yomodellaroya
art maker
1998-2002 | "Industrial cave", first personal workshop | Disused cement factory in Bassano d.G. (VI-IT)
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“Journey to the origin of the man-material relationship”
Pasquale Difonzo (Zurich, 1975) comes to art as an autodidactic. Not an institutional training, but a personal didactic route formed from continual experience on building sites constitutes his background. What moulds and inspires him is a kind of poetic ‘recovery’, an overwhelming desire to operate on the material, the tenacious search for signs hidden in the subject itself, as well as a passion for informal art and the personal studies carried out into aesthetic research developed during the period following the second world war, which in his work finds an extremely subjective reworking. His works are actions, gestures taken to bring out the aesthetic potential of waste material, such as pieces of lead, wood, zinc or iron. His poetry is to embrace the concepts of time and space, turning them into means. Time, in his hands, becomes the tool necessary to implement the corrosion of the iron material which he treats patiently with acids and solvents. An action of subtraction therefore, leaving the essential sign clear; space, which in the artist’s conception becomes a physical thing and, although invisible to the eye, remains perceivable in the lightness distinguishing it, juxtaposing it with the effort put into the forging of the material, which finds its own shape in the struggle marking the birth of the work. Both concepts become strongly materialised, weighty means of formation of the experience, felt and lived. They come from the empire of the pure abstract, losing in conceptuality and gaining in concreteness, in physicality. As the art historian Carlo Giulio Argan wrote: "the artist has given up, before the subject, pride in his own spirituality and has accepted the identification, that subject […] has made itself at once present and human […] and has opened up in a new dimension of space and time"1. |
In Difonzo it is this space-temporal dimension of the material itself which becomes the object of his intervention. He makes it evident, lets it exist for what it is and has always been, even when prior to his attention, it was latent, just a piece of rubbish.
The way the artist works concurs with that which at the beginning of the 1970’s Bonito Oliva described as "the aspiration of liberation of underground vitality"2.
And it is really with the object trouvè, an object without form and without the possibility of expression, in short, from the subject itself, and from the 'nourishing' that Difonzo takes from it, that his quest begins and consequently, the moment of design comes to constitute only a secondary moment in the realization of the work.
The artist writes: "My search begins in books of art, of history or other kinds, even if it’s just with the thought of picking up something interesting, to feed myself with newspaper clippings even, or images stolen with the eyes from my surroundings. Then, wandering around heaps of iron in garbage tips and dumps here and there, the reworking takes place in a spontaneous way, unconsciously, at times helped by a pencil and a piece of paper and on good occasions by my camera."
It is an exchange, a relationship which the artist establishes with the world of the physicality of the material. Artist and material are on the same level. The concept does not come before the thing. Idea is born from the thing itself and returns there to let it speak, to lift it from its discarded state and give it aesthetical dignity, able to communicate sensations, not as subjective expression from the fantastic world that animates the artist, but as tightly and intrinsically and indissolubly tied up with the material itself.
As Dubuffet wrote "Art has to be born from the material and from the means and has to preserve traces of the means and its struggle with the material. Not only the man must speak, but also the means and the material"3.
The way the artist works concurs with that which at the beginning of the 1970’s Bonito Oliva described as "the aspiration of liberation of underground vitality"2.
And it is really with the object trouvè, an object without form and without the possibility of expression, in short, from the subject itself, and from the 'nourishing' that Difonzo takes from it, that his quest begins and consequently, the moment of design comes to constitute only a secondary moment in the realization of the work.
The artist writes: "My search begins in books of art, of history or other kinds, even if it’s just with the thought of picking up something interesting, to feed myself with newspaper clippings even, or images stolen with the eyes from my surroundings. Then, wandering around heaps of iron in garbage tips and dumps here and there, the reworking takes place in a spontaneous way, unconsciously, at times helped by a pencil and a piece of paper and on good occasions by my camera."
It is an exchange, a relationship which the artist establishes with the world of the physicality of the material. Artist and material are on the same level. The concept does not come before the thing. Idea is born from the thing itself and returns there to let it speak, to lift it from its discarded state and give it aesthetical dignity, able to communicate sensations, not as subjective expression from the fantastic world that animates the artist, but as tightly and intrinsically and indissolubly tied up with the material itself.
As Dubuffet wrote "Art has to be born from the material and from the means and has to preserve traces of the means and its struggle with the material. Not only the man must speak, but also the means and the material"3.
In this way it seems that in these works man actually disappears, it seems that the presence of the forger is latent, and that the subject has the final word thanks to the maieutic function of the artist.
And the word in this case is made concrete in signs. So more than a word, we could talk of a cry. The traces that result in the work recall the primitiveness of the individual in the world. From this is derived a sign that far from being writeable in an encoded language, in idea remains a 'fragment' inspiring physical sensations before mental concepts.
In this sense one can define the work of Difonzo as 'informal.' Given the wide use that is made of the term, it is necessary to identify it with a determinate meaning: what this indicates in our context is not so much the means for the explicitness of a 'poetry of gesture' that illustrates the value of artistic behavior, as much as its modus operandi: what mainly results from the work is actually the primitive sign emerging from it, almost seemingly spontaneously, and that suggests patient and tiring work, conducted in order to bring the material to life.
Therefore ' informal': to underline the common denominator that unites all the artistic quests which have in turn made expression their own, and that also characterizes the production of Difonzo: “that intimate” pertinence to the world of experience, from a worldly perspective and absolutely immanent. So a direct relationship between existential condition, expressive condition and communication; in conclusion, the pertinence of the subject, of the sign, of the gesture itself to the space and time of the lived experience, renunciation of an ideal space, of image"4, leaving space to the concrete presence of the subject, once functional for use, now usable 'only' aesthetically.
Elena Bortolazzi
1 Giulio Carlo Argan, Salvezza e caduta nell’arte moderna, Milano, Il Saggiatore, 1964.
2 Achille Bonito Oliva, Vitalità del negativo, in ‘Vitalità del negativo nell’arte italiana 1960/70’, Firenze, Centro Di/edizioni, 1970 (catalogo della mostra, a cura di A.Bonito Oliva).
3 Jean Dubuffet, Prospectus aux amateurs de tout genre, Paris, Gallimard, 1946; trad.it. I valori selvaggi- Prospectus ed altri scritti, a cura di Renato Barilli, Milano, Feltrinelli, 1971.
4 Enrico Crispolti, Pittura d’avanguardia nel dopoguerra in Europa, Milano, Fratelli Fabbri Editori, 1970.
And the word in this case is made concrete in signs. So more than a word, we could talk of a cry. The traces that result in the work recall the primitiveness of the individual in the world. From this is derived a sign that far from being writeable in an encoded language, in idea remains a 'fragment' inspiring physical sensations before mental concepts.
In this sense one can define the work of Difonzo as 'informal.' Given the wide use that is made of the term, it is necessary to identify it with a determinate meaning: what this indicates in our context is not so much the means for the explicitness of a 'poetry of gesture' that illustrates the value of artistic behavior, as much as its modus operandi: what mainly results from the work is actually the primitive sign emerging from it, almost seemingly spontaneously, and that suggests patient and tiring work, conducted in order to bring the material to life.
Therefore ' informal': to underline the common denominator that unites all the artistic quests which have in turn made expression their own, and that also characterizes the production of Difonzo: “that intimate” pertinence to the world of experience, from a worldly perspective and absolutely immanent. So a direct relationship between existential condition, expressive condition and communication; in conclusion, the pertinence of the subject, of the sign, of the gesture itself to the space and time of the lived experience, renunciation of an ideal space, of image"4, leaving space to the concrete presence of the subject, once functional for use, now usable 'only' aesthetically.
Elena Bortolazzi
1 Giulio Carlo Argan, Salvezza e caduta nell’arte moderna, Milano, Il Saggiatore, 1964.
2 Achille Bonito Oliva, Vitalità del negativo, in ‘Vitalità del negativo nell’arte italiana 1960/70’, Firenze, Centro Di/edizioni, 1970 (catalogo della mostra, a cura di A.Bonito Oliva).
3 Jean Dubuffet, Prospectus aux amateurs de tout genre, Paris, Gallimard, 1946; trad.it. I valori selvaggi- Prospectus ed altri scritti, a cura di Renato Barilli, Milano, Feltrinelli, 1971.
4 Enrico Crispolti, Pittura d’avanguardia nel dopoguerra in Europa, Milano, Fratelli Fabbri Editori, 1970.