Not Random Art | Page 91

We use to think about a person (perception and conscience) like a unity of many different plans physical, moral, psychological... We divide the existence to be able to understand something in this infinite complexity. An artist can make clear his aims on intellectual and physical plan and discover that does not know anything of what he made on the symbolic or psychological plan. Or vice-versa. The most important issue in art for me is that, like any creation, is made of infinite inseparable ingredients, some of them are controllable with the mind, others with the sensitiveness, or with the professional skills, or emotive language. But the complex sense that the artwork produces is not reducible to other simpler plans of communication, nor completely explicable with other means. If it was, in my opinion the “work” has no artistic value, I can't consider it art, but in the best cases just a game, a craft, a political declaration, or an intellectual entertainment. So it's clear that I cannot consider emotional and intellectual perception of my work as separate. I think that the immersive nature of the art experience is in big part influenced by the time. As R. Krauss wrote, in sculpting this is a key issue, more than ever in contemporary art. I conceive visual art as not only working with materials, or images and formal issues, neither working with ideas and concepts nor expressing an emotion or creating suggestion: these are only tools that an artist must use to move the others to the experience, that is something that produces a change in the subject. The direction of the change is not predictable as, in my vision, art must be interrogative, instill doubt. I would like that my artworks may recall this quote from Brian Eno: “Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the dress rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process.” My aim is to produce continuous semantic reference on different interpretative levels, creating a kind of visual trap. I consider it necessary to get into this snare to be able to "see" my work. Through this participation (some of the works are even to be manipulated) the viewer gets active: amusement and formal pleasantness flaw and the viewer is unexpectedly attracted to continue the fruition of the work to focus details and hidden visions. Perspective changes and what was felt gloomy becomes playful, the naive becomes cruel, despair turns into mockery. Yet, the first impression does not disappear, but it changes, twists, is enriched by different plans of interpretation, making the fruition of the artwork more complex. This is transformed into experience, as soon as the user is forced to "get a feel" in the variety and in the ambiguity of the messages (formal, iconographic, linguistic) that the work contains. My intention is to make the enjoyment of art as an active experience of those who benefit from it. During the last years what interests me most is that in its complexity the work has to be in any case clearly understandable at first glance: light, simple under the formal and iconographical aspect, it must contain those factors useful to create the suspension of the fundamental incredulity in order to create a real "experience"whether it is perceptual, emotional, sensory or imaginative, or all of these, through the personal reorganization of what arose, the situation of uncertainty created by formal ambivalence is transformed into a creative act, very personal (yet sometimes in synchronous with the artist). My job is to construct my artworks around a complex series of aesthetics, formal, emotional and intellectual meanings: this is strictly under my control, but then I consider licit (and welcome) any different kind of interpretation from the viewer, as it must be a product of what the artwork did. Best said, what the knowledge, sensibility and personality of the viewer produced with the material I gave him. Usually the viewers are reporting two or three different interpretations of the image, but with many different feelings, thoughts and emotions about it: a small house with a girl inside it can be falling, protecting, constricting, blocking, or concealing her. But these different interpretations give many more different impressions, that change according with the viewer personality. So usually, the feedbacks that the viewers give to me are really interesting, in fact I always find in it something that it was intention to put inside the artwork, clearly or well hidden. And melancholy and humor are usually among them.

Before taking leave from this interesting conversation, we would like to ask if, in your opinion, art can change the future for racial and ethnic identity? How can art help to make sense of these complex histories?

As an artist can't produce something good from what he's not, artworks deep and sincere gets clear to the viewer a part, or the whole, complex identity of the artist, with his history ethnicity and culture.

I think that it is crucial for any artist to know well the roots and branches of the culture from which he proceeds, that comprehends also his ethnic and racial history. Working as a teacher with young artists who have quite a different culture from mine I can see that the first important thing that a young artist is normally missing- after a good art instruction- is the “experience with the different”, that serves like a mirror, as a knowledge of oneself ad to deepen the contact with the roots. The kind of significant artworks made by experienced and self-aware artists is always an act of investigation about identity both for the maker and

for the viewer. Racial and ethnic identity is always a radical part of anyone's identity