Fremo Immagine: a conversation
Fremo Immagine, Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, Rome, 2019
English translation generated with AI from the original Italian text.
Saverio Verini: In the case of this exhibition the title is a point of arrival, reached after you had already developed your idea for the show and made some of the works. And yet Fremo Immagine (who knows how many people will think it is a typo, or confuse it with “fermo immagine”, freeze frame!) seems to me to express not only an idea of instability bound up with the image, an aspect that has always characterised your poetics, but also a certain urgency – a haste, an anxiety? – to make a show entirely your own.
Francesco Ciavaglioli: This title does tie a knot between my artistic research and my personal attitude. “Fremere” means to be shaken, troubled, animated by a passion that exceeds us and makes us unable to fully manage ourselves. I think it expresses – perhaps with a vaguely romantic and naive air – the idea of a work in movement, almost a drift, which is not, however, a proceeding without direction, but an abandoning oneself to a journey with no set itinerary, guided by the constellation of ideas and references that nourish my work. It is a process that goes on with urgency, but without haste: the works gathered in this exhibition belong to the past year and represent a fairly in-depth segment of my research. Bringing all these works together and “making a place of them” is an essential moment, both for the dialogue I would like people to perceive between the works and to give myself the chance to experience them in space, unfolded, outside the intimacy of the studio. I live this passage with the same rapture as the act of creation itself.
SV: You speak of “research”, a term which, when referring to an artist’s practice, is in my view based not only on books read, exhibitions visited and theories developed, but also on more or less conscious obsessions. I have been following your work for several years, and if I had to identify the most recurrent aspect of your poetics, I think it has to do with the imperfection of the image, with its erosion or modification, often due to the reproduction processes it undergoes. How does Fremo Immagine connect to this attitude?
FC: I think it is a question of distance. I always feel the need to “distance” images from themselves in order to emancipate them from a purely representational function and let their evocative power surface. In Fremo Immagine the works appear as traces of images composing natural scenes and landscapes; giving these subjects an indefinite, suspended appearance helps me create scenarios – made of replicas and reiterated copies – in which I believe a dreamlike dimension can emerge, archetypal in a sense (prehistoric, perhaps?), but also pervaded by a certain melancholy.
SV: I would like to dwell on the natural elements you have just mentioned. I find it a very precise “strategy” to set subjects belonging to a nature we somehow take for granted, which seems to hold no revelation or special moment for us, alongside more or less sophisticated systems of reproduction. In your earlier works I have seen sunsets detonate through a “glitch” effect, floral motifs gradually fade in photocopies, flocks of birds multiply through the use of matrices. Can you tell me about this friction between the apparent banality of the natural subjects you often represent and the complex, problematic reflection on the mechanisms of image reproduction?
FC: It is a crucial question for me: the relationship between images and media was not born of technological progress understood in a digital and strictly “contemporary” sense. For me “media” images are all those obtained through a technique, a repeatable mechanism that frees us from the arbitrariness of a freehand mark; this does not mean, however, that such a mechanism should be considered post-human – on the contrary, if one thing identifies the human being, it is precisely this projective and technical capacity. I believe – as Walter Benjamin argued in his own way – that the first media image is the outline of the hand in the caves of Lascaux: a simple gesture that traces the body and testifies to a presence, a contact. A Greek myth about the birth of painting also derives from a similar gesture: the maid of Corinth tracing on the wall the shadow of her lover’s profile shortly before his departure. And we can think of all the “preparatory” production of medieval and Renaissance workshops, where drawings on cartoons formed a true code, a repertoire to draw on freely. Finally, I believe the idea of reproduction is certainly a way of reflecting on our current condition, overexposed to images, but also a way of connecting with an archaic past. The banality of my subjects is therefore quite deliberate: on the one hand I think it is a reaction to the idea that everything must be unique, exclusive, incredible, exceptional; on the other, I believe that an everyday imaginary can be the key to a possible “reconciliation” with the world, to a free contemplation, without the need for spotlights showing us the way from above.
SV: The exhibition includes an element you had never used before: the curtain. It does not seem to me merely scenographic; rather, I think it works as a “threshold”, something that keeps things apart but can at the same time be crossed; something that protects, that sets apart what lies behind it, and can also produce wonder, surprise and perhaps disorientation. The curtain is also a recurring element in the history of images, at least of some images you know well: the Black Lodge in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, certain paintings by Giorgio de Chirico… And the painting contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius, with the latter being fooled (and beaten) as he tries to draw aside a curtain that had in fact been painted by the former. What does the curtain you made for the exhibition mean to you?
FC: The idea of making an element capable of marking Spazio Molini – even if lightly, in keeping with the feeling of the show – came about on my very first visit. It is a strongly characterised space, with many elements that break its linearity, and so the need to “contextualise” the idea of the exhibition emerged immediately. On the one hand, I decided to install the works inside Spazio Molini without necessarily placing them in privileged spots, almost leaning them, in some cases seeking continuity with the elements already in the space; on the other, I chose to add new ones, trying to extend the characteristics of the works into space, creating further layers and an additional environmental level. In particular, the curtains stem from the wish to echo the characteristics of the space, but through a work in its own right which, as you rightly say, is not scenographic, even if it may allude to a theatrical dimension. Lynch’s cinema is full of theatrical references in a symbolic sense (for example when we see Agent Dale Cooper lost in those red velvet corridors, as if in the unfolding of an eternal curtain that never lets him understand which side of the proscenium he is on). De Chirico too has this theatrical dimension: his mannequins often stand on floors made of wooden boards that recall, precisely, the stage… Or we see curtains and drapery conceal (or reveal) part of the scene. The point is that the concept of theatre, as a delimited space dedicated to a specific purpose, has probably always belonged to human beings, certainly since before drama as we know it developed; and so has the idea of the “screen”, which in common understanding today is what unilaterally shows us everything (think of computers, TVs, smartphones…), but which is in fact still an ambivalent device: a medium that conceals and reveals. The reed bed I painted on the curtain is nothing other than a natural version of this threshold: a barrier that closes off a space, but at the same time allows us to imagine a beyond.