If you say – Ciampoli
If you say - Ciampoli
"... every man has his personal vocation or mission, and he can make history with it; although certainly if I had only waited for my private affairs and the running of the family, or, worse, to fulfill the unworthy mission of the gaudy, I would not now be taking the pen to explain myself."
Blessed Cross - Contribution to a self critique
I received an invitation to present a project for the annual programming of 16Civico Contemporary Art.
Inevitably I could not fail to explore the history of this place.
Background
Cristian Ciampoli, has a unique history and for me this is important. After a training in Art he decided to wander the area to encounter and collect experiences to fuel his creative personality.
The difficulty of being and living as an artist in this country (Italy) is somewhat complex. Both from the point of view of facing up to history that stretches back for millennia, and from the point of view of social and family recognition.
So what do you think, what does he do?
From Abruzzo, like his fellow countryman (Cross), metaphorically he picks up his pen to tell his story.
He occupies his family's home and transforms it into an artistic space, a container or art.
16Civico
"16 Civico was born in a fifties style building situated on the outskirts of Pescara, a few meters away from the beach and the Adriatic Sea.
16 Civico is a temporary project aimed at promoting contemporary art in a context that is outside of the conventional system, it is a space that continuously transforms. It has existed in a place that for many years the uncertainty of change has played a lead role. History and culture form the past have added layer upon layer
In this geographical and architectural context, halfway between the natural landscape and the kreeping industrialization, through the rise of buildings and supermarkets, the aim is to welcome projects by artists with different languages, to which the living space will be temporarily entrusted.
16 Civico is a place of active research, a small but important point of reference for local artists, as its website states.
Cristian Ciampoli, for me, turns into a ghostly figure:
"In Aristotelian psychology, the image of a sensitive and individual, a reality present in fantasy: as such the ghost contains a powerful intelligibility (still particularized in the uniqueness of the image), which is dematerialized and rendered intelligible in place by the light of the agent intellect." from the Diz. Treccani
Suggesting a form to me through an action and the space in which it takes place.
Gesture:
"A gesture is communicative when the shape taken by the hands and their movement are produced to communicate. A communicative gesture (from now on simply gesture) is a sign: something with a significance, the signifier is a particular shape and movement of the hands, arms and shoulders, and the meaning is an understanding of the format or a mental visual image.
Typical examples of creative gestures are those depicting actions, people, objects to illustrate the narrative. These gestures are necessarily iconic, that is, they resemble what they mean: if they were not, the interlocutor could not understand them, since it is the first and only time they are produced." Treccani
Work
The idea is to meet Cristian Ciampoli in Pescara in his Space, 16Civico, where he lives and hosts the invited artists’ projects. So, I'm going to spend a day with him. Let's talk, eat and talk some more. With the camera, I steal that body that inhabits those spaces, that body that moves, takes things like plates and cups, that body that opens the doors, moves a bicycle, that body in its daily action.
Cristian tells me many stories and shows me his works as an artist.
I then spend time with him, once in private, once within this space. It is a moment that that tries to evade time itself. It borders on the on the dream-like and even alcoholic dimensions. Let's look at the problems of this space together. Like mice, we spy on his father’s activities and machines. His dad is his neighbour and has a screenprinting activity nextdoor. I make a video as Ciampoli tries to take the imprint of the crack that has formed on the ceiling of one of the two rooms which has been prepared for the exhibition of the artistic activities of 16civico. Just at this moment Ciampoli accepts the game that I propose to him: to bring back in a sign the size of this crack. But how do we do it?
We go back to being two mice again. We open a door covered by a board, we cross it and with a torch we enter inside the screen print warehouse. There, Ciampoli sees a transparent panel of plexiglass, and suggests to use it. We take it, then we also take the kitchen table and, thanks to the Ciampoli’s height, we stand on the table. I hold the panel of plexiglass and draws the boundary line between the plaster and the crack of the ceiling with a marker pen with extreme patience and care. After this step, we place the panel on the table, then Ciampoli takes about thirty sheets of paper and joins them along the entire path marked on the panel. He sticks the sheets together, one by one with sticky tape and retraces the shape with the black marker onto the paper. I'm shooting all of this with my video camera. Throughout this, I ask him questions about what he's doing, what he's thinking, how he is feeling.
He, maintains his concentration and patience as he works on the sign, and he responds to me, opening up a dialogue accompanied by sisiness and pauses and free associations and anecdotes, on the gentleman who lives upstairs. This gentleman is called the Barber of D'Annunzio. He was actually a barber in real-life, but Ciampoli tells me, as he works on the line of the crack, that he can not be sure of the the veracity of this story, because he thinks: how did this gentleman get to be the Barber of D'Annunzio, if D'Annunzio was bald? While this line -sign continues its path, accompanied by the hand and mind of Ciampoli, himself, an answer is given to the question. His answer is that, perhaps, the barber had been D'Annunzio's barber, when D'Annunzio was small.
His hand stops, as does the story of the barber, Ciampoli looks at me comes out of the frame and hands me the sign -shape of the crack.
Here now I have the first form!
Ciampoli gave it to me!
I was also able to photograph him while he was sitting and even while he was lying on his red couch in the kitchen, even standing in front of the stove, and even when he looks at the entrance from outside the garden, or while opening a door...
He also told me the story of his bedroom window and some of the works on display during the 16th exhibitions.
Now I have the shape that Ciampoli gave me and the shape of his body inside and outside his environment.
These shapes are like arrays.
Fingerprints.
Where he lives and welcomes.
From this imprint, I draw different forms of Cristian Ciampoli on a 1:1 scale that can meet Cristian Ciampoli.
I make these forms with linoleum, leather-matrix-imprint, everything turns into a welcoming space for my art and are returned within 16 Civic.
All by thinking about the concept of myself.
We are forming form.
Where does the author's body end and the body of the work begins?
Project Materials
The Linoleum
I chose this material instinctively, then discovered that it also has an interesting story, two hundred years long, although it looks like a modern material, it contains terminology evocative of other places and other eras, such as:
Vulcanisation
Kauli
Rosin.
Linoleum is a type of resilient floor, composed of natural raw materials: flax oil, wood flour, cork flour, dyed pigments grilled on a natural jute fabric.
How do I tell him?
How can I tell you? How do I explain this to my friend and poet the artist?
If you want to meet Sphinx you must first have crossed an unfathomable abyss and peregrinated without stopping. You need to discover that the horizon is not a plane, but instead it is something that gives relativity to depth and offers a better reference to test this.
To give space to this thought, we must take a step back and return to Nicola Rotiroti's personal exhibition in Rome, “Ghost Sonata- A Tribute to Paolo Aita"(2018) which transformed the gallery into a dreamlike landscapes. It burst forth and orbited. When you see the works, you instinctively did somersaults and cartwheels. And here there was something different, which pulled your gaze from the walls, the floor. from an orthogonal relationship with painting on canvas towards a visual encounter something that inevitably made your feet move. It was a piece of plastic painted and placed on the floor which looked like a puddle-frog. It was self-attracting, disturbing as a bourgeois aleph: a playful sequence of mental associations fuelling the desire to dive in, to make the colours and elements held within splash onto the walls, sucking and then whirling, energising them to conduct their framed duty.
Crossing the puddle-frog we get to today, at "Se Dici Ciampoli" the personal exhibition of Nicola Rotiroti in Pescara. It was conceived with with Cristian Ciampoli, for 16Civico. Ciampoli is 16Civico’s artistic director, and is both an artist and the founder of this not-for-profit space.
A single work is displayed here, comprised of 8 rubber linoleum figures, placed inside and outside the house. Each form has two facades of grey cerulean, derived from the material being used.
The linoleum, which in Rome stimulated a new perceptive pictorial dimension, in Pescara it has become the protagonist.
The 8 forms came from a desire to compete with a space that is unique in that it is both the home of the artists and an arts project.
During a day that Nicola and Cristina spent together in the house preparing for the exhibition, Nicola took many portraits photographs of Ciampol. As Ciampoli moved around, documented the dialectic of his friend's body had with his home: his ways and movements.
They are accomplices in front of a shape, a crack in the wall: Ciampoli traces it on to paper.
Based on the photographs, Nicola enlarges the shape to a human dimension [1: 1], he also translates the form from one symbolic order to another.
The subject of the series, is Cristian Ciampoli.
The flexibility of linoleum, determines the way the shapes exist in the the world, the material quality informs them: they have the ability to adapt to a wall, to behave two-dimensionally and "appear" like a framework, to be installed on supports and "appear" like a sculpture, or to be left free to surrender to gravity and fall to the ground, like discarded clothes, stripped of their function.
Each of these possibilities is alive in the Pescara installation even the last, invisible; lying on the ground without constraints. It is the variant of that which was discarded at the time of the exhibition, but it is the stage in which the linoleum shapes lay longer before getting up. The "forms", that came out of the relationship between Cristian, Nicola and the house, are a unique work, a family of forms whose singularity is irrelevant: the work is a whole, but it is the singularity that relates to the user.
The work includes the times and stages that are not part of the final form and how it appears to the world. It is the trail of events, second thoughts and compromises that remain latent, perhaps invisible, but not absent for this: “ what he tells me, the aesthetic object says with its presence, within the perception "*.
“The warm aldo evaporates from the rubbery asphalt,
deforms footprints
but the shadows approach”**
Something similar to asphalt condenses through linoleum. It takes shape through the artistic process, turning from a solid to a “rubbery” stage, where the Pescara house and its owner represent the event that led them to rise, germinate, accepting the invitation to "appear sculpture-like".
The 8 shapes scattered throughout the rooms, are different from one another. Each one is attributable to a position taken by Ciampoli during that first day the artists spent together; one of them includes a recurring theme in Rotiroti's pictorial production: the landscape. On one of the two façades there is a view of the Pescara beach which is located close to 16Civico.
Sometime after that first meeting, Rotiroti and Ciampoli met again in Pescara to see the outcome of the months of work on the project together: the “figures”, which had been created in the studio in Torpignattara's in Rome. Before the figures were taken to 16Civico and set up for the exhibition, Rotiroti and Ciampoli wandered around Pescara, creating a beautiful album of photographs with Ciampoli with figures in various places: on the beach, at the bus stop, and in some of them both Ciampoli and the shapes seem to be posing.
Leafing through the photo album of that day, a couple of shots particularly stand out.:
Image 1: the “ shape ”painted with the landscape is placed in the same landscape, on the beach, the subject of the painting. It stands there, solitary.
Image 2: Cristian Ciampoli is in the foreground, positioned in front of the shape which is in the mid-ground and which has been painted with the landscape of the beach in the background behind it. The playful performativity in the urban and natural space opens up a meta-linguistic dimension, the presumptive-linear description of the work, done up to this point in the text disappears. A desire exists to want to assign a closed meaning to the aesthetic object, to want to trace a predetermined subject, a linear chain of motivations and ingredients that produce a result.
In the photographs we see the "form" camouflaging with the background, configuring.
And then there's the horizon.
Finally, the horizon, the real one and the painted one which coincide, at least in the space-time of the shot, and in the enjoyment of the two friends on the beach.
What is surprising is that this dividing line, which is often a protagonist in Western art, is practically absent in Rotiroti’s body of work from the past decade: there is no trace of the horizon in either the "amniotic" paintings, in the series "inside" (2006-2009), or in "outside" (2009-2015). It is not even in in the kaleidoscopic baroque visions "Lo Re" (2016). Nicola Rotiroti's painting pull you under water, you are forced to hold your breath and submerge. When you raise your chin to look up towards magmatic baroque vaults that are an unbalanced delirium.
Figuration, the product of a rare executive quality, pushes you towards a sense of suspension, a necessary condition for patient contemplation. Then you can hear an echo of that dull noise which thoughts produce as they bang on your cranial wall. A magma-thought-feeling that boils up and feeds on its own bubbling, self-sufficient destruction and the continuous cycle of regeneration.
Returning to the beach at Pescara, the painted "form" comes out of the water or perhaps it does not want to enter it. Regardless, it remains planted there on the shore, on the sand, observing the landscape to such an extent that it takes possession of it. A bystander and projector, like a Sphinx it brings the landscape with its horizon and then moves it in front of the viewer in the exhibition at 16 Civico.
The viewer in front of the landscape embodied in the shape could align their horizon and make it meet the other, risking them to coincide and camouflage themselves. There is a renewed invitation to push the pictorial machine and not stop on the threshold of its unique, presumed dimension. Just as with the puddle-frog, in the exhibition in Rome, the artists has embarked upon a new season of research.
In his work, Rotiroti exercises a continuous oscillation between a pre-reflexive, non-differentiated unity, in which he is one with the world, totally fused with it, so as not to be able to recognise anything other than himself within in it, and its complete opposite: to know oneself as a conscious subject in the definitive loss of unity and to be able to enjoy the world as another. ***
The painted "figure" is in a midground between the two existential poles, equidistant between wanting to maintain total adherence and at the same time emancipating itself from it.
In this sense, what we leaf through in this album seemed to be a game between friends, it is a critical event, a crisis as an awakening. A crisis that above all stands before its author. Like a Sphinx.
And looking at the Sphinx is an act of courage.
The subject of "Se Dici Ciampoli", then, is the crisis in the sense of awakening.
How can I tell you? How do I explain this to the artist, to my friend and poet?
If you want to meet Sphinx you must first have crossed an unfathomable abyss and peregrinated without stopping. You need to discover that the horizon is not a plane, but instead it is something that gives relativity to depth and offers a better reference to test this.
* Mikel Dufrenne, Fenomenologia dell'esperienza estetica, Lerici, Roma, 1969, p. 31
**Nicola Rotiroti, Giulio De Martin, 1,1, tre… stella!!!, Edizioni Ponte Sisto, Roma, 2016, p. 5
*** “For a human being, becoming a subject represents an awakening, accompanied by the pain of the irretrievable loss of a state marked by non-difference, in short: by the pre-reflexive unity. The crisis frees the subject, , from the awareness of the definitive loss of the previous condition at a certain cost.”. Michael Jakob, Il paesaggio, il Mulino, Bologna, 2009, p. 31
How the project came about
Arriving in Pescara at 16 Civico, Christian Ciampoli's house, I ask him to give me the shape of the crack that he has on the ceiling.
Creating the work at the studio
Return to Pescara
During
I returned for the second time to 16Civico, I took Christian's forms with me, me also installed them around Pescara and, waiting for the inauguration, I asked Christian to keep them under his bed.
After
During the exhibition, I asked Christian during the duration of the exhibition to make a video that would, in some sense, return some of the suggestions living with these forms had given him.
