The Solitude of Sculpture
Ludovico Pratesi
What are we talking about when we speak of
sculpture in 2013? Having finished the period of
relational art which dominated the 1990’s and
having almost exhausted the revival of Modernism
reconfigured under the aspect of multiculturalism,
international sculpture of recent
generations seems to have abandoned the idea
of sculpture understood as affirmative and muscular,
understood as an exercise of power connected
to the use of noble and heavy materials,
from bronze to marble, in order to favor instead
the practice of assembly, but in a different direction
from that highlighted in the well-known
exhibition The Art of Assemblage, which opened
in 1961 at MoMA, and closer in style and process
to Unmonumental, the successful exhibition curated
by Massimiliano Gioni at the New Museum
of New York in 2007. Sculpture is no longer
ready-made or fragments of everyday worn-out
objects, brought together to compose anthropomorphic
forms or inspired by the aesthetics of
the machine so dear to our futurists, but combinations
of heterogeneous materials that make
up landscapes that have completely subjective
meanings connected to poetic, literary or anthropological
references. Or it is simply connected to
an idea of physical displacement that modifies
the viewer’s perception of space, modifying its
structural conditions in order to provoke a sensorial
slip in a symbolic, metaphoric or mental
direction, giving the viewer an all-round experience
based on an interpretative vocation of the
space through sculpture. It is not environment or
installation, but a sort of architecture of meaning,
an open device that determines an active relationship
between the work of art and space that
is activated by the presence of the work itself, not
to contain it but to operate it.
This is a necessary introduction to contextualize
the thinking of Giovanni Termini on the occasion
of his solo exhibition proposed by the Fondazione
Pescheria in the space of the ex-church of the
Suffragio, which the artist has transformed into a
melancholic and striking incomplete landscape,
empty and deserted, whose apparent uselessness
is underlined by the title that the artist gave
it, summarized in one word, sharp and wicked in
its subtle and biting ambiguity: Armatura (Formwork).
It is a large installation that purposely
resembles the architecture of an abandoned
construction site, gloomily empty of the voices,
actions, tensions and energy that had animated
it for days in the communal effort to erect a building,
to give life to a new space inside the perfect
and harmonious forms of the church of the Suffragio.
It is a dialogue between sacred and profane, completed
and uncompleted that constitutes the
main meaning of the work: an invitation to relate
with a non-place, a sort of basic depository of denied
will made impossible, which exists only in the
dimension of a feasible but unanimated memory,
that Termini compares to the impotence that
characterizes contemporary Italian society.
There is no narrative concession, no aesthetic
adornment, but the brutality of a structure in
progress that incorporates real processes and
materials according to the practices of rereading
Modernism, which belongs to international art-
ists such as Pedro Cabrita Reis, Oscar Tuazon or
Tom Burr.
Like them, Termini works on the relationship between
the work of art and the space that hosts
it, according to a procedure already underway
at the beginning of 2000 that gives substance
to works such as Divaga ma non troppo (2008),
displayed at the Quadriennale, where a structure
of scaffolding tubes supported crates and other
three-dimensional elements, corresponding to
the correct definition of Andrea Bruciati “to redefine
sculpture no longer as a layout of static volumes
but an assembly of expanding forms and
relationships between these forms”.
These relationships in other works, such as Inclinata
(2009) or Attraverso (2009), were presented
as tensions between compressed forces,
whereas in Armatura (2013), the artist uses his
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ability to generate basic practicable spaces that
appropriate the symbolic and tautological associations
of the materials in order to interpret the
space in a rough, almost cruel manner.
These are not works but temporary locations,
structures striped for aborted buildings, children
of an ill territory which Termini wanted metaphorically
to present to the public to initiate a reflection
on the state of malaise of our country.
And he did this in a strong way, without indulging
in the narrative that weakens the language
of many Italian artists of recent generations, but
with meticulous and exact work, without rhetoric
and gloating.
It is a strong message that is moderated by the
other two works in the exhibition, the sculptures
Disarmata da se stessa (2013) and Idea di coesione
(2012), where the presence of elements such
as clay targets and transport straps bring our attention
to temporally defined actions in an everyday
dimension, almost playful, without however
giving up the formal rigor that characterizes the
development of Termini’s work.
Time, as Alberto Zanchetta illustrates, “the real
container of forms” for Giovanni Termini reduces
the language of sculpture to a metaphor of
everyday life, experienced in full consciousness
of one’s being without backing away from radical
choices such as Disarmata