ArtModern

from IM Italian magazine 14 - the human rights issue

Blogging

This is how Luca Grossi, born in 1980, tells his story when we ask him to explain to us how his paintings, sculptures, engravings and sketches take shape with such a strong identity. The voice is calm, the gaze far away, as if looking elsewhere for the original flash from which Creation came. In the studio-laboratory of his home in Arce (FR), where he lives and works, one breathes a sacred, austere atmosphere, with ancestral shades that blend with the colors of winter. He opened to us the doors of his kingdom made of straw, paper, wood, stone, color palettes, chisels and old photos. Raw material waiting for the philosopher’s stone in an alchemist’s workshop, sacred elements placed on the altar of a temple, in which Promethean hands try to give men the fire of the god, snatching it with the favor of the night to give shape to the ineffable. In this shrine out of time, light and shadow mingle, together with life and death, which invade the artist. Between the erotic tension of lack and the heroism of research already doomed to failure, Grossi returns presences and presence, as in the time of Orpheus, at the cost of desperate mediations with an oblivion that does not give discounts. The divine spark is then granted as a fragment, as a creative lamp which realizes the demiurgic promise inherent in the term “artist”, even with the fatigue of work inflicted on Adam after his disobedience. We look around and we feel observed... From canvases, sheets of paper, carved wooden frames and even tiny honeycomb cells, rows of figures that almost make you uncomfortable emerge with their almost material consistency, despite the faint features of the contours. Mute witnesses, recalled through the charcoals that now lie exhausted on the work surface, next to the brushes still standing like guards at attention. More and more intrigued, we can’t help but turn to the landlord again:

“When did you realize that when you grew up you wanted to make art your life?”

“I don’t think I ever understood it, because deep down I never asked myself what I really wanted to be. As a child I was strongly attracted to drawing. I loved drawing family scenes, the peasant world, the tiredness on the faces of my loved ones, the passage of time of a humble, slow and tiring life, but full of traditions, sacred values that are almost extinct today. I never left those pieces of coal, with which I was trying to draw story lines. Even today I always carry a few pieces in my pocket.”

“What has changed since then?”

“Very little. My childhood games continue with the same urgency but, with an adult awareness, they must now witness a passage, a movement which is that of existence, where life, death, identity, history… For me, creation is a physiological need, almost cutaneous, rather than a desire wanted. It is born and takes place in total, daily naturalness, through the gesture of reconstruction. I am often asked the most common question: “Do you do your job for fun or for a profession?”. I answer with an embarrassed smile. Ironically, I’ve always thought that in art you need to be able to die of hunger and fame, regardless of what happens around you”.

“Has there been among your teachers, someone that you believe influenced you artistically in a particular way?”

“After school I began my studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Frosinone, but it was above all the meeting with Dennis Compagnone, a landscape architect, that refined my technique, with the classic “workshop” training which has always been in all craft trades. Then the guidance of Marco D’Emilia, an artist of whom I have great respect, was very important for me. He paved the way for me to new conceptualizations.”

“Are your subjects real people?”

“They are past lives, first of all. Sometimes I am inspired by anonymous people, other times by family, friends or simple stories reconstructed around different eras. The most fascinating part of my job is that I never live in the present. This keeps me strongly tied to my origins and makes me a witness of something lost or about to be lost. We risk being like autumn leaves, while I would like to be like roots.

“To which stories or personal memories do these roots bind you most?

“Once, while walking around my village, I was struck by the photograph of a young woman on a mortuary poster. Even if it was very damaged by time and by rust, which had also corroded the metal of the showcase, it seemed that in the girl’s gaze a multitude of anonymous identities were confused, yet all strangely familiar to me. A few shreds of waste paper were left on the bulletin board and those eyes continued to look outwards, crossing the lives of indifferent passers-by. A life that goes on and forgets...”

“What happened after that?”

“I took a picture and took it to my studio-laboratory. I wanted to rebuild as much of that person as possible and give her a new life. I painted this oil on canvas --he points to the portrait on an easel on his left-- and it’s as if I’ve seen it reborn. After that moment of euphoria, however, I resigned myself to the fact that most likely the result of all that work was for nothing.

“Why?”

“Because I had painted something that no longer had anything to do with the person the girl had been in life. Mine was just one of man’s many painful attempts to overcome death. The more ambitious and extensive the reconstruction project, bigger is the failure, sometimes.”

“Isn’t it senseless to refuse to accept a natural fact like death or in general the end”

“As a child I always felt reassured by the warmth of the loved ones. Then, gradually, you start to lose them and you feel the strong need to recover them. Death is always present, strongly, in everyone’s life. Sometimes we would like to go through it lightly, just not thinking about it too much.”

“When you work with colours, drawings or wood, do you feel like rediscovering the light-heartedness of when you were little?”

“Yes, it is as if the child of that time returns to play, lost forever despite the long research dedicated to childhood. Only a tomb is obtained from it, but a presence is still felt. The choice of materials, on the other hand, initially took place out of necessity. As a child, I could not afford expensive toys. I had to arrange my happiness with what I found. Then, my hands did the rest. A dry branch, a stone, a piece of paper… Everything was useful to build toys that my creativity and imagination turned into toy cars, airplanes and other amusements. Today I continue to use the same elements because they put me at ease, I have technical confidence in their use and I feel the clean, primordial energy that leads me back to the essence of simple things and to evocation.”

“What do you think of today’s children and the fact that they often easily have everything right away?”

“I’m especially worried about speed, the fact that you don’t have time to be fully present to yourself and what you’re doing. For everything else, today is an age like any other. The way of dressing, technology and the ability to self-destruct oneself change, but I believe that man tends to remain always the same. In all of this, probably, the only true spiritual evolution has been given to us by art, which can never really suffer precariousness because, if authentic, it naturally separates itself from the latter.”

“What relationship do photographic images and their figurative representation have for you?”

“When I paint I tend towards the realism of things. Then begins a second phase, of synthesis, which removes the most, except what is left in me of the real object. Finally the third phase sometimes corresponds to the total destruction of the original image. However, everything begins with the work of research. This is why photography is essential. We always start from the concrete, in order to be able to de-construct and de-write, restoring distance to memory. This theme was also the basis of some pieces, chosen from a series of about 90, which I exhibited in September 2022 at the collective exhibition Sottotraccia, which was held at the Civic Museum of Boville Ernica. There was a moment, however, in which I also had to distance myself from photography.”

“How come?”

“I returned to painting because it creates different conditions in me. The photo stops the moment, it tells me that this is the instant to which the image of that particular person or situation belongs, but it does not restore the life of that moment. It is as if the past died a second time. The pictorial exhumation works in the introspection of a memory, of a presence, which is what remains within you over time. When you lose a loved one, the first thing that tends to disappear is the voice. It’s one of the first things you lose track of. Then the image begins to be less clear and the presence also recedes. This is why my identity research work is based on sensation, on the pursuit of something that is confused between memory and feeling. I am not speaking of pure abstraction, but something we experience in everyday life.”