Matteo Negri

From the inside to the outside through an explosion

Milovan Farronato

A web of lines, a kind of abstract naturalism combined with the graphic description of a childish drawing. Spontaneous germinations in a scrap metal garden, a mass of old machineries, electric wires, broken valves. Bundles of overlapping signs, perhaps meetings between the "black" culture emerging from the underground and the "white" information, which progresses through gradual removals. Blurred, uncertain dimensions...

The early works by Matteo Negri were dump devices and mechanicisms made up for a last appearance. Collected in the Milanese surroundings, reinvented with substance proper of the sculpting tradition, comfortably placed on chilly basis, the eroded turbines are towering over, the inextricable eletric wrappings of oldfashioned dishwashers or primal washing machines; used condensers and wrecked alternators. Probably also the ignition engine of any generic vintage motorbike peeped out sometimes. Deboned artefacts and melancholic exoskeletons called out to show and disclose their intimate and fleshstripped nature. A last, harmonic and settled greeting before,, most likely, resting forever in peace.

An interest towards an objectivity made by leftovers not working anymore and nevertheless refined by the artistic action and by an incisive and balanced maquillage in the same time. The giving of the thing returns entirely and simultaneously it's denied with a sharp magic game. Detailed and internal visions, private, secret. Re-emergings. Copies and sinister doppelgangers. Left -job lots or passwords to another, more articulated, mysterious and parallel reality? Or better, to another more mysterious possibility to view a parallel reality?

 

As it happens, perhaps even now, during the recent urban 'en plein air' journeys of some monumental sculptures which were born on-site. They wisely enclose , with a desire of returning and sublimation, the landscape reality around them in as many fragmentary visions. Sometimes they are scaring and threatening slipknots framing souvenir-visions, as romantic postcards from the Louvre or Les Invalides in Paris. Other times the slipknot becomes a lazo circling and defining the eliptical boundary, ideally reversed, of another perspective which encapsulates the visitor's gaze in a selected detail from the surrounding reality. The bricolage aspect survives, as keen and careful builders do with the devices and gears: these loosenup knots, and these holes literarly "gaze hanging" are shown as combinations and joints of the vivid LEGO bricks, giant and accessorized with an unusual elastic property. What has been lost, in Negri's work evolution, is the interest for what is "inside", and, in a way, drowned. An incisive and characterized Pop turning, a bit acidic and psychedelic, has been added in the brilliant colors and high contrast; another characterizing coming-out of an out-of-level childhood world.

 

How did the passage happen? From the desire to get into the reality and possibly see how it works when you want to frame the visions. From one dimension, as a pathologist you're about to re-create a fragmented anatomy, to the landscape maker who wants to underline, in a bizzarre way, some personal highlights to make playful and jazzy worlds. From the unfunctionality to the construction, brick by brick. From the full-scale copy to the visual hyperbole. From the inside to the outside. From the detail to the world map.

 

In the middle, there has been a moltitude of mines: a world of detonated clays, frozen in a more or less advanced stage of explosion. Hit in their inside and ripped open. Potentially dangerous and jazzy colourful. Still inside their own spherical nature, a bit flopped on the right or on the left sides, or already kneeling on the ground like a blossomed and quickly withered flower. They conserve and keep the sense and value of showing a hidden content - in some way similar to the carburetors and pumps re-made in the studio - and contextually they already push the author's gaze towards the up-coming and politicized world, proper of the symbology of the most recent production season. The slipknot and the current events of the Arab Spring; the geo-politics in a series of globes and world maps re-made as LEGO combinations which quote alternatively Boetti, Mondrian and the Constructivism. The mines are Fullness showing Emptiness, or letting Emptiness coming out. In this military objectiveness, it's already evident the blow-up possibility made even more clear thanks to the photographic reproduction, which, beyond the reproduction topic, gives indeed possible and surreal architectural visions and realistic ones in the same time. The silhouette of these frozen explosions is masked as a urban vision, it dresses up as futuristic building... Not exactly residential.. Between a fragment and an abyss, a hole and an extra-added detail of the detoned body, a procession of people in uniform could appear. Maybe the photographs would deserve to be bigger. More threatening. More majestic, on the same direction of the recent public sculptures. They are a middle organism, between two sizes and two measures. A borderline being whose progress will show for sure, in the future, even more accelerations and meaning assemblances.

 

 

DRAWING INTO SPACE

A conversation between Luca Fiore and Matteo Negri. Mirta restaurant, Milan, November the 12th, 2012. Around 10,30 pm. 

LF: So you've decided to quit Lego? 

MN: I don't know. I might change something. 

LF: It's anyway a turning point. 

MN: I'd like my Genoa exhibition to be a closing point for a certain type of work. Lego had more successful developings than others. I am now in front of a question. The doubt is not on the "Lego" factor itself, but on a sculpture level.

LF: In which way?

MN: These sculptures have imposed themselves on space. Also in the open and public areas. My studios' ceiling gets up to 3 metres and 20 centimetres. My most interesting Lego works have reached that height. Now I want to develop my research up to the maximum dimension.  

LF: Monumental. 

MN: Yes, real monuments. In their size.

LF: What are you intrigued by regarding this?

MN: To made the Lego knots I have to make a real knot with foam rubber . Even for the biggest sculptures. The shapes I make are abstract harmonies in the space. The knot became the measure of an empty space. 

LF: The "knot" factor matters more than the "Lego" one? 

MN: Yes, sure. Lego is an alphabet through which I created my own normal language. It's like the shape of my drawing.

LF: Where did the Lego idea come from?

MN: I was working with blowed mines. But I was looking for another direction. I was saturated by those "mad constructions", bombs transformed in containers of imaginary architectures. I wanted to find a deeper connection with architecture. As a sculptor, I have always been connected with the idea of construction and I was looking for a simple element which could have it inside. Lego is a popular object which includes this idea of construction. It's got certain rules and sizes. 

LF: Did you begin immediately with knots?

MN: No, in the beginning I studied Lego as itself, as a structure. 

LF: And how did the knot come out?

MN: Changing substance. I started with iron fusions. Then I moved to wax. While I was working on the Lego wax bricks, it happened to bend them. After the first twists, I needed to make knots. The knot is the opposite of a geometric construction. I found another possibility in a popular object, and told myself: Let's see what happens.

LF: The knot has a peculiar meaning for you? 

MN: It's a centre. Each sculpture has got a centre and wings. The knot is the centre from which his wings come from.

LF: How do people react when they see your work for the first time?

LF: How do people react when they see your work for the first time? 

MN: Sometimes they come into the gallery thinking it's a Lego shop and then they ask: "What kind of Lego is this? I've never seen it...". I don't think it's negative. 

LF: And children?

MN: They freak out. They're my favourite collectors. Often they convince their parents to buy my works. In the end, I do what every child really wants to do: to bend a Lego.

LF: What's the relationship between mines and Lego?

MN: Somebody says: you take a dangerous object, the mines, and you transform them in something playful. Then you take a playful object, the Lego, and you shape it dangerously, as the slipknot. It's like a kind of magic. If you work on a universally recognizable topic, you can make it even closer to people. 

LF: The Lego come from a very precise planning process. How do you notice the poetic possibilities in this "cold" work?

MN: When things work, they work. You see it. They might work in different ways. In Mondrian everything is based on colours, knots are based on the beauty of bends. Now I would like to go deeper on Dna. 

LF: You're not afraid of this changing moment?

MN: No, it's the best in the world. 

LF: Why?

MN: Because you're free. You're free from results. I would be more scared if I were called by Moma for a personal exhibition. I'd be trapped. Because I still have many problems to resolve.

LF: The ones who liked mines do also like Lego? 

MN: No, not obligatory.

LF: Lego works, you're not afraid to leave it?

MN: I'm not saying I'm abandoning it. There are parts in this work which have developed in a certain way, so they have to remain like this. You cannot go beyond. Also because you can't always say the same thing. After a while you get bored. Now it's like as if the knot topic has found its own structure, which could get free from Lego, but always be recognized as a work of mine.

LF: Which one?

MN: It's the anatomy of my sculptures. It's about structures into space. When I was a student, I heard that sculpture is a drawing into space. I didn't understand that time. Now I know it is really like this. And now I'm interested in this. Mines or Lego, it doesn't matter. 

LF: How did you think of Dna? 

MN: It has a beautiful shape. It moves into space. The helix is an extraordinary shape. I'm fascinated by it: it's a full and empty space. It limits space, but in the same time it empties it. It's made by two symmetrical bands moving around a cylinder. It's perfectly proportioned. It's pure geometry, and a callenge for a sculptor.

LF: Here you touch the topic of life, why?

MN: Damien Hirst has built his own entire career on the relationship between life and death. Especially on the idea about death. We know only a few things about this. But we know a few about life too. It's still mysterious even if we know its structure. Dna shows that also life is connected with design. It's an architecture. It's a construction, a creation. The genetic code is a vocabulary through which life speaks its own language. And it works by bricks, like Lego...

 

Matteo Negri

Sceneries from a NeoPop Imaginary

ABC Arte, Genoa

 

By Viana Conti

 

The artist. The title of the exhibition Asupposedly fun thing I'll never do again quotes the corrosive reportage by David Foster Wallace about a week he spent on an extra-luxury cruise ship, describing the typology of the average American man's holydays in the Caribbean. In the work by Matteo Negri (born in San Donato Milanese, 1982), which goes from sculpture to art installations, objects, relieves, photography and scenography, there is an undeniable playful component, together with an intense thinking of the human subject from childhood to the adult age. The Danish game LEGO, universally recognized by its own small bricks, becomes the modular - minimal element of his work, from which the hazards of his research move into space, shapes, chromatic relations, interactions with internal and external environments. His research forces in the beginning and subverts later the rules of the game and, working plastically over the shape and the structure, through his own ways of choosing and melting the substance and altering the primary colors into secondaries and tertiaries, he opens a building modality overlooking the void and the no-limit between concept, project and execution. He constantly refers to the terraqueous globe starting from the interior world, not only on a psychic level, but also on a genetic and molecular level, and his own aestetic choices are related to the history of art. His graduation thesis about the English sculptor Tony Cragg and his research on the work of the artist Sol LeWitt, though with their own differences, had a considerable weight on his artistic education, together with the geometric and harmonious bars, based on the reds, blues, yellows and blacks by Piet Mondrian, and the maps and planispheres by Alighiero e Boetti, where the world nations are rappresented with the flags colors. The playing possibilities for a child during his educational phase become, in adulthood, a challenge to the plans decided elsewhere by other people, to gain a self-awareness and to look for and realize his identity in a social, political and cultural context, where he can analyze his own projections into the world and his own practical, theoretical and emotional investments in art. There is a linguistic assonance, on a phonetical - scriptural level, between the LEGO brand and L'Ego (the Ego) as a psychic structure based on the relationship with reality and the other from himself. As it happens with the playful and constructive components of LEGO, they can change sign in the project of the artist. They become a condition of risk and invasion, the same as with those deep mines, whose plastic side interested so much the artist's imaginary, which, out of his studio - laboratory, are not death tools anymore, but explosions of life.

 

The itinerary of the exhibition. Thetitle: Asupposedly fun thing I'll never do again. Once in the gallery, the visitor faces a lambda print (Big Landscape, on Epson photographic paper and plexiglass, 50x70 cm): it shows some mines in blue, orange, red, dark brown, black colors on the green carpet of a carom pool: the announcement of a game with unexpected results. Opposite, you'll find three shining deep mines "blown" in glazed ceramic (Ground Zero). They positively change the result of a possible terroristic attack in an amazing baroque scenario. Going on, the visitor will find himself in a dark room, illuminated by a blinding spot-light pointing over a structure, white as a ghost and iper-dimensioned, reproducing the double-helix of the genetic code in varnished iron and resin (The source code, 2012, 300x100x100 cm). On the ceiling, a moving cloud of white balloons, partially covered with fluorescent paint, transcribes, in a kind of score which reminds the self-portrait of the artist, the process of the cellular generation of the living organism. In the long balcony on Via XX settembre, there is a monumental yellow loop-knot, revolutionary symbol of the Arab Spring in Egypt (At the end of the day, 220x60x60 cm, varnished iron and resin on a iron base), a mute, warning and emblematic sculpture. Having in mind the art of sailing knots - looped, rolled, shortened, stopped, sheeted, jointed, the cappuccino and English knots - the artist made one with the colors of the flag of Genoa and named it Margherita Knot, Genoa (135x135x20 cm). A very bright room hosts on its walls four different exemplars of the L'Ego Mondrian relief, a gold bar composition on a chromed and varnished iron base, 55x55x18 cm, standing in front of L'Ego Mappa, 2012, chromed iron and varnished resin, 75x120x6 cm, in which the five continents are coloured in an empathetic way (America is red, Europe yellow, Asia green, Africa blue, Oceania white). This work is dedicated to the dead artist Alighiero e Boetti, one of Matteo Negri's most important references in the history of art. The same for the world globe, entitled L'Ego Globe, 45 cm in diameter, and for the varnished resin ten maps of the continents, in various colors on a white LEGO background, 50x75x5 cm, shown in the last room. This is the vision of a coloured world by an artist who, in childhood, has dreamed to lay out the terrestrial world at his feet.

Critical review. The unsurmountable barriers of the infantile creativity become now a propositive challenge of existence. The missing piece in playing is re-made in the studio, the wall is pulled down, the plate is folded, the pillars are knotted and the knots are untied. The substance becomes modifiable. Getting out of the little dreamroom, the mini dimension becomes macro and the project expands, from the inside to the outside, to step into the world. In Matteo Negri's work it's visible a cartographic vision of the world, a paleo-geographical attention to the continental drift from the primordial Pangea and Panthalassa. His idea of sculpture reminds the shape of the everyday objects. These shapes are re-edited in the artist's imaginary to become re-visited simulacra marked out by his own vision of the world. Ideally, his sculptures are intended for open spaces like squares, bridges, cross roads, the great urban views where they can interact with the metropolitan aspects, such as signals, traffic lights, street lamps, trees, malls and museum architectures. Sometimes you can frame a perspective or a monument in the loop of a knot. For example, in the occasion of his recent exhibition in Paris, his en plein air works were related to the architectures of Les Invalides or the Louvre. The Pop component is very strong, on a figurative, dimensional and chromatic level. The provocative power is undeniable as well. Also the mechanical and manual component are crucial to the final process, and in the same way are the rituals of drawings, plates, fusions, scale prototypes, the choices of the industrial stuff such as the polyester resin, fiberglass, galvanized iron, car paint and lead coating. In the beginning the artist had a great interest for the industrial wrecks he used to collect from the dumps in the Milanese surroundings, such as carburetors, engines, tanks, injection pumps, appliance wrecks. Corpses with no organs, de-functionalized, left in pieces but, in spite of the wounds of time, still releasing a secret energy, a past life which makes them looking now seductive, communicative and full of life. The deep mines attracted him in the same way, unsettling and intriguing at the same time, smooth as jewels or scratched as craters, realized in the famous ceramics town of Albisola, Liguria, where Lucio Fontana and Leoncillo had worked in the past. Ceramic is another strong and revealing art tool for the artist: relationship with soil, gestures, tensions, surprises of the cooking moment, chromatic reactions, effects of crystalline mixed with the magic of the Indian blue. Another adventure with the erotic mould of the material and the tactile and physical modeling of the shape. Knots, wrappings, crushings, twistings are a meaningful metaphore of the interior and exterior vision of the world by Matteo Negri, an artist who bends the game of life with the power of body and imagination, to get his own Ego to be finally and symbolically untied. 

 

Uncertainty Principle

 Ivan Quaroni

 

 "There is no abstract art. You always start with something. Afterward you can remove alltraces of reality."

(Pablo Picasso)

 

"An image breaks the borders defined by concept in order to define and contain it. Spiritmust realize this, whether it likes it or not, or it will succumb under phenomena."

(ErnstJunger)

 

In recent times, Italian art developed a new aniconic and polysemous sensibility expressed through several media, from painting to sculpture and installation, in discontinuity with the codes belonging to geometrical abstraction. In the history of art, the abstract process often represented an arrival point, intended as an evolution or improvement of the pictorial language. Many Italian abstract painters like Alberto Magnelli, Manlio Rho, Arturo Bonfanti and Osvaldo Licini, for instance, started from a realistic approach to then create a system of inner signs and figures closer to the intangible world of ideas. However, the passage from iconic to aniconic representation has always developed in this order and never in the opposite way.

What distinguishes this group of artists belonging to the Millennials generation is the recognition of the basic ambiguity of visual language and, therefore, the final dismissal of the dichotomy between abstraction and representation, a legacy from the past. It is clear that these categorizations are not functional anymore. It might be the consequence of a structural change in culture, regarding the emerging of a new awareness, more and more a-confessional in an ideological way. We may consider it as a legacy of the post-modern period, which helped to redefine genres making them liquid and supporting a free circulation of artist between various artistic fields. International critics testified this change, pushing authors like Tony Godfrey and Bob Nikas to rethink old classifications and introduce new elastic visions on present pictorial researches. Godfrey invented the definition of Ambiguous Abstraction, regarding those works by abstract artists where figurative traces survive in a evanescent way. Nikas expanded the Hybrid Picture definitionalso to those works by mainly figurative artists (like Jules de Balincourt and Wilhelm Sasnal) showing abstract elements.

In reality, Gerhard Richter's many and various works between abstraction and figuration already proved how painting could be considered as something homogeneous, regardless of its own declinations. In 1986, the American abstract painter Jonathan Lasker wrote: "I'm seeking subject matter, not abstraction." Lasker thought Abstraction was dead with Frank Stella's Black Paintings, so he imagined painting as representing marginal topics like memory, presence, matter, transcendence and the mix between high and low art. In addition to these topics, felt as crucial nowadays, the post- abstraction by the Millennials, shaped by the exponential growing of information and digital technology, reflects on the individual's position during image creation and fruition processes.

Studies on perception, at the core of artistic experimentations since the end of the Fifties, were one of the many consequences derived from the discoveries in quantum physics. The observer was given the power to influence the results of scientific experiments and, in an extended way, he could concretely define reality. Through the Uncertainty principle, the epistemological consequences of Werner Karl Heisemberg's theory would have been received also by contemporary arts, which started then a deep reflection on the observer's role in the construction of images. Optic and kinetic works were conceived as interactive devices able to create a physiological reaction into the observer, who became an active part in the understanding of the image. Artists considered themselves as aesthetic scientists with the social mission to show the audience how congnitive mechanisms work. To realize their goal, they had to make one step back and give up with the author principle, in the same way as the N Group from Padova did when their works were presented under a collective signature. After fifty years, at the peak of the digital era, studies on the relation between image and perception have reconceived or, at least, extended to the new cognitive standards of the Y generation. These young artists are not interested defining how visual mechanisms work, while they focus on the reactions to the changed fruition conditions to internet and virtual reality images. They developed a critical awareness to distinguish artistic creation from the production of commercial, advertisting and playful images. All the artists present in the exhibition show a radically individualistic approach in considering art as a cognitive tool and as a way to resist to the codes of mass-media communication and traditional storytelling systems. The abstraction choice has been immediate for some and gradual for others. It represents a precise wish to cut any connection with the invasion of media language (and not its technology) to re-establish a primary and creative connection with reality.

Abstract comes from the latin expression ab trahere and means "to remove", "to separate". It refers to that kind of mental action that moves from the concrete and immediate side of contigency to the one filtered by reflection. Abstraction and theory are comparable terms. They both include detachment from reality, even if in the Millennials' abstraction is only temporary. It has the same value of an epochè, a suspension of judgment towards the alleged truth of phenomena, which never resolves in a complete detachment from reality.

Paolo Bini, for example, translates physical (and mental) landscapes in abstract chromatic units, based on pixels and scanner or plotter timings. The artist paints on paper strips, then mounted on boards, canvases or walls to create images characterized by a rhythmical and chromatic partition. With paintings, installations and paint-sculptures, Bini builds a lyrical and personal variation of pattern painting, where geometrical precision and gestural urgency of abstract expressionism coexist. This emotional geometry, produced by the fusion between mental structures and phenomenical entities, places his painting style on the the thin border between visible and invisible, on the precise point where the act of observing nature fights with the creative distorsions of awareness.

The pictorial signs by Isabella Nazzarri may be defined as phyto-morphic and anatomorphic. Using an organic and perpetually changing alphabet, she expresses feelings, memories and intuitions incomprehensible in any other way. The artist gets inspiration from the classification of anatomical and herbal tables to build a world of evocative and fluctuating pictograms, obtained through a free interpretation of natural morphologies. Nazzarri realized a big mural painting on the gallery ceiling, a crowded organic genesis echoing the codified forms of her Innatural systems, an imaginative theory of amoebas and parameciums, bacteria and protozoans coming out from the primordial broth of an alien planet. Even if her artistic world is not influenced by science fiction, it represents the inner observation of an overabundance of archetypical forms, similar to terrestrial microbiologies generate by a mobile and liquid imagination.

Matteo Negri's research focuses on plastic substances in an eclectic way, in combination with stone and ceramic, metal and resin, using industrial varnishes to create pop colors for an immediate expressive efficiency. His varied production centers on the division between form and meaning, a short circuit of aesthetic content and substance. This is the case of Kamigami Box, big irregular boxes showing internal surfaces covered with mirroring steel. The surfaces reflect the Lego constructions on the sculpture's base ad infinitum, giving the impression of a limitless urban settlement. Together with a new Kamigami, the artist shows a piece of furniture, an old chest of drawers transformed in a displayer containing many little works. The visitors are invited to explore it, so they can experience an unusual form of artistic interaction.

The mechanisms of creation and image fruition are at the core of Patrick Tabarelli work. His works drive the observer towards a kind of perceptive uncertainty, thanks to their formal ambiguity. His paintings are made of flat, almost digital surfaces, or are crossed by dynamic and minimal oscillations, in contrast with the gestural origins of his style. Recently, his works focused on the construction of drawing machines, digital hardware and software for the production of surfaces, which look like hand-painted, so the ambiguity between author and work emerges once again.

Through his project NORAA (NOn Representational Art Automata), Tabarelli suggests a redefinition of the traditional concepts of author and autenticity of the work, on crisis because of the recent development and the new interactive possibilities introduced by digital and information technologies.

Viviana Valla elaborates the language of geometrical abstraction through unconventional substances, like recovery papers, post-it, tape and fragments of printed images. She invents an intimate dimension with the realization of a mysterious and enigmatic visual diary. All we do not see, such as the pictorial adjustments and the collage erased by the artist during the stratification process, is the skeleton of her work. The settled formal subjects partially emerge from the work's surface, they are part of a gradual rearrangement of chaotic elements through continuous additions and exclusions, negations and affirmations. The artist translates in a clear and extensive language the gathering of elusive thoughts, immediate ideas and sudden inspirations accompanying the creative act. The final result is a slow perception of soft colors and delicate tones, almost

monochromatic painting style, reducing lyrical and emotional distractions in a minimal and analytical world.

Giulio Zanet's painting style is based on the impossibility of objectifying thoughts ad emotions in a clear and linear system. His artistic career testifies a gradual moving from destructured figuration to a hybrid and polysemous abstraction, his language reflects the vague imprecision of existential experiences. Using the main codes of abstract tradition - analytical, informal, abstract expressionism and neo geo - he defines a basically mobile and uncertain style, alternating the rigour of pattern with the pleasure of decoration, the freedom of gesture with the imperfect disposition of signs on an instable and fragile balance between rules and transgression. Many of his recent works overcome the classic structure of painting and become abstract shapes. They are fragments of an omnivorous language, similar to an expanded texture, invading the envirnommental space to change invariably its own perceptive boundaries.

 

Conversation between Matteo Negri and Lorenzo Bruni to introduce the exhibition "Piano Piano" in Genoa

Milan - Rome, October 2016

Lorenzo Bruni: Can you explain what is the conceptual core of your solo exhibition in Genoa "Piano Piano" from an external point of view?

Matteo Negri: The answers given from the exhibited works are basically related to the question of how images are "stuck" to artistic objects. How does the external context become part of the object itself? From this point of view, this is not an exhibition about sculpture or painting, but about the role of "public" works of art. For this reason, my process method moved the attention from the form of the object to its essence.

LB: Your peculiar approach to this project highlights a great change for you, especially in the process rather than the style of your last period. Considering your past creations, such as the 2004 engine sculptures made of pietra serena, the unexploded ceramic mines of 2006 or the wall sculptures reminding Lego bricks (introduced in 2009), you moved on the borderline between industrial and everyday object, popular imagination and artist's freedom. Your recent works are focused on showing, measuring and realizing the space and time, which divide and connect the observer and the object under observation. You might have been inspired by what happened in the history of art, where the attention moved from form to the perception of form itself, and in the social media and digital screen era, where the human subject is able to experience things in a real and virtual way.

MN: Everything is real and virtual at the same time. These standards must be reconsidered, they are not opposite categories anymore as it happened by the end of the Nineties. My last works - including the video, in which I throw the sculpture/spinning top into the sea, and the wall drawing, including two paintings, made of special resins, representing oblique surfaces - are this: devices to study the influence by digital images in our society, or the culture and perception of the past, going beyond the superficiality connected to our present times' haste. My "Piano piano" work, conceived for the main gallery's room, is the core of the exhibition and was realized following this necessity of mine.

LB: The sculpture you mentioned is made of two reflecting surfaces crossing each other. They do not show only themselves but, through their pictorial, lyrical and plastic effects, they also show the environment containing them, both in physical and conceptual ways.

MN: The two surfaces form a kind of disordered composition. Thanks to two special films applied on them, they produce unique color effects. These films are industrial products, they are mainly used in architecture to modify the impact of light on glass walls. In this way, I could create a concrete object and an optical effect in progress. The results are the endless points of view highlighted on the object himself. All these points of view are aware of themselves. I feel these two surfaces, one horizontal and one vertical, finding a balance in the space between them, are a kind of "image hoover".

LB: This sculpture turns on with the observer and his fruition. Did you mean this when you wanted to create not a sculpture or a painting, but a reflection on public works of art?

MN: That is exactly what I meant. Once the structure of the work is placed, it becomes a proper environmental installation. In this case, the artwork is not activated only by its perceptional relationship with the architecture, the observer or the concept of sculpture, but also by the "images", applied on the walls, representing monkeys I recently filmed at the zoo. This "presence observes us" and moves all our questions from objective to subjective dimensions and vice versa.

LB: That is?

MN: At the beginning, with this sculpture I wanted to reproduce two sheets easily fitting together. Considering then the laws of perspective, I wanted to make the orthogonal surface the center of the perspective vision. During this phase, I analyzed some considerations I had about monkeys since a while. In some ways, monkeys learn instinctively from what they see. So I studied the idea of connecting instinctiveness and planning on different levels. Perhaps this is the reason my way of working has been influenced by a rational and evaluating side. Later I tested the sculpture with a fully instinctive approach towards reality and works in progress, as evidenced by the images taken at the zoo. The connection lies in the dialogue with the animal in its own instinctive dimension (its instinct). Its freedom is limited by the space of the cage. This is the same condition we all live in, not in the real but in the virtual world today. We are always under observation. I believe that the originality of this work of mine underlines how the discussion between art and reality goes in both directions and is continuously in progress. 

LB: Do you mean that the monkeys - both as subject and as black and white photocopies of video frames - are effectively the privileged observers and not the objects under observation?

MN: Yes, guinea pigs in guinea pigs. They are attentive but not aware observers, to allow the human side to emerge when relating to the work. I think the monkey is not only a disturbing image, a kind of mistake, like a stone falling into the pond and rippling it. It is the representation of its own instinctive limits in recreating such a magical object like a sculpture. Basically, it is connected to it just because it observes it, as it happens with the prism in "Space odyssey", through which the monkey observes itself and the world around him at the same time.

LB: The "Piano piano" sculpture, through the estranging presence of the monkeys and especially the refractions of the surfaces in space, activates a kind of "performing" fruition, both in a physical and cognitive way. This activation destabilizes what could have been considered as a work studying the codes of Minimalism. It is like as if your work puts Frank Stella's motto "What you see is what you see" under question, not only on the interpretative but also on the communicative level. Can you explain this peculiar condition characterizing the artwork and us observers, please?

MN: First of all, I can say that this sculpture was jumping like a "monkey" in my mind since a long time, as we say in Milan. The object itself shows the contradictions of our social and personalizing society. In this way, the interpretation prefigures the communication of the facts. The technical result cannot be classified only as sculpture, image, illusion, architecture, idea, real or imaginary space. The truth lies into the interconnection of these elements. By a conceptual point of view, I conceived this result - the production of reflections between metal, chromium and glass sheets - to create several vanishing points destabilizing the Renaissance vision based on one unique point of view. As you mentioned before, today the observer is in continuous movement, on a physical level and also in the world of digital communication. This is why I chose to use a monkey as a kind of neutral observer. He cannot choose or understand what lies behind the different perspectives or surfaces. That image can only observe reality as it merely appears and highlights vanishing surfaces. The eyes of the observer, including its perceptional processes, feel them as perpetually on the edge of vanishing.

LB: So are these "virtual and perspectival" surfaces, which must be considered also as physical and concrete components, your answer to the de-materialization of space through the emerging of social networks, or is it related to a more ancient aspect, such as Escher's reflections on optical mistakes in the last century?

MN: Mmm… I try to squeeze the de-materialization you mentioned. Only in this way I am able to create not only a sculptural object, but also a device activating in the observer's mind a reflection on the perceptive mechanism of the observer itself. To observe and imagine these two surfaces means we must be aware of the point of view through which we imagine/observe them. So this work focuses more on materializing spatial references, rather than being a representation of space. As observers, we find ourselves observing a sculpture reflecting on itself. So we are not necessary. It exists even if we do not look at it, but if we stand in front of it… it "turns" on.

LB: Is this process method the same used for the wall drawing, including the PSA paintings?

MN: Yes. The PSA wall drawing is based on the concepts of fullness and emptiness. The serigraph pattern on aluminum and the glass varnishes increase the focal depth of the painted surfaces. Here the pattern is a leitmotif, it "draws" the surfaces and the wall on which all paintings are hanged. So, as soon as the installation was ready, it was possible to notice how the painted plates and the wall could dialogue on the continuous space created by the perspective surfaces in an irregular but poetical way. That is why I inserted an empty space at the start, I needed to represent also emptiness before moving into the narration. This pattern made of holes, basic part of the wall drawing and connecting my paintings with the architecture, is a kind of matrix (dot-space, dot-space) or language for me. It helps me to anchor myself somewhere inside the infinite visual possibilities. I am sure that these surfaces exist just because I see them, even when they are seen from a diagonal point of view or even when they add dynamic and irregular elements to the frontal vision of the wall. The most extraordinary thing is that I (and the observer) can imagine and plan them at the same time.

LB: This consideration of yours confirms that these works represent a turning point, by a formal point of view, in your artistic itinerary. I am talking about your first ceramic sculptures or your modernist Lego paintings shown at a former exhibition organized by the same gallery in Genoa.

MN: My past sculptures, made of deeply colored ceramic and connected to the concept of unexploded mines, represent a sort of simple architecture, a bit Gothic and a bit Romanesque. When I use the Lego imaginary, I do it to reconnect to my idea of constructing. This is the seed I want to develop. Lego was a simple and iconic method to face and resolve dynamics I was interested in relation to the concept of harmonious space. They also helped me to reconnect to the world of childhood and possibility, and also to the modernist theories by Mondrian. Everything was related to the idea of repetition and variation of primary forms.

LB: … and what about your last works?

MN: My last works put in connection the concept of public space and the reflection on the role of making art today. This is the question at the center of the first video I realized for this occasion: on the beach of Boccadasse, you see me throwing a sculpture / spinning top into the sea. Simultaneously, we produced three big photographs including, like a postcard dispenser, a series of smaller photos showing public locations in Genoa and Cinque Terre as in an "epiphany" dimension. This aspect is suggested by the presence of the sculpture / spinning top suspended from the ground, reflecting the urban and social surroundings. These photos do not only represent the documentation of public sculptures, but also a new kind of job. It is a new way of imagining the urban space, and therefore the concept of community.

LB: Does your choice of marking the territory and observing it as your first time, through the positioning of the sculpture and the related photographic "narration", underline your need, both as an artist and citizen, to take a responsibility and be aware of the physical place from which we observe and receive all the information of the world?

MN: My need of references is the thin red line connecting all works taking part to this solo exhibition. The choice of placing at the entrance of the gallery my photographic work, showing the series of actions made in Genoa with this sculpture, goes into the same direction.

LB: This photographic work of yours is a sort of conceptual matryoshka. One photo contains a series of other photos, which in turn contain several urban landscapes containing a sculpture. The image suggests a relational dimension with the observer, thanks to the exposition of places right outside the location of the exhibition and not far away like exotic places. It represents a complete image to you, in the same way as the stories on the Trajan's Column. Heroic actions are shared, but in time, not in the process. Today's heroic actions might come out when you become aware of the details of places you walk through. Indeed, any time you will represent this action for an exhibition, you will re-make the artwork and connect it to the city hosting the event. Also this aspect underlines your works of art do not share the same needs of some artists at the end of the Nineties (Fischli & Weiss, Giuseppe Gabellone, Patric Tuttofuoco, Annika Larson). They reflected on the role and the stratification between the different media. So they tried to create short-circuits using the sculpture technique, which was activated, at times, only to be documented by photographic reproductions. Your necessity rather comes from the need to go beyond the times of social networks and the creation of consensus and demonstrations. You want to show the re-activation of space as social aggregation: the square, not virtual and not even real, is not a project for the future, but is not even a memory.

MN: The core of my work is not only the idea of a nomad sculpture stealing images of the city to then survive only through a document: to place it, photograph it and take it away. My idea is to move the attention towards the time of perception felt by the observer, rather than merely contemplating the object. In my way, I assign more importance to the action of joining context, presence and memory.

LB: Although the idea of the video comes from this process, it does focus on your meeting with the sea and not with the city. How did you conceive the

Navigator work?

MN: To throw my sculpture into the sea has been a liberating action. It is something related to my roles as sculptor and image designer. That's why I appeared in my video, it could not have been anyone else. Mine gesture was intimate and ancient at the same time. It is measuring the infinite. When I sent you the video via WhatsApp, you wanted to exaggerate saying it reminded you of Lucio Fontana's slashes and Gino De Dominicis' stone into the water, when he wanted to make water squares instead of circles. With this video I want to represent the timing of the throw, the waiting, the suspension. This time becomes space and it strictly connects this work with the one entitled "Piano piano", composed by two orthogonal and reflecting surfaces. They are the two sides of the same coin. I think the need to throw my spinning-top-shaped sculpture into the sea comes from my desire to make it corresponding with the very similar and reflecting surface of the water. This video represents the zero grade of interaction between the spinning top and the landscape. I explored the same interaction in every aspect when I placed my sculpture in many urban locations in Genoa. I noticed the landscape of the sea - horizon was not absorbed and reflected by the sculpture's surface, but the two elements blended into each other. When the object touches the water's surface, the video looks like slowing down because nothing is happening. The two surfaces correspond and mirror each other, sculpture and water. So the representation of space expands and contracts, materializes and de-materializes.

LB: Going back to the different installations you realized for this exhibition at the ABC-ARTE gallery in Genoa, it is like as if you planned an itinerary through which, room by room, you explore a different level of relation between art and life. From the image chosen as poster of the exhibition, we move to sculpture and to the video screened along the stairs. We move from the big photograph at the gallery's entrance, showing the spinning top in various corners of the city, to the sculpture with reflecting surfaces and to the wall drawing. The final room appears pretty quiet and pure, with the three geometrical-shaped monochrome sculptures hanged on the wall.

MN: These sculptures are called "Kamigami". They are plates integrated into the square in an oblique way. This is the reason they can be frontally seen both as a flat pierced screen and, at the same time, they show their obliquity re-proposing surfaces for an infinite number of times. Although these paintings of mine are connected to my former Lego works - the circles correspond to the pierced spaces from which the buttons come out - they activate a completely different process. It deals with measurable and not measurable space at the same time. The frame does not divide the painting from the world, but instead it shuts it in itself and moves it towards a vortex made of its own borders' repetition.

LB: Like the other exposed works, all is part of a research focusing on "live perception". Which must or could be the role of the artist today, by your opinion?

MN: Simply a not neutral observer.

 

Space in action

Alberto Fiz

Prosumer. In our constantly connected society, the observer is producer and consumer of information at the same time.

Matteo Negri knows this very well. His last work of art, the most completed of his so far, catches images or behaviors. The observing action becomes an essential part of a consubstantial instability. Piano Piano is a 2016 sculpture made of different substances: zinc-plated iron, liquid chromium, tempered glass and film. This work is able to absorb the environment surrounding it. The inclined prism, on an orthogonal level, acquires new information, based on the lights and movements impressed on its surface. It is a kaleidoscope, reflecting itself and, at the same time, including all variables from the external world. There is no need to use any of the pre-established methods: the color range is almost infinite, thanks to the reaction of the film applied on the glass sheet. Through the identification of each shape and color, each observer becomes the center of a metamorphosis rather based on our emotional state than our eyes. The only objective element is the presence of two little monkeys painted on the wall. So this work might absorb information and content to bypass inertia and transform them in sensitive data. This mechanism goes trough traditional methods, avoiding the use of technology. In this way, the ambiguity of a temporary, never definitive vision is highlighted by its plastic component, coming through an uncertain area of perception and constantly interrupted by passages and interferences.

Piano Piano must be handled carefully. It reminds of the experiences by Light and Space, the Californian group of artists that included also Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Bruce Nauman and Larry Bell. Especially the latter used refractive and reflecting substances like mirrors and colored glasses for his environmental installations. However, Matteo Negri's attitude is anyway different. He makes various linguistic processes interacting through the manipulation of the visual pattern and the continuous regeneration of the color-form, following the itinerary of a simulated, slow and not-aggressive virtual world, where sculpture seems abandoning its physical concreteness. "The fragment of the world projected within the retinal space in question" (1), wrote Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology of perception. Matteo Negri's desire to release images from their natural itinerary characterizes another work, Navigator, a trap to catch ephemeral images from reality. The spinning top, made of two glued cones, is a kind of portable sculpture, a mirroring and mysterious object connecting only with the surrounding environment. It creates interferences between elements, overlapping and overturning images in a vortex, without leaving tangible traces. These are projections of real places, which might have been seen quickly. They dance, together with their own gazes, in a circular space where nothing is definitive, where everything is touched by an emotional flow, reminding of the punctum mentioned by Roland Barthes in Camera lucida, his essay on photography.

Unlike Piano Piano, for Navigator the artist avoids the direct observation and leaves only traces of his artwork's passage. Sailors are left without their navigator, they lose their bearings and face their journey mostly made of memories. Information is ordered randomly on a postcard stand full of empties to be never filled. Matteo Negri unloads all the objects hidden in his backpack, so he may walk more comfortably on the main way. What matters is not the thing itself, but the process born from a perpetual interaction with the observer.

Five years passed since 2011, when the artist's interest for industrial scrap led him towards the realization of ceramic sculptures, reminding engines or submarine mines deprived of their original meaning. It seems a different era, in comparison with those studies through which he became a mature and aware artist. He left his codified and even too recognizable system, allowing the iconic component not to prevail on the content. After all, his experiments on substances and his series of combinatorial mechanisms based on Lego do appear as unavoidable passages for his cathartic research. First he managed to absorb the object, later he modified its premises to eventually expel it in its own completeness.

In 2016, this desire became even clearer. On the occasion of his exhibition at Casa Testori, Splendid villa with garden, charming views, the artist imposed a single point of view to the observer, who was then obliged to peek from the outside into spaces created in the secret rooms. It was already clear those objects were supposed to live in isolation, so a physical and psychological separation with the observer could emerge. The presence of Between the most beautiful, the words, needless to say they think they exist, an installation made by a big silicone sphere releasing signs full of casual letters on the ground, should be considered as emblematic. The object creates a distance, leaving its own bright trail free to expand into the environment. There is no need to look for immediate recognition anymore.

The catalogue dedicated to that exhibition includes an interview by Giuseppe Frangi with Matteo Negri. The artist expresses his most authentic feelings: "I like making the objects I make. I love thinking of them, organizing them, but, at a certain point, all this work makes me feeling first indifferent and then hating them. I can't stand them anymore. I hate these objects until they find a new position. Only then I start accepting them." (2)

The new position is not physical anymore, but it becomes mental. It is a gradual semantic repositioning, through which the object goes beyond its limits and develops another nature, not only defined by its simple presence.

Matteo Negri expands perception through several experiments. Recalling the first computer models, he inserts Lego inside irregular prisms, colored with yellow, orange, light blue tones and surrounded by a cage of mirrors regenerating and multiplying its image until its disintegration. "These objects are completed as a subject, but endless as a vision. They create infinite spaces, while they surrender to the idea of their endless reflection. They grab you inside them, they attract you, their coldness cannot reject you" (3), explains the artist.

Lego loses its original function to become the source of further development, where signs acquire their autonomy. So we have the PSA series, simple acronym to distinguish the substance used (Painting On Aluminum), and the Kamigami series, Japanese onomatopoeic word coming from the repetition of two words to underline plurality and union of spirits.

By one side, a technical definition, by the other a more abstract and emotional formula help to identify two phases of the investigation focused on the same question: the research of a new perceptive space, regenerated by our eye, defining a variable passage of information and questioning any objective principle: "Perceptional experiences are connected, motivated and involve each other. The perception of the world is nothing else than an expansion of my field of presence" (4), writes Merleau-Ponty.  

In his PSA series, Matteo Negri applies a simulation process. He develops a perspectival geometry to destroy the traditional vision and move the attention from the object towards its projection into vacuum.

Facing a system full of indifference, the artist works on an improved awareness and drives the observer's eye towards the borders and corners, as reminded by the title of his 2016 exhibition Straight into the corner. Only from here we will be able to catch the transience, on which our certainties are based. The observed world gets confused with the space built on a research starting from Bridget Riley and arriving to Shirana Shahbazi.

The environmental component is highlighted by the line convergence of ellipses and black holes, they spill over the work of art following an endless progression. Those negative signs sail along the PSA sidereal space (they appear as a distant memory of the little buttons on the Lego bricks seen from an horizontal point of view). They are ready to occupy the colored Kamigami, where they appear on the surface and find their tactile sensitiveness.

This time they become devices of abstracts three-dimensional works, mostly circular and in polished stainless steel.

The discontinuous surface reveals multiform perspectives, opening very subtle areas, which directly reflect on the contained - container.

Matteo Negri's new-pointillism evokes with irony the avant-gardes and overturns the concept at the base of the overlapped canvases by Paolo Scheggi and, even more, the Volumi a moduli sfasati by Dadamaino. Their aim was to make tabula rasa of the past, as done by Lucio Fontana, to erase the residues of a consumed way of making art and finally be able to work on depth rather than surface. Now the situation is much different: the expansion of ubiquity in space stimulates the research towards a new perspective. Matteo Negri's dots (formers ones may be found in those made by Yayoi Kusama e Damien Hirst), fill the holes opened in the Sixties with ironic and irreverent actions. He reintroduces the triumph of surface, intended as the place of action and interaction where the observer may skate as long as he likes, well aware there is nothing in front of him.

 

(1)  M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of perception, Bompiani, Milan 2005, p. 404

(2)  M. Negri, Look but don't touch, interview with Giuseppe Frangi in Matteo Negri. Splendid villa with garden, charming views, curated by Daniele Capra, Casa Testori, Novate Milanese, 2016

(3)  M. Negri, Cues for a statement, interview with Ginevra Addis in Matteo Negri Dis-Moi une chose, curated by Alberto Mattia Martini, Melzi Fine Art, Milan, 2015

(4)  M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of perception, Bompiani, Milan 2005, p.400

 

 _________________

 

Space in action

Alberto Fiz

 

Prosumer. In our constantly connected society, the observer is producer and consumer of information at the same time.

Matteo Negri knows this very well. His last work of art, the most completed of his so far, catches images or behaviors. The observing action becomes an essential part of a consubstantial instability. Piano Piano is a 2016 sculpture made of different substances: zinc-plated iron, liquid chromium, tempered glass and film. This work is able to absorb the environment surrounding it. The inclined prism, on an orthogonal level, acquires new information, based on the lights and movements impressed on its surface. It is a kaleidoscope, reflecting itself and, at the same time, including all variables from the external world. There is no need to use any of the pre-established methods: the color range is almost infinite, thanks to the reaction of the film applied on the glass sheet. Through the identification of each shape and color, each observer becomes the center of a metamorphosis rather based on our emotional state than our eyes. The only objective element is the presence of two little monkeys painted on the wall. So this work might absorb information and content to bypass inertia and transform them in sensitive data. This mechanism goes trough traditional methods, avoiding the use of technology. In this way, the ambiguity of a temporary, never definitive vision is highlighted by its plastic component, coming through an uncertain area of perception and constantly interrupted by passages and interferences.

Piano Piano must be handled carefully. It reminds of the experiences by Light and Space, the Californian group of artists that included also Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Bruce Nauman and Larry Bell. Especially the latter used refractive and reflecting substances like mirrors and colored glasses for his environmental installations. However, Matteo Negri’s attitude is anyway different. He makes various linguistic processes interacting through the manipulation of the visual pattern and the continuous regeneration of the color-form, following the itinerary of a simulated, slow and not-aggressive virtual world, where sculpture seems abandoning its physical concreteness. “The fragment of the world projected within the retinal space in question” (1), wrote Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology of perception. Matteo Negri’s desire to release images from their natural itinerary characterizes another work, Navigator, a trap to catch ephemeral images from reality. The spinning top, made of two glued cones, is a kind of portable sculpture, a mirroring and mysterious object connecting only with the surrounding environment. It creates interferences between elements, overlapping and overturning images in a vortex, without leaving tangible traces. These are projections of real places, which might have been seen quickly. They dance, together with their own gazes, in a circular space where nothing is definitive, where everything is touched by an emotional flow, reminding of the punctum mentioned by Roland Barthes in Camera lucida, his essay on photography.

Unlike Piano Piano, for Navigator the artist avoids the direct observation and leaves only traces of his artwork’s passage. Sailors are left without their navigator, they lose their bearings and face their journey mostly made of memories. Information is ordered randomly on a postcard stand full of empties to be never filled. Matteo Negri unloads all the objects hidden in his backpack, so he may walk more comfortably on the main way. What matters is not the thing itself, but the process born from a perpetual interaction with the observer.

Five years passed since 2011, when the artist’s interest for industrial scrap led him towards the realization of ceramic sculptures, reminding engines or submarine mines deprived of their original meaning. It seems a different era, in comparison with those studies through which he became a mature and aware artist. He left his codified and even too recognizable system, allowing the iconic component not to prevail on the content. After all, his experiments on substances and his series of combinatorial mechanisms based on Lego do appear as unavoidable passages for his cathartic research. First he managed to absorb the object, later he modified its premises to eventually expel it in its own completeness.

In 2016, this desire became even clearer. On the occasion of his exhibition at Casa Testori, Splendid villa with garden, charming views, the artist imposed a single point of view to the observer, who was then obliged to peek from the outside into spaces created in the secret rooms. It was already clear those objects were supposed to live in isolation, so a physical and psychological separation with the observer could emerge. The presence of Between the most beautiful, the words, needless to say they think they exist, an installation made by a big silicone sphere releasing signs full of casual letters on the ground, should be considered as emblematic. The object creates a distance, leaving its own bright trail free to expand into the environment. There is no need to look for immediate recognition anymore.

The catalogue dedicated to that exhibition includes an interview by Giuseppe Frangi with Matteo Negri. The artist expresses his most authentic feelings: “I like making the objects I make. I love thinking of them, organizing them, but, at a certain point, all this work makes me feeling first indifferent and then hating them. I can’t stand them anymore. I hate these objects until they find a new position. Only then I start accepting them.” (2)

The new position is not physical anymore, but it becomes mental. It is a gradual semantic repositioning, through which the object goes beyond its limits and develops another nature, not only defined by its simple presence.

Matteo Negri expands perception through several experiments. Recalling the first computer models, he inserts Lego inside irregular prisms, colored with yellow, orange, light blue tones and surrounded by a cage of mirrors regenerating and multiplying its image until its disintegration. “These objects are completed as a subject, but endless as a vision. They create infinite spaces, while they surrender to the idea of their endless reflection. They grab you inside them, they attract you, their coldness cannot reject you” (3), explains the artist.

Lego loses its original function to become the source of further development, where signs acquire their autonomy. So we have the PSA series, simple acronym to distinguish the substance used (Painting On Aluminum), and the Kamigami series, Japanese onomatopoeic word coming from the repetition of two words to underline plurality and union of spirits.

By one side, a technical definition, by the other a more abstract and emotional formula help to identify two phases of the investigation focused on the same question: the research of a new perceptive space, regenerated by our eye, defining a variable passage of information and questioning any objective principle: “Perceptional experiences are connected, motivated and involve each other. The perception of the world is nothing else than an expansion of my field of presence” (4), writes Merleau-Ponty.

In his PSA series, Matteo Negri applies a simulation process. He develops a perspectival geometry to destroy the traditional vision and move the attention from the object towards its projection into vacuum.

Facing a system full of indifference, the artist works on an improved awareness and drives the observer’s eye towards the borders and corners, as reminded by the title of his 2016 exhibition Straight into the corner. Only from here we will be able to catch the transience, on which our certainties are based. The observed world gets confused with the space built on a research starting from Bridget Riley and arriving to Shirana Shahbazi.

The environmental component is highlighted by the line convergence of ellipses and black holes, they spill over the work of art following an endless progression. Those negative signs sail along the PSA sidereal space (they appear as a distant memory of the little buttons on the Lego bricks seen from an horizontal point of view). They are ready to occupy the colored Kamigami, where they appear on the surface and find their tactile sensitiveness.

This time they become devices of abstracts three-dimensional works, mostly circular and in polished stainless steel.

The discontinuous surface reveals multiform perspectives, opening very subtle areas, which directly reflect on the contained – container.

Matteo Negri’s new-pointillism evokes with irony the avant-gardes and overturns the concept at the base of the overlapped canvases by Paolo Scheggi and, even more, the Volumi a moduli sfasati by Dadamaino. Their aim was to make tabula rasa of the past, as done by Lucio Fontana, to erase the residues of a consumed way of making art and finally be able to work on depth rather than surface. Now the situation is much different: the expansion of ubiquity in space stimulates the research towards a new perspective. Matteo Negri’s dots (formers ones may be found in those made by Yayoi Kusama e Damien Hirst), fill the holes opened in the Sixties with ironic and irreverent actions. He reintroduces the triumph of surface, intended as the place of action and interaction where the observer may skate as long as he likes, well aware there is nothing in front of him.

 

1. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of perception, Bompiani, Milan 2005, p. 404

2. M. Negri, Look but don’t touch, interview with Giuseppe Frangi in Matteo Negri. Splendid villa with garden, charming views, curated by Daniele Capra, Casa Testori, Novate Milanese, 2016

3. M. Negri, Cues for a statement, interview with Ginevra Addis in Matteo Negri Dis-Moi une chose, curated by Alberto Mattia Martini, Melzi Fine Art, Milan, 2015

4. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of perception, Bompiani, Milan 2005, p.400

 

____________

 

Conversation between Matteo Negri and Lorenzo Bruni to introduce the exhibition “Piano Piano” in Genoa

Milan – Rome, October 2016

 

Lorenzo Bruni: Can you explain what is the conceptual core of your solo exhibition in Genoa “Piano Piano” from an external point of view?

 

Matteo Negri: The answers given from the exhibited works are basically related to the question of how images are “stuck” to artistic objects. How does the external context become part of the object itself? From this point of view, this is not an exhibition about sculpture or painting, but about the role of “public” works of art. For this reason, my process method moved the attention from the form of the object to its essence.

 

LB: Your peculiar approach to this project highlights a great change for you, especially in the process rather than the style of your last period. Considering your past creations, such as the 2004 engine sculptures made of pietra serena, the unexploded ceramic mines of 2006 or the wall sculptures reminding Lego bricks (introduced in 2009), you moved on the borderline between industrial and everyday object, popular imagination and artist’s freedom. Your recent works are focused on showing, measuring and realizing the space and time, which divide and connect the observer and the object under observation. You might have been inspired by what happened in the history of art, where the attention moved from form to the perception of form itself, and in the social media and digital screen era, where the human subject is able to experience things in a real and virtual way.

 

MN: Everything is real and virtual at the same time. These standards must be reconsidered, they are not opposite categories anymore as it happened by the end of the Nineties. My last works – including the video, in which I throw the sculpture/spinning top into the sea, and the wall drawing, including two paintings, made of special resins, representing oblique surfaces – are this: devices to study the influence by digital images in our society, or the culture and perception of the past, going beyond the superficiality connected to our present times’ haste. My “Piano piano” work, conceived for the main gallery’s room, is the core of the exhibition and was realized following this necessity of mine.

 

LB: The sculpture you mentioned is made of two reflecting surfaces crossing each other. They do not show only themselves but, through their pictorial, lyrical and plastic effects, they also show the environment containing them, both in physical and conceptual ways.

 

MN: The two surfaces form a kind of disordered composition. Thanks to two special films applied on them, they produce unique color effects. These films are industrial products, they are mainly used in architecture to modify the impact of light on glass walls. In this way, I could create a concrete object and an optical effect in progress. The results are the endless points of view highlighted on the object himself. All these points of view are aware of themselves. I feel these two surfaces, one horizontal and one vertical, finding a balance in the space between them, are a kind of “image hoover”.

 

LB: This sculpture turns on with the observer and his fruition. Did you mean this when you wanted to create not a sculpture or a painting, but a reflection on public works of art?

 

MN: That is exactly what I meant. Once the structure of the work is placed, it becomes a proper environmental installation. In this case, the artwork is not activated only by its perceptional relationship with the architecture, the observer or the concept of sculpture, but also by the “images”, applied on the walls, representing monkeys I recently filmed at the zoo. This “presence observes us” and moves all our questions from objective to subjective dimensions and vice versa.

 

LB: That is?

 

MN: At the beginning, with this sculpture I wanted to reproduce two sheets easily fitting together. Considering then the laws of perspective, I wanted to make the orthogonal surface the center of the perspective vision. During this phase, I analyzed some considerations I had about monkeys since a while. In some ways, monkeys learn instinctively from what they see. So I studied the idea of connecting instinctiveness and planning on different levels. Perhaps this is the reason my way of working has been influenced by a rational and evaluating side. Later I tested the sculpture with a fully instinctive approach towards reality and works in progress, as evidenced by the images taken at the zoo. The connection lies in the dialogue with the animal in its own instinctive dimension (its instinct). Its freedom is limited by the space of the cage. This is the same condition we all live in, not in the real but in the virtual world today. We are always under observation. I believe that the originality of this work of mine underlines how the discussion between art and reality goes in both directions and is continuously in progress.

 

LB: Do you mean that the monkeys – both as subject and as black and white photocopies of video frames – are effectively the privileged observers and not the objects under observation?

 

MN: Yes, guinea pigs in guinea pigs. They are attentive but not aware observers, to allow the human side to emerge when relating to the work. I think the monkey is not only a disturbing image, a kind of mistake, like a stone falling into the pond and rippling it. It is the representation of its own instinctive limits in recreating such a magical object like a sculpture. Basically, it is connected to it just because it observes it, as it happens with the prism in “Space odyssey”, through which the monkey observes itself and the world around him at the same time.

 

LB: The “Piano piano” sculpture, through the estranging presence of the monkeys and especially the refractions of the surfaces in space, activates a kind of “performing” fruition, both in a physical and cognitive way. This activation destabilizes what could have been considered as a work studying the codes of Minimalism. It is like as if your work puts Frank Stella’s motto “What you see is what you see” under question, not only on the interpretative but also on the communicative level. Can you explain this peculiar condition characterizing the artwork and us observers, please?

 

MN: First of all, I can say that this sculpture was jumping like a “monkey” in my mind since a long time, as we say in Milan. The object itself shows the contradictions of our social and personalizing society. In this way, the interpretation prefigures the communication of the facts. The technical result cannot be classified only as sculpture, image, illusion, architecture, idea, real or imaginary space. The truth lies into the interconnection of these elements. By a conceptual point of view, I conceived this result – the production of reflections between metal, chromium and glass sheets – to create several vanishing points destabilizing the Renaissance vision based on one unique point of view. As you mentioned before, today the observer is in continuous movement, on a physical level and also in the world of digital communication. This is why I chose to use a monkey as a kind of neutral observer. He cannot choose or understand what lies behind the different perspectives or surfaces. That image can only observe reality as it merely appears and highlights vanishing surfaces. The eyes of the observer, including its perceptional processes, feel them as perpetually on the edge of vanishing.

 

LB: So are these “virtual and perspectival” surfaces, which must be considered also as physical and concrete components, your answer to the de-materialization of space through the emerging of social networks, or is it related to a more ancient aspect, such as Escher’s reflections on optical mistakes in the last century?

 

MN: Mmm… I try to squeeze the de-materialization you mentioned. Only in this way I am able to create not only a sculptural object, but also a device activating in the observer’s mind a reflection on the perceptive mechanism of the observer itself. To observe and imagine these two surfaces means we must be aware of the point of view through which we imagine/observe them. So this work focuses more on materializing spatial references, rather than being a representation of space. As observers, we find ourselves observing a sculpture reflecting on itself. So we are not necessary. It exists even if we do not look at it, but if we stand in front of it… it “turns” on.

 

LB: Is this process method the same used for the wall drawing, including the PSA paintings?

 

MN: Yes. The PSA wall drawing is based on the concepts of fullness and emptiness. The serigraph pattern on aluminum and the glass varnishes increase the focal depth of the painted surfaces. Here the pattern is a leitmotif, it “draws” the surfaces and the wall on which all paintings are hanged. So, as soon as the installation was ready, it was possible to notice how the painted plates and the wall could dialogue on the continuous space created by the perspective surfaces in an irregular but poetical way. That is why I inserted an empty space at the start, I needed to represent also emptiness before moving into the narration. This pattern made of holes, basic part of the wall drawing and connecting my paintings with the architecture, is a kind of matrix (dot-space, dot-space) or language for me. It helps me to anchor myself somewhere inside the infinite visual possibilities. I am sure that these surfaces exist just because I see them, even when they are seen from a diagonal point of view or even when they add dynamic and irregular elements to the frontal vision of the wall. The most extraordinary thing is that I (and the observer) can imagine and plan them at the same time.

 

LB: This consideration of yours confirms that these works represent a turning point, by a formal point of view, in your artistic itinerary. I am talking about your first ceramic sculptures or your modernist Lego paintings shown at a former exhibition organized by the same gallery in Genoa.

 

MN: My past sculptures, made of deeply colored ceramic and connected to the concept of unexploded mines, represent a sort of simple architecture, a bit Gothic and a bit Romanesque. When I use the Lego imaginary, I do it to reconnect to my idea of constructing. This is the seed I want to develop. Lego was a simple and iconic method to face and resolve dynamics I was interested in relation to the concept of harmonious space. They also helped me to reconnect to the world of childhood and possibility, and also to the modernist theories by Mondrian. Everything was related to the idea of repetition and variation of primary forms.

 

LB: … and what about your last works?

 

MN: My last works put in connection the concept of public space and the reflection on the role of making art today. This is the question at the center of the first video I realized for this occasion: on the beach of Boccadasse, you see me throwing a sculpture / spinning top into the sea. Simultaneously, we produced three big photographs including, like a postcard dispenser, a series of smaller photos showing public locations in Genoa and Cinque Terre as in an “epiphany” dimension. This aspect is suggested by the presence of the sculpture / spinning top suspended from the ground, reflecting the urban and social surroundings. These photos do not only represent the documentation of public sculptures, but also a new kind of job. It is a new way of imagining the urban space, and therefore the concept of community.

 

LB: Does your choice of marking the territory and observing it as your first time, through the positioning of the sculpture and the related photographic “narration”, underline your need, both as an artist and citizen, to take a responsibility and be aware of the physical place from which we observe and receive all the information of the world?

 

MN: My need of references is the thin red line connecting all works taking part to this solo exhibition. The choice of placing at the entrance of the gallery my photographic work, showing the series of actions made in Genoa with this sculpture, goes into the same direction.

 

LB: This photographic work of yours is a sort of conceptual matryoshka. One photo contains a series of other photos, which in turn contain several urban landscapes containing a sculpture. The image suggests a relational dimension with the observer, thanks to the exposition of places right outside the location of the exhibition and not far away like exotic places. It represents a complete image to you, in the same way as the stories on the Trajan’s Column. Heroic actions are shared, but in time, not in the process. Today’s heroic actions might come out when you become aware of the details of places you walk through. Indeed, any time you will represent this action for an exhibition, you will re-make the artwork and connect it to the city hosting the event. Also this aspect underlines your works of art do not share the same needs of some artists at the end of the Nineties (Fischli & Weiss, Giuseppe Gabellone, Patric Tuttofuoco, Annika Larson). They reflected on the role and the stratification between the different media. So they tried to create short-circuits using the sculpture technique, which was activated, at times, only to be documented by photographic reproductions. Your necessity rather comes from the need to go beyond the times of social networks and the creation of consensus and demonstrations. You want to show the re-activation of space as social aggregation: the square, not virtual and not even real, is not a project for the future, but is not even a memory.

 

MN: The core of my work is not only the idea of a nomad sculpture stealing images of the city to then survive only through a document: to place it, photograph it and take it away. My idea is to move the attention towards the time of perception felt by the observer, rather than merely contemplating the object. In my way, I assign more importance to the action of joining context, presence and memory.

 

LB: Although the idea of the video comes from this process, it does focus on your meeting with the sea and not with the city. How did you conceive the Navigator work?

 

MN: To throw my sculpture into the sea has been a liberating action. It is something related to my roles as sculptor and image designer. That’s why I appeared in my video, it could not have been anyone else. Mine gesture was intimate and ancient at the same time. It is measuring the infinite. When I sent you the video via WhatsApp, you wanted to exaggerate saying it reminded you of Lucio Fontana’s slashes and Gino De Dominicis’ stone into the water, when he wanted to make water squares instead of circles. With this video I want to represent the timing of the throw, the waiting, the suspension. This time becomes space and it strictly connects this work with the one entitled “Piano piano”, composed by two orthogonal and reflecting surfaces. They are the two sides of the same coin. I think the need to throw my spinning-top-shaped sculpture into the sea comes from my desire to make it corresponding with the very similar and reflecting surface of the water. This video represents the zero grade of interaction between the spinning top and the landscape. I explored the same interaction in every aspect when I placed my sculpture in many urban locations in Genoa. I noticed the landscape of the sea – horizon was not absorbed and reflected by the sculpture’s surface, but the two elements blended into each other. When the object touches the water’s surface, the video looks like slowing down because nothing is happening. The two surfaces correspond and mirror each other, sculpture and water. So the representation of space expands and contracts, materializes and de-materializes.

 

LB: Going back to the different installations you realized for this exhibition at the ABC-ARTE gallery in Genoa, it is like as if you planned an itinerary through which, room by room, you explore a different level of relation between art and life. From the image chosen as poster of the exhibition, we move to sculpture and to the video screened along the stairs. We move from the big photograph at the gallery’s entrance, showing the spinning top in various corners of the city, to the sculpture with reflecting surfaces and to the wall drawing. The final room appears pretty quiet and pure, with the three geometrical-shaped monochrome sculptures hanged on the wall.

 

MN: These sculptures are called “Kamigami”. They are plates integrated into the square in an oblique way. This is the reason they can be frontally seen both as a flat pierced screen and, at the same time, they show their obliquity re-proposing surfaces for an infinite number of times. Although these paintings of mine are connected to my former Lego works – the circles correspond to the pierced spaces from which the buttons come out – they activate a completely different process. It deals with measurable and not measurable space at the same time. The frame does not divide the painting from the world, but instead it shuts it in itself and moves it towards a vortex made of its own borders’ repetition.

 

LB: Like the other exposed works, all is part of a research focusing on “live perception”. Which must or could be the role of the artist today, by your opinion?

 

MN: Simply a not neutral observer.