Interview: Pier Paolo Calzolari On “Saudades” in Marianne Boesky NY

The melancholy awareness of time, the longing for something unnamed and incommensurable and the acceptance of the necessary change of all things within the inevitable evolution of matter and power revive the work of the Italian artist Pier Paolo Calzolari. Emerging from an ongoing conversation with a living, moving story, his works often take the form of simple traces left by the processes of change, which give evidence of the temporary nature of all forms and organizations as they are always subject to constant change, from conception and formation to decay and dissolution.

Calzolari’s practice is based on an extended, sensory understanding not only of sculptures and installations but also of their inescapable nature of ongoing, interdependent relationships with other bodies and forces in space. Working as an alchemist and medium, he chooses things that are less formal stability than their ability to change, decay or react, which includes the ephemeral and unstable state of the first four elements and their cyclic transformations, included in things like salt, ice, lead, sulphur, moss, tobacco leaves, flame and flame.

Long associated with the poetry of Arte Povera, Calzolari fully embraces the movement’s call to use “negative things,” transforming his art practice into a deep work of repurposing and interacting with the natural cycles of matter. Yet his position has always been different and, in many ways, advanced in this poverty. His objects are “poor” not as an anti-capitalist rhetorical gesture but as a way of expressing the basic structure of physical reality itself, which includes risk, entropy and imperfection as the only possible conditions for a work of art to exist.

There was a conflict within the organization about the idea of ​​”the poor,” the king of Italy admitted, when the Observer had a rare opportunity to enter into what turned out to be a deep philosophical conversation with him during his latest exhibition, “Saudades,” at Marianne Boesky in New York. One reading was more psychological, combined with resistance to capitalist production and consumption, he explained. “My position was different. I started from the Franciscan thought: the idea of ​​losing the central place of man in relation to things, of moving to a relationship on the same level between man and things, things, animals, everything that exists—to study the horizontal world.”

Calzolari describes Arte Povera as “a magnificent comet” that announced another way of seeing the world but whose participants ended up separated by different lines of research, “like meteorites.” For him, the word “poor” always had a deep meaning: that of humility, based on the vagueness of the human being and on the acceptance of limits as part of an important folding rather than the illusion of omnipotence over other elements: “My brother water, my brother wolf, my brother fire. followed, in another way There is a kind of familiarity with things. It’s all about understanding that everything that exists—from the flight of a bird to the fall of a stone—is matter, color and living matter.

From this mystical and poetic thinking, it is clear that Calzolari’s approach to art and nature touches on the ancient understanding, pre-Aristotelian and pre-modern, close to the Greek concept of hýlē but also in the animist beliefs of many Native communities, where the matter is not a useless thing but consistent with its commitment.

Here he provided a vivid, poetic image that felt at once prophetic and so ancient it seems to have begun at the dawn of mankind. “Let’s think about the temple—Jews, Arabs, Christians, it doesn’t matter. “Inside this temple, people leave traces, even flesh. At the same time, he noted, it is not just physical presence that accumulates but also meanings, symbols and powers. “When you enter the temple, you feel a concentration—not only the immediate desires and requests of others, but also those previously placed within it. This energy moves, circulates and listens. We breathe it in and absorb it.”

The temple becomes a center of collective action, where cultures from all cultures and religions come to listen, combine and facilitate this distribution of energy and power, accepting what Calzolari describes as the unity of all things: “Then there is a moment when a person stops, kneels on a mat or makes a mark. However they are able to concentrate, almost, upwards, in that small place.

What Calzolari describes is a miraculous moment when the power and dimension of reality collide, colliding into a heightened awareness that everything belongs to a wider cosmic order. Art becomes a moment of conception and revelation, able to bring us closer to the realization of that cosmic awareness.

Calzolari’s recent body of work in New York reads as a rebuke of this thinking—a later life, a quiet peaceful meditation on the nature of all things—and its acceptance that puts into play the art of creation a claim to the power of renewal after and after disintegration and decay. In all areas of the casein-tempera paintings of the same scale, traces of past events appear: signs of physical passing and remnants of past lives, created by the presence of pieces of found objects that create subtle textures and focal points for reflection while focusing on these diaphanous situations back in the long-lasting environment of human existence.

Walking on the edge of existence as a silent poetic assertion, his works appear less as performance subjects than as presences, expressions of past events deliberately suspended between irresolvability and potential evolution. Their transitory, transitory nature guides the inevitability of change and disappearance while still allowing for the possibility of transformation into new forms.

It shares the same untranslatability as a Portuguese and Galician name sister which gives the exhibition its title, the works unfold as soft notes, fragile in time and presence, marked by a rhythmic movement between breath and hesitation, assertion and near-silence, reminiscent of a Debussy-like piano piece. Clair de luneand carrying a quiet awareness and acceptance of transcendence and continuous letting go.

“That’s my world, so I tried to let it emerge, to let it speak,” said Calzolari, answering questions about the reflection from which these new works come. “I have to answer with another common phrase that I have used many times, otherwise I don’t know.” Here, he showed the mysterious and ineffable path of the artistic process and the mystery of its deepest motives. “This question is asked so many times that I always answer in the same way: first, who makes the instrument; second, who plays it; third, my job is to keep the instrument working,” Calzolari added briefly, admitting that he is not sure that muses or poets exist and that he does not particularly care.

He has clearly accepted, in his practice, the role of the artist as a channel, through which higher forms of awareness of the fundamental principles of the universe may be seen, or we may at least get fleeting glimpses that bring us closer to deeper truths. “Musicians are very selfish, they are self-important people – you shouldn’t trust what I say – but I repeat that if musicians were stations, those are the ones I am most interested in,” he answered when asked about this directly.

“I think there’s a lot of calling from demons—meaning the Greek word for daimon,” Calzolari admits. However, it is the slow conception of those messages, he added, that makes the work possible. “I am always in the midst of bad encounters and bad messages that I have endured.” At my age, I feel that I pay more attention to other things—not only spiritual things, but spiritual things sometimes—things that are full of the real world.”

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