Alfredo Pirri

Artist (Rome, Italy)

Making a work of art is not a narcissistic act, nor pure self-therapy, that tells of one’s own private story even though such works always speak from the very inside. The civilization of the work tells about feelings in contrast to the personal and collective mythologies of self-reference and egotism post-modern rituals. The post-modern nostalgia concerns only unreal places and emptied images. My own attention is to real places of identification that are those of civilization: the choral action of the crowd that is the warm-heartedness of a civilization. My works meet the world with steps at once light and heavy. They embody the rhythm of a “primitive” civilization whereby the works of art appear as necessary and invisible “natural events”, and yet with so strong a presence as to show the way. The form is not an addition of visual facts, but a place where senses rest, a departing point towards the world. The adventure of forms is the adventure of this journey from being torn to becoming whole. And a quiet sort of tearing this is that already knows its reconciliation and so waits overcoming its tragedy. The viewer is taken along this journey unable to feel fully involved, no matter how much he tries.

He is not able to close the circle opened by the work who alone can close it. Here you have the solitary adventure of the work of art, a solitude that feeds on distance. The “conquest” is a conclusion that sounds final. I do not believe in art annihilation, yet it is from this ground of defeat that art is howling with pain. I’m terrified that artists become simple spectators, just astonished open-mouthed onlookers being the end point of a chain of observers called the media, philosophy, politics, science, and so on. But the artist does not observe: he is blind, he judges without looking. I am not against what is found as a gift, but against that way of finding that forces one to resignation, that condition from which you cannot expect the making of any work of art. I am not interested in the comparison between works of art and everyday objects. I prefer to conceive the image as parallel to reality, something feeding on it without getting subject to its rules and taking it daily without getting addicted to it. Possibly they could establish an uninterrupted dialogue, where in turns one takes over.

At any rate I don’t think it right to keep holding a belief, be it either of pop or pro-Third World inspiration, in some magic power of objects, as if they were fetishes. For me a work of art should not be affected by either of these influences that weigh it down in its search for a way. I admire that art that is able to mould forms and materials into a new image, even if to do so it uses and manipulates the existing objects. There is something that draws me towards a purely idealistic dimension and simultaneously to the condition of a skilled performer, highly expert of handicraft techniques. Within this duality, I really wouldn’t know where to stand. Anyhow I feel rather inclined towards the highly sophisticated matter. The work of art thus becomes a compound, a contamination and, being within a dialogue, never a pure product. The work of art is the result of a daily dynamic. We live constantly waiting for an intuition and sometimes it happens. This is the creative gesture, the founding act of the work of art. I don’t like to think about the work of art as a reiterated vocabulary exercise, I regard it more as a unique moment both of arrival and departure. I’m not interested in de-materialization. Indeed, often the matter of my works stands out.

Of course the work’s final result does not aim at its elevation. In actual fact, on the one hand matter is “put on stage” while on the other it vanishes. In this way de-materialization is a transition rather than a starting point. The forms I normally work on are not derived from figures, but I like to relate them with something human, as for example the body and the point of view of the spectator. I try to evoke a human presence (much as invisible), both through materials’ traces and through experiences. My work is a dialogue between things that have borders and things that don’t. I think light and colour are constantly expanding factors and the form is something superimposed, that defines the borders. Painting, for instance, is a very topical issue. The relation between projected colour and solid colour is considered an attempt to set borders to something otherwise bound to expand over its surroundings. All my work is a struggle between these energies. The work of art cannot be considered a container of ideas, but an ideological fact: it approaches directly the question of power, of it’s authority within reality and its ability to be perpetuated.

© 2005 Alfredo Pirri