Enrico Gusella interviews Alessandro Taglioni    it • en
(June, 2000)

Water is a constant element in your painting. What meaning does it take on and what does it represent in your imaginative world? How does it enter your work?

First of all I must say that water is part of the materials I use, and in the context of the series that you are referring to it is a kind of protagonist. And the same thing happens with the theme of water. I'm interested in two things: the thematic aspect and the pretextual aspect. The approach that I obtain with it is the same that I obtain with the portrait, from the point of view of classical painting, that is. What I mean is that it is the portrait of water and the portrait of air for me, that is, the procedure is exactly as it is for the portrait of a person. In the case of water, it interests me because the theme lends itself in a particular way to unrepresentability, so it is a good challenge trying to recount something around what is somehow unrepresentable. It might be just an exercise in style and aesthetics, but not hermeneutics or morphology, so it seems to me of some interest, if only because it allows me to proceed by "emulations" and supply us with a pretext for emulating nature, not directly, but with some artifice and some distortion. In this series I attempt to give an apologia, a narration. Sometimes along these linguistic and pictorial scribbles I try to emphasise what I consider certain properties of water and earth. What is here is a question of matter and material, which still remain connected to painting. This is why the first draft for a title to the exhibition was Painting, digital, water. Because in these works I consider painting as a protagonist, both in a technical and thematic sense, here are the properties and themes I mentioned. And anyway I do realise that proposing painting today as the theme of a series of works may be completely anachronistic.

Where do you start from when you create a work?

I start from a test, meant as the test of truth, and a bet, something that provokes you to do, something that induces you to do something. I don't know, something that makes you decide to get on to the boat — if we want to keep to the theme. And then it's important to understand that you always have to find the specificity that in every instant regards this or that utensil. Whatever utensil it is, it is important to know that there is this specificity that also involves the question of the utensil and also the tool; but that's not enough, there are other virtues as well, and other prerogatives that are needed to produce anything at all, and following on this there starts up a system of production.

In your work is there any relation between the finished figure and the amorphous?

The "informal" character of these works may appear obvious. Sometimes they are pictures drawn in the form of a scribble. But each and every work proceeds from the drawing; even if I didn't prepare it with an initial sketch — on a piece of paper or something else — the story begins with a drawing. This drawing never needs to be resolved or explained or made sense of. Let's say that it gives just a hint, which then gradually constitutes, rather than forming itself into, a completed work, and not necessarily a successful one. There's the surface, the panel, elsewhere there are canvases that start from the frames, assembled one by one. In other places they are just the computer monitor screen, the only time that the support is not placed horizontally. Painting is in itself an absolutely enigmatic act which does not require very much artifice or many stylistic tricks. This may help us to understand the interest in the work of Fontana, for example, as examples of the essential and sober. I don't believe there exists a morphology of the work of art except as a rather precarious and transitive issue. In other words we can understand it in the sense of education in reading a work of art, or also in the importance of the anatomy of the image. And so here is the issue of aesthetics and semblance which require an enormous amount of exercise both by those who work in art and those who are simply approaching it once in a lifetime.

Could deforming reality through the work be one of the hypotheses that you start from?

Form cannot be deformed. But it can definitely be informed. There's the datum, there's the form, there's the information. There is no power over form, because that would be as much as to say that matter is pliable, and yet that does not mean that there is no formation for whoever finds himself doing. Bacon did not produce deformations, neither did I think cubism. Caricature is something else, there we can say that we in some way attempt a deformation starting from a datum which is erroneously thought to exist in reality — that's what naif art does.

As for the concept of detail or fragment, how do you think your works can be collocated? Do you recognise some analogy?

Well, by way of answer, and keeping to the metaphor, let's go from water to powder, to the grain, the fragment, the detail; elements that I try to explore in these works quite explicitly. I try to do it without heeding diatribes about micro/macro or the form/content dualism. The materials themselves are coherent in this regard, because we have the water of the works on canvas on the one hand and the powder of the toners and digital inks on the other. And perhaps the detail also expresses the question of sizes a little. In other words, we have things that everyone writes, that I attempt, try to write and which might seem few to us, to relish one by one, fragmentary even for those who produce a great deal, all this compared with things that everyone has to read, which are immense, difficult, larger than us, and very important. There is this disproportion which is suggested by these exercises in writing which make you think of the detail and which refer you to reading and writing.

What part do rhythm and repetition play in your works?

Rhythm. First I was saying that I needed a water-colour technique because I realised how this highlighted movement and automation; so each time I follow a layout. It's where something happens that rhythm is created. Then there's movement. And also violence. And water-colours are I believe a specific technique for highlighting rhythm and movement, where you cannot stop nor "repent", as Cerritelli noted. In this specific sense you can say then that rhythm is arithmetical. In fact, and perhaps here I'm wrong, I rarely manage to do a drawing which for some reason refers back to the one produced before; in practice, production takes place as if each work constituted a series in itself. So repetition does intervene, but in a strange sort of way, after a long time. However, in these works there's a clear reference to waves, water, and arrangement.

And fractals?

The fractal is an interesting discovery and much exploited at the moment in information technology, even though it is not its invention, seeing that we actually find fractals in mineral prisms as well, and in other elements in nature. The leaf of a tree is the inimitable and elaborated design of a fractal. The fractal is extremely useful in information technology languages. Today it enables us to draw, paint, write, communicate, transmit data. In particular it enables us to compress images in a way that was up to now unthought of, and in this way we understand that with a simple fractal we can really do what Eta Beta did when he showed he could pull all sorts of things from his pockets.