Plan of a symposium at the Italian Cultural Institute in Berlin,
starting from the work of Roberto Ciaccio
Introduction
Although it focuses on the work of Roberto Ciaccio, the symposium also deals with more general themes, such as:
a) reflections on the nature of the work of art in twentieth-century philosophy (Benedetto Croce, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Jeanne Hersch);
b) the nature of the artistic object, and of its originality and reproducibility or différance, also from the point of view of the new media;
c) temporality and memory as traces in the work;
d) the link between the sacred and the image;
e) the relationship between artistic practice, craftsmanship and materials (with reference to the collaboration between Roberto Ciaccio and the printer and publisher Giorgio Upiglio).
Outline
Leçons de ténèbres: this is the title of a composition by François Couperin (performed on the night of Holy Wednesday) and a book by the philosopher and sociologist Roger Caillois. When spoken, the title can be interpreted as either Leçons de Ténèbres (Lessons of Darkness) or Le sons de Ténèbres (Sounds of Darkness). In both cases, something is being taught to us, or else resounds starting from darkness.
On a visual level, Roberto Ciaccio’s works express both meanings: light often emerges from the dark, from the dark tones, and appears as a sort of flickering hesitation, poised in the balance with regard to its possible swallowing up by darkness.
Time settles in the space of the plates or pictures. Ciaccio’s technique and poetic purpose consists in allowing the traces to emerge that events, including fortuitous ones (‘scars of time’ such as ink, scratches and rust on the metal) and human intervention (prints of hands and gauze, superimposition of leaves) have left on the copper, zinc, iron and chrome iron matrices from which the prints are then made. In this way, it is the plate itself that tells its own story. Paradoxically, by incorporating the sheet, the plate becomes a mirror, a doppelgänger of the sheet, once again bringing the past into play and allowing it to resurface as a revenant or a place of nostalgia.
It is the mirror, with its simultaneous recording of a presence and an absence, and a recto and a verso that refers to the problem of the origin and to what generates the image and its virtual, duplicate or multiplied return. This, however, takes place in Ciaccio’s work through a Derridian différance — in other words, through a pictorial device that avoids the alternative, on the one hand, between art as seen by Benedetto Croce as the ‘knowledge of things in their individuality’ (‘this river, this lake, this brook, this rain, this glass of water’ and not water in general, insofar as it is a concept) or the work of art as an original (described by Walter Benjamin as the ‘aura’ of uniqueness) and, on the other, its technical reproducibility, as required by the contemporary world. On each occasion, the same matrix, in fact, produces multiples each of which is slightly different from the others, thereby combining producibility with irreproducibilty, uniqueness with seriality, and continuity with dispersion. In comparison with the previous one, each work in the series appears to be a sort of metalanguage.
Thus the plates, sheets and canvases are, in their own way, provided with a memory — that is, the persistence of the past in the present — but also with oblivion, since every new overprint partially obscures the previous one. This is why the events of the past (presses, gauzes, powders, alterations and the images of other impressions) are superimposed on the plate through the paradoxical concurrence of a concurrence and a sequence, marked by thresholds where the break of the gradations is clearest, almost forming a rift (a Heideggerian Riss) between the various presences. So it is that in Infinitononfinito (Non-finite Infinity) we find, for example, a plate used to print fifteen large-format portfolios that ‘interrogate’ it, almost as if they were seeking to make it confess its memories and reveal its history.
In the plates serving as matrices, monoprints (frequent from 1999 onwards), Trittico per la croce (Triptych for the Cross) and the small aquatints of Leçons de Ténèbres — where the image of the revenant reveals itself by passing through the support, Japan paper, from the recto to the verso — the artist’s passion for the sacred becomes dominant. This is stressed by the distance or proximity and the sense of alterity conveyed by the gradual appearance of iridescent colour seen from various angles.
In this field, Ciaccio’s work results from the symbiosis between art and craftsmanship that he himself desired and practised, but that would not have been possible without the invaluable collaboration of Giorgio Upiglio, in whose workshop the plates and prints have been produced. One could even say that, in a modern manner, the artist is continuing here the tradition of the artist’s studios of the past, with the difference that there are no apprentices and the masters are two.
Ciaccio not only works with plates, however, but he also paints on canvas and plywood, uses collages of sheets of paper to which paint and asphalt powders have been applied, or else composes diptychs. In the oil paintings — which are characterized by division through contrasts — he often uses absolute matt black, giving a giddy sense of loss, and the cold whites of titanium or the softer ones of zinc, together with earth colours and veins of cadmium red or shades of green.
Ciaccio is one of the few artists who has drawn inspiration from philosophy, combining — in Merleau-Ponty’s sense — the eye and the spirit. In his works we see the process of cross-pollination between thoughts and images, and between reason and imagination.
Ciaccio’s poetic purpose is declaredly inspired by Heidegger, in particular by the latter’s essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ of 1935, which contains some of the keywords that have guided his work, such as ‘light’ (Licht) and ‘clearing’ (Lichtung). Ciaccio subscribes to Heidegger’s fundamental idea that the truth or things of the world do not appear to us clearly, in the light of day, but in the contrast between light and shade, like that of a clearing in a wood, where the dim light penetrates more abundantly through the branches and leaves of the trees and dances lightly (leicht), and where it does not appear in its radiant triumph, but shares its presence with the shadows. For Heidegger, the work of art preserves this revealing and concealing of things.
Even if I do not believe she was familiar with it, Ciaccio’s output makes me think of the position of a pupil of the German existentialist Karl Jaspers, the Swiss philosopher Jeanne Hersch. According to her, the work of art opens up a ‘passage in time’, so that it comes close to the tangential point between becoming and eternity, forming a link between transcendence and immanence, and showing how much remains in what comes to an end. In this way it offers the greatest mystery in the greatest transparency, presenting a representation of eternity in miniature.
Letter from Jacques Derrida to Roberto Ciaccio