remain imprinted between the fibres of the trunk.
The sculpture with the apple is a sculpture in the round, i.e. it does not have a privileged side, a front, although everyone can find their own.
The texts imprinted on the wood are taken from Titus Lucretius Caro's De Rerum Natura, specifically from Book One, The Matter, Book Two, The Atoms, and Book Three, Death.
Lucretius' words are interspersed with texts taken from a radio programme conducted by Luigi Lombardi Vallauri in 2004, Meditare in Occidente, partly revised.
It is advisable, once the apple has been placed, to leave it to its fate, observing it from time to time. When it is considered necessary, it can be replaced.
Se fosse, 2012, cedar wood, ceramic, 12 photographic prints, cm 46 x 36 x 29
Once the box has been opened, it is advisable to place the base on the ground and place the feet in the area indicated by the template.
At the top of the box, a drawer holds twelve photographs.
You can look at them one at a time, for example one per day, or arrange them all together, visible in any sequence. The pictures were made by repeatedly dropping a leaded ribbon (usually used for curtains) from a height of about one and a half metres.