The twelfth print in the collection of «Il Giornale dell’Arte» for its subscribers is by the Italian artist who sought the material aura released by the shape of things
As in no artist of his generation, in Parmiggiani’s history a precise moment cuts a before from an after. At the end of 1970, at the twenty-seven year old, at the Galleria Civica in Modena (the city where he trained before the key meeting, with Giorgio Morandi) he moves a painting and a ladder, which have been leaning against the wall for who knows when, and discovers the trace that have left: in all that time the dust has settled everywhere except there.
The episode recalls a famous one told by Vasily Kandinsky: returning home one evening, he is surprised by «a picture of incredible beauty» where you can only see «shapes and colors“, while the “content” is “incomprehensible». After an instant he understands that that painting is one of his, so «normally» figurative, «leaning against the side wall». Thus, commented Edoardo Sanguineti, «he will continue throughout his life to paint pictures upside down».
In the same way, since that day Parmiggiani has taken to producing thatmaterial aurafrom the combined effect of loss and evocation, in what he called Relocations: exposing certain objects to an open flame (for example from tire tyres, which are particularly «expressive» in projecting smoke and soot into the environment) to then contemplate their «negative» shape impressed on the canvas or directly on the wall. Namely theirs shadow.
He wrote: “They originate from silence, from the shadow, […] from the mountains of glasses, shoes and dentures piled up in the Auschwitz camp, […] from the pain in the eyes of my white oxen machine-gunned by an American plane, […] from the fire in my house, […]from the rubble of Stalingrad where I was born, from the poetry of Paul Celan, from the light of Sinai, from dreams, from mud, from blood, from art, from nothing». L’fire is that of the winter of the twentieth century, the one in his native Luzzara on the front line, but it is then a meta-historical dimension (with all that it can symbolize Stalingrad) and, finally, metaphysical and absolute: the clause recalls the Góngora translated by Ungaretti, «earth, smoke, dust, shadow, nothing».
There metaphysics of Parmiggiani, just like that of de Chirico or the seventeenth-century poets rediscovered by TS Eliot with their «sensuous thought», presupposes and summons the physical dimension that transcends. In this way Parmiggiani reconciles the deepest spirituality and the most radical materialism: the title of the largest anthology of his writings, A faith in nothing but total (Le Lettere, 2010), could not be more eloquent.
Parmiggiani’s is aart of losingto quote Elizabeth Bishop, or rather an art of to have lost. But she’s also a’art of finding. Just like photography according to Roland Barthes (and then we remember those of Hiroshima), this light writing fix something in time is state: even if (and, in a sense, just why) that something, now, is gone. The two dimensions (the presence, absence) need each other. Parmiggiani himself spells it out: «Build, destroy, build again, destroy again».
Truly for him it can be repeated that Destruction is his Beatrice but, as in Dante’s metaphor of Mallarmé, his is a Creative Destruction: a bit like, said Joseph Schumpeter, every cycle of economic growth can only start from dilapidation of previous wealth. The concept comes from Marx but it has even been possible to compare it to the Hindu mythology of Shiva, a destructive and at the same time creative deity (and perhaps we are not even far from Neoplatonic and Christian “negative theology”).
Commenting on another image that becomes obsessive in Parmiggiani’s journey, the Labyrinth of broken crystalsJean-Luc Nancy evoked the whole of violence And classicism. In this Parmiggiani is the only artist who has had the courage to accept the more problematic legacy of a master to whom he is often compared, but for different reasons: Alberto Burri. Just like in Ironsin the Bags and in Plastics the hand that sews, the hand that sutures, the hand that reassembles is the same hand that has ripped, torn, burned.
The violence of history is obscene. And in fact, unlike in that ancient cruel sarcophagus, we don’t see it. She is stolen, delivered to the abyss of time. What we see is a Destruction that has always already occurred, a après coup; and the work is the sign of an achieved silence. To quote the poet of Parmiggiani’s heart, Paul Celan, that of art is a argumentum and silence: who, «last», «witnesses of the night». Another of the artist’s aphorisms sounds: «to engrave the word in the earth: spirituality». Each of us is called to put the emphasis on spiritualityi.e. on Earth. But for Parmiggiani there is no one without the other.
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