What follows is the English translation of our Skype conversation with Luca Vitone about his artistic research.
Tiziana Casapietra: Your works investigating the idea of “place” were the result of a very accurate research, but they required great effort from the audience as not much consideration was placed on the visual impact of the work. In your most recent work, instead, I mean from the monochromes, passing through the work presented at this year’s Venice Biennale and the video “Per l’eternità” now on show at Pinksummer (Genoa, Italy), there is a greater level of visual seduction. I would like you to tell me more about this change.
Luca Vitone: It is not very easy to explain. I have not clearly focused on this change. However, I would say that my present work is the result of the development of my analytical research, which has naturally evolved, like life itself evolves, like a human being, who becomes old and grows up.
It is true that there are some very essential moments of change in my work and in the course of my research. Twenty-five years ago, I had the desire to annihilate the image. I worked with photocopies in black and white. At that time, those methods were simpler, more direct, cheaper, and easier for a young artist. It was this great desire to fade the image through photocopying, a tool which depersonalizes the subject through duplication and pixilation of the image. My initial desire was to question the status of the object. I went further on this path, with the metaphors of places, places of our being, of our living, places that we inhabit. For some years I used cartography to tell about this existential loss in orientation that my generation went through in the ’80s. A loss that may also have emerged on aesthetic and political levels, in what I called my Carte Atopiche (Atopic Maps). At the moment, at the Galleria Milano owned by Carla Pellegrini, there is an exhibition done on the occasion of the publication of the book I wrote with Franco La Cecla fifteen years ago, Non siamo mai soli (We are never alone). Here, I am showing works that are included in the book, works done in 1994 which go through a very intimate and personal itinerary related to “places of belonging”. I have realized that in ’94 there was the first great change in me. Analyzing the place that represents this loss, I have realized that most of my works done in 1994 were very intimate, and I would say even personal. However, there are also some works that speak about the community, such as my cartographic works. In that year, I had my first exhibition titled “Der unbestimmte Ort” at gallery Christian Nagel in Cologne, where I invited a Rom community to come to the gallery. In 1994, I also did a work on Islam at the Italian Cultural Institute in Cairo. It was about the Islamic community of Milan; in the same year I made some drawings of India, Appunti di viaggio (Notes on trips), which are typical hand drawn maps. This was when I recovered a kind of manual dexterity as in the drawings for Non siamo mai soli (We are never alone). And this was also when I quit with the idea of photocopied duplication. There is some change there. At the beginning of the 2000’s, there was another change, which tells more about the formal aspect of an object, trying to maintain that kind of coherence, that modus operandi which is uniquely mine: investigating places, working on a territory, and on specific exhibition places. Even food, which has a convivial aspect, in 2000 became a sculpture as for the project I showed that year at Maria Colao in Rome, a work which is now on show at Silvia Geddes, Rome. This is when I started making monochromes, as a sort of painting. Maybe it was also my wish to test myself with the practice of painting. Being a visual artist, I inevitably confront myself with sculpture, which I think is everything that exists in space. During the last twenty years, sculpture has become installation. It is always an explosion of a tridimensional object that involves space in its totality. Sometimes, it involves the experience of the visitor, and sometimes it involves the senses of the audience. If I think of one of the cartographies that I made at the end of the ’80s, L’invisibile informa il visibile (The invisible informs the visible), here I find my first monochrome. It is a topographic map mounted backwards on the wall. The greater attention that we placed on this white sheet of paper, made us recognize some lines, colors, a territory, a cartography. Depending on our attention to it, we can manage to understand and read the territory that is described in this work. In 2000, for an exhibition in Florence where I displayed a saffron garden, I made some watercolors with saffron. The watercolor became a monochromatic painting made with a food element. This work was a diptych and on one watercolor I have drawn the geographical coordinates of the saffron’s place of origin, and on the other those of the exhibition place. These monochromes brought me to a further step in my research. I remember we were at the “Island of Art” in Milan, those were the years when the Stecca area was occupied with the sole aim of making the city of Milan aware of the need for a public space devoted to contemporary art. Milan pays lots of attention to European changes. It is very receptive of what happens internationally, but at the same time, if we compare it to other Italian towns, it is far behind in the field of public contemporary art spaces. It has changed, lately. Now there are some private and public spaces that are doing interesting exhibitions. In that period there was not a space for contemporary art in Milan. This is why we occupied that area. However, it was difficult to make an exhibition in an occupied place with no economic possibilities, and try to produce works for a space that aims at being a high quality museum space without funds. This is why I thought of working with the dust of the place. By collecting the dust of the place – we were working in a semi-abandoned space where dust was sedimented over the years – I managed to make some watercolors. Seven large watercolors on paper were placed on the corridor of the exhibition space to look like opened windows. From there, my reflection on the idea of monochromes evolved. Monochrome is seen as the culminating moment in western painting, a noble period in the history of western painting, the most extreme example of Modernism. It is a modernism that includes the concept of “rational absolute” on one hand, and of spiritual insights on the other hand: Ad Reinhardt and Piero Manzoni on one side and Marc Rothko on the other side. We have this kind of dialogue among different approaches to monochromatic painting. I am not a painter, neither by academic training, nor as an artist. I just wanted to give my contribution to this reflection by using anti-pigments. Thus, I used natural elements that are generally accused of destroying the idea of painting either materially or conceptually. The debate over restoration is always on what should be removed from the work and how the work should be restored. The dust I use comes from closed spaces, dust of the outside environment, all ashes that surround us. These are the elements that nullifies the state of painting. So, maybe these elements, these anti-pigments, are the last act of a utopian idea of progress which was typical of the 20th century, which does not exist anymore, but for many years was considered crucial to the social growth of our western world. These dusts, perhaps, are here to tell us about this ideological failure. I started with these kinds of dusts and then to those in the open air, to the atmospheric agents and at the end to the ashes of incinerators, of garbage. The idea was to tell about the rhetoric that we have in the consuming society, on our environmentalism, on the environmental ideas that collide continually with selfishness.
Jessica Genova: How do you plan your works? What kind of people do you involve, what tools? And more specifically, since you use harmful dust, how do you protect yourself?
LV: I take advantage of the opinions of people that are close to me, friends of different backgrounds, some of them are collaborators of mine. I start with consultation, and then the work grows and comes to its definition. We protect ourselves at work. According to the work we are doing, we put on overalls, filtered masks, and glasses that allow us to complete the work.
JG: Looking to the future, how is your work evolving? What are your current projects and what do you have in the future?
LV: It had a very busy summer, with a lot of exhibitions including the Venice Biennale at the Italian pavilion and at the Latin-American pavilion. Recently, I have opened three solo shows. I am working on some projects in Germany, in South America, and in Italy. But it is too early to talk about them.
Special thanks to Garvin Cummings, Jessica Genova, and Sidita Hoxhiq for helping with the transcription and the translation of theis interview.
Luca Vitone was born in 1964 in Genova, lives and works in Milan.
Selected solo shows: 2013: Pinksummer, Genoa; Silvia Geddes, Rome; Galleria Milano, Milan; 2012: Museion, Bolzano; Fondazione Brodbeck, Catania; 2011: e/static, Turin; Galleria Cesare Manzo, Rome; 2010: Michel Rein, Parigi; Pinksummer, Genoa; 2009: Nomas Foundation, Rome; 2008: Christian Nagel, Berlin; GAMeC, Bergamo; 2007: Cesare Manzo, Pescara; MART, Rovereto; Fossati esterni del Castello Sforzesco, Milan; Emi Fontana, Milan; OK Centrum, Linz; 2006: Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg; 2005: Magazzino d’Arte Moderna, Rome; Franco Soffiantino Arte Contemporanea, Turin; 2004: Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato; ASSAB ONE, Milan; 2003: Galleria Primo Piano, Rome; 2002: Micromuseum, Palermo; Gianluca Collica, Catania; 2001: Lotta Hammer at Westlondonproject, London; Emi Fontana, Milan; 2000: Base, Firenze; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome; P.S.1, New York; Primo Piano, Rome; 1999: O.K Centrum für Gegenwartskunst, Linz, Austria; Neon, Bologna; 1998; Christian Nagel, Cologne; Openspace, Milan; 1996: Künstlerhaus Schloss Wiepersdorf, Wiepersdorf; Special Project for Liste ’96, Basel; 1994: Juliet Room, Trieste; Christian Nagel, Cologne; Emi Fontana, Galleria Paolo Vitolo, Milan; 1993: Marsilio Margiacchi, Arezzo; Paolo Vitolo, Milan; 1992: Galleria Raucci/Santamaria, Naples; 1991: Franz Paludetto, Turin; 1990: Paolo Vitolo, Rome; Galleria Pinta 3, Galleria Neon, Bologna; U7 Gallery, London 1989: Galleria Pinta 2, Studio Oggetto, Milan; Galleria Pinta, Genova; 1988: Studio Gennai, Pisa; Galleria Pinta, Genova; 1985: Libreria Il Sileno, Genova.
Selected group shows: 2013: 55° Biennale di Venezia (Italian Pavilion); 2012: Ritratto di una città. Arte a Roma 1960 – 2001, MACRO, Rome; 1st Montevideo Biennial, Espacio Expositivo Banco Repùblica; In anderen Worten. Der Schwarzmarkt der Übersetzungen – mit zeitgenössischen Kulturen handeln, NGBK, Berlin; D’après Giorgio, Fondazione De Chirico, Rome; 2011: Secret Societies, CAPC, Bordeaux; Italia Ora, Museo Andersen, Rome; Il Belpaese dell’arte, GAMeC, Bergamo; The Impossible Community, Moscow Museum of Modern Art; Secret Societies, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; ACCADEMIA-STANZE-PERSONE, American Academy in Rome; 2010: Storytellers, Centre d’art contemporain Passages, Troyes with the collaboration of FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims; ORTung 2009, Salzburger Kunstverein, Deutchvilla, Strobl; Linguaggi e sperimentazioni. AGI Verona Collection, MART, Rovereto; Elogio della semplicità, Fondazione delle Stelline, Milano; Ibrido, PAC, Milan; 2009: Sicilia 1968/2008 lo spirito del tempo, Riso museo d’arte contemporanea della Sicilia, Palermo; 2008: Nient’altro che scultura, XIII Biennale Internazionale di scultura, Sedi varie, Carrara; Sguardo periferico & corpo collettivo, Museion, Bolzano; 2007: Deutsche Bank Collection Italy, Deutsche Bank, Milano; Sharjah Biennial 8, Sharjah, UAE; Capricci. Possibilités d’autres mondes, Casino Luxembourg; 2006 Fuoriuso ’06, Ex mercato ortofrutticolo COFA, Pescara; Less, Strategie dell’abitare, Pac, Milan; 2005: Emergency Biennale in Chechnya (travelling toPalais de Tokyo, Paris; Grozny, Chechnya; Matrix Art Project, Brussels; Museion, Bolzano); Padiglione Italia Out of Biennale, Flash art Museum Trevi; Fuori Tema, XIV Quadriennale d’Arte, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome; Alice nel castello delle meraviglie, Sale Viscontee del Castello Sforzesco, Milan; 2004: Shake. Staatsaffäre, O.K. Centrum fur Genenwartskunst, Oberosterreich, Linz; Villa Arson, Nice; EmPowerment: Cantiere Italia, Museo d’Arte contemporanea Villa Croce e Villa Bombrini Genoa; 2003 Moltitudini-Solitudini, Museion e AR/Ge Kunst, Bolzano; Utopia Station at the 50° Venice Biennial; Déplacements, ARC, Paris; Fragments d’un discours italien, Mamco, Geneva; 2001: Dinamiche della vita dell’arte, GAMeC – Bergamo; Leggerezza, Lenbachhaus Kunstbau, Munich; 2000: As it is, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; La forma del mondo, la fine del mondo, PAC, Milan; 1999: Molteplicittà, Fondazione A. Olivetti, Rome; La Ville, le Jardin, la Mémoire, Accademia di Francia, Villa Medici, Rome; 1997: Cartographers – geo-gnostic projection for the 21st Century, Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, Croatia; Officina Italia, Galleria Comunale di Arte Moderna, Castel San Pietro (Bologna); Città Natura, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome; 1996: Ultime Generazioni, XII Quadriennale Nazionale d’Arte, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome; 1995: Hotel Mama, Aperto ’95, Kunstraum Wien, Vienna; 1993: On taking a normal situation and retranslating it into overlapping and multiple readings of conditions past and present, Contemporary Art Museum, Antwerp; 1992: Ottovolante, GAMeC, Bergamo; 1990: Italia ’90. Ipotesi arte giovane, La Fabbrica del Vapore, Milan; 1989: La “mostra non mostra”, Gallery, Milano; 1988: The Gallery as Artwork, Luciano Inga Pin, Milano.
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