Sculpture

Nicola Micieli
The theatre of sculpture

Enzo Sciavolino has by now fifty odds years of sculptural practice under his belt. Over half a century spent for the best part as if poised, in a quite awkward position where visitors are scarce, because he is overexposed, contaminated, annoying, and because of this he is the target of fairly predictable critical barrage, shot to kill, from different sides but always polluted by an ideological bias, rather than by artistic merit. I’d say this is normal and predictable. Actually, all things considered, I find it desirable, as evidence of a position which is neither neutral nor pacifying when the artist is not afraid of the “contagion” of reality, he plunges into the folds of the soul and faces the emergencies, the imbalances, the anxious beat of the collective event.
The fact Sciavolino has kept its promises with determination and without breaks, relaxation or vacations is proof of a firm temperament and a well-grounded moral belief. And the fact he did it, I’d like to add, while remaining faithful to an expressive medium that demands a live connection, hand-to-hand fighting, as well as a moral rule over the creative and executive processes. Which is tiring and rewarding in the matter-of-factness of the making. I mean sculpture of rigorous plastic and constructive definition; the one that imposes its presence in the space, the one which one has to reckon with. Sculpture and drawing — or even engraving — closely related to it, a necessary working implement that Sciavolino has regularly used, cycle after cycle: the results of which are to be regarded as creative moments, accomplished and independent in themselves, in their unique propriety and formal and stylistic solutions.
Sciavolino’s long career is now told by the far-ranging exhibition documented herein, promoted by the Region Piedmont as if to seal the intimate relationship between the Sicilian sculptor and Turin, the city where he migrated at a very young age from his home town of Valledolmo, in the distant 1953. He landed there and made it his second home. Turin showed him the fullness of life and art. In the city of work and culture, Sciavolino found himself as a metropolitan man and artist, having retained, of his land, the indelible print of his Mediterranean cultural roots and a feeling of humanity still imbued with the ethics of respecting people within the community. That’s why Sciavolino proved to be extremely sensitive to the contradictions of modernity and willing to do a corrective criticism of it.
For about thirty years, at least until the appearance of La Questione (1973-76) and the cycle Discorso sui materiali del far scultura per interposto Marat (1977-1981), two cornerstones of his career, that emblematically sum up the crisis of the identity and role of the Italian Left, wading across the outrageous Seventies («Marat — said Sciavolino — is the chronicle of a suicide. La Questione is the closure of what came before the suicide. And the showdown of my “experience” in social life»), Sciavolino then moved on a ground that is in itself unstable and treacherous. I’d call it a border ground, if I wasn’t afraid of some avant-gardist misunderstanding, in the sense of suggesting an experimental research aimed at novelty or at an increased language rather than at the “staging” of the thematic and poetic basic assumption, to be provided with appropriate expressive instruments.
Until the juncture of Marat, Sciavolino actually worked to portray, from a provisional perspective, the structural cracks, the signs of cultural and social crisis of his time. He actually used the peremptory tone and the cutting formal synthesis of the denunciation, entrusting it to claustrophobic and inquisitorial contrivances, thus actually equating sculpture to a veritable theatre of cruelty, which in fact covers all of the Seventies.
Cruel was the spirit of the time. A time that Sciavolino lived as a heretical leftist man, in Pasolini’s sense. A man, that is, which appreciated the inconsistency between theoretical elaboration and political practice, in an Italian Left which was poorly dialectic within and culturally not too flexible in an ever-moving international scenario. Sciavolino took over that inconsistency: it took it as a subject of debate, he somatised it in the poetic metaphor by exposing himself personally, by laying himself bare in his role as an active artist in that specific civil scenario and at that specific historical contingency. No exceptions or shortcuts; no visionary flights or ideological screens, but ruthless intellectual clear-mindedness. This brought to life an acute, even painful, reflection on sculpture and its statute, so that a poetics of self-confessed existential and social endorsement, one where the contents could easily drift off as well as being full of rhetoric statements, eventually composed the pages of a restless biography, in which one can recognise the climate of an era and the parabolic profile, amidst illusion and disillusionment, of a whole generation.

In his youth and early maturity, when he was trying to find his place on the artistic zone, Sciavolino did not work to put himself in a “situation” with what was going on in the milieu in which he found himself to work, in the sense of newly-forming languages and areas of interest and action of research. I am thinking in particular of the trends of the area that is in between conceptual art and “Arte Povera”, which had to establish themselves on an international plane and where they would certainly find leeway enough, because of his fairly outstanding personality in the common laboratory of Turin. He might have appeared as the one with the most ideas and working skills in that movement if he had not been double-tied to the plastic and structural statute of sculpture and had not felt as a priority, since the early Fifties of his apprenticeship under Sandro Cherchi at the Art School of Turin, the need to filter, as a sculptor partakiny of contemporariness, the subjects and the urgencies of the human condition. This, in a deeply-changing social, economic and cultural setting, in a Turin that was about to become Italy’s largest “Southern city” and one of the propellers of the economic boom.
In those formative years, during a long stay in Paris and an immersion in the existentialist climate, Sciavolino reflects on the feeling of emptiness and instability of life. He meets and studies works by Giacometti, Richier, Fautrier, Dubuffet, from which he infers an image of man of devastated, primeval corporeity, in which he reads the contemporary sign of a violence that is sensory and cognitive deprivation, as well as phisical repression. Hence, in Turin, his closeness in spirit, fuelled by the presence of Moreni, Rambaudi, Tapié, and Franco Garelli’s speared, residual figures. Garelli’s welded sheets must have no doubt played a role in Sciavolino’s formation, along with Cherchi’s “landscape-sculptures” and “theatres of the forms” and Lucio Fontana’s farther shimmers of light, the slithering plastic forms “touched” by the sacred compositions, made for the tender for the Door of the Cathedral of Milan (1950).
From this background, at the dawn of the Fifties, Sciavolino makes his debut with figures of a rough corporeity, exhausted by the burden of the matter. The tone is halfway between the informal and the expressionist. These are figures of “resistance fighters”, redolent of the models of Cherchi and Paganin, two artists who actually belonged to Corrente’s movement. And a scent of sculpture still affected by the “horrors” of the war can be smelled in that first season. It can be grasped in the shapeless bundle of muscles in which lies the corporeity of Nudo, Uomo nello spazio and other works around ’57, which look as if they had escaped a cataclysm. I think it wouldn’t be out of piace to see in them the ghost of Hiroshima, a subject at which, at that time and in a corporeal morphology of similar devastation, the Tuscan Agenore Fabbri was working in Milan. After all, still in the mid-Sixties, Sciavolino would go back to subjects reminiscent of the war and the resistance — with some updates on the current conflicts: Viet-Nam, 1964 — such as shootings and hangings, perfectly similar, to his previous sacred compositions in the extreme liveliness of the mouldings and layouts. But in the meantime the sculptural organism would develop into space (Uno spazio per vivere is the heading for the period ’57 to ’70), now fully qualified as a forestage or a public area, while the plastic form, still of a chopped moulding, would become quite stronger, giving a neater figural identity to the jumbled bodies of his beginning, in the Fifties. Bodies in which a very young Sciavolino fixed, without however marking it by any means, the figure of the land-occupying labourer, violated by the police, which had struck him during his Sicilian childhood.

The choice of settling in a border zone, to record and bear witness to the existential “temperature” and, often explicitly, the political contingency of an era, involved a quite tiring personal commitment for Sciavolino. It actually meant reconciling two planes or functions: the clearness of the mind which senses, distinguishes and plans and eventually controls and leads the forming processes to an aesthetic haven, and the reactivity of the senses to the flow of the emotions associated with the personal experience, also to be somatised, that is, to be acted upon in the plastic body and the spatial layout of the sculpture. Between wariness and relinquishment, through the different seasons and the chopping and changing of the styles, Sciavolino has worked at a sculpture of indubitable formal quality and expressive intensity, full of unique solutions, not least because of its extraordinary ability to understand and elaborate on the properties of the most diverse materials and technical processes. A sculpture which in addition, just because it is alien to formalism and open to subjective feelings and memories, has never experienced repetition, stylistic key features, stock phrases, with life urging the artist so powerfully to look in the reservoir of imagination for unusual forms and figures, to be made to play the roles of the sculptural tale.
As the Sixties went by, Sciavolino’s sculpture begins to be more and more urban in character because of the kind of settings and the situations he portrays (Costruttori di Cartelloni, 1965). On his own background in between the informal and the expressionist, Sciavolino grafts other linguistic and cultural features. For instance, Calder’s lithe, minimal structures or the identifying adaptations of Pop Art. He thus flows into a key cycle of self-evident theatricality, which should be regarded as one of the most interesting examples of Italian “situation” sculpture, on a plane with Alik Cavaliere’s and Mario Cero li’s experiences. Let’s mention Ieri, oggi... domani? (1966) and Fahrenheit 124 (1967), part plastic, part object sculptures, built as stages on which an action develops, sometimes in a filmic sequence.
The next step is the object-sculpture in which the space (closed, included, open-closed), built of minimal structural and setting features, incorporates the figures and seals them, stopping them in the flagrancy of their violent deed. Of which they are the initiators and the victims, as the mechanism of the machine that contains them and makes them rivals, is a closed circuit. An automaton. We are at the crucial experience of But cruel are the times and the encoded abbreviation of formal and expressive features: the plastic stopping, the crushing of the volumes, the outlining of the shapes, the exaggerated and even unpleasant objectification of the figures, reduced to mechanically-jointed outlines. This is Sciavolino’s way of portraying the man that Marcuse used to call “one-dimensional”. I think it is symptomatic of a certain intellectual independence, that Sciavolino felt the need to cool down the language and ultimately choose a detached observation post, which enabled him to practise his critical reason, just at the time the pulse of the Western world beat frantically and the temperature was quite hot. The facts are well known: the youth protest started from the American campuses on civil subjects such as racial discrimination and equal rights; then the criticism of authoritarianism, the protest against the Vietnam war, the imperialistic policy, and finally the American lifestyle with its stultifying consumeristic rituals. In Europe, the starting point is the French “May”. In Italy, the youth protest involves the working class and takes a strong political relevance, even a revolutionary one. After ’73, the movement escalates into the long season of terrorism, which has its highlight in the murder of Aldo Moro (1978).
These were the black and red “leaden” years. The initial elated participation was followed by a return to the private, to a lack of commitment, to giving politics back to opposing extremisms. From the bright dream of imagination in power, to the sulphurous reawakening in armed fight, these were cruel years. This is how Sciavolino experienced them, and he summed up their meaning in the phrase with which he signed his works between ’71 and ’76: But cruel are the times, indeed. Cruel was that time, because it let the great generational illusion sprout, no less for the agony of disillusionment, dotted with the black bursts of Piazza Fontana, Piazza della Loggia, the “Italicus” train and the red bursts of the terrorist attacks and the murders signed by The Red Brigades.
Sciavolino fixed in the sculpture of the time the ambiguity of that tragic seesaw, trading in the urgencies of political news for the alarming intricacy of his play-acting of freezing-cold sadomasochistic efficiency, which is basically the metaphor of the discrediting attack of the intellectual role vis-à-vis the betrayal of history. And it is the category of history rather than the political one that we should refer to, in order to put in the right light Sciavolino’s work in the Seventies. A decade that includes La Questione, a work that, with its exceptionally painstaking conception and execution and the uniqueness of its results, marks a turning point; and the cycle Discorso sui materiali del far scultura per interposto Marat, which focuses on the figure of the murdered Jacobin whom the artist identifies with. Here the other side to Sciavolino’s strategy, that he deployed to speak of his own difficult times with enough clarity, comes into play. I mean the reading of history as a metaphoric species, as a projective place of the turbulent relationship between the artist and his muse. It’s not by chance that in But cruel are the times Sciavolino appears on stage for the first time, both in effigy and under several disguises, as the inevitable protagonist in his capacity as the filter of the events into the sculptural form. There can be no neutrality in his presence, neither to art nor to life, and therefore to history, because in the creative game he invests the full load of his own humanity.
In La Questione, Sciavolino dresses himself, or better, undresses himself as PierPaolo Pasolini. The tribunal-table of Questione is laid with everyday objects and symbols of ideologies. Busts of intellectuals and men of power, ideologists and artists are gathered around the table as at a lay last supper. Gathered to judge — the naked figures of a man and a woman; in fact by the silence of a man and a woman they are questioned, I think with no hope for an answer, about the great issues of power, the ideologies, the conflicts and possible happiness in a dimension of social life taking inspiration from the sentiment of justice.
Everything is motionless on this stage, waiting for action to snap up, in this theatre of potential changes that affect all the implicated subjects and contexts: the people, the political class, the intellectuals, the ideologists, the industrial management. It is a presence that embodies the genius loci, a language, a tradition: Ignazio Buttitta, a folk poet whose Sicilian character rings with the voice of the ancient bard. Called to role-playing, to role exchanging, every character gathered at the big table can turn from the protagonist of a desirable civil dynamics into a judged subject. By appearing on stage in Pasolini’s disguise, Sciavolino pays homage to the difficult, heretical, outrageous artist and intellectual and to his painful role as the critical self-consciousness of the Italian Left and “questions” himself, that is, his own identity as an artist and the role of sculpture in the wider cultural issues of that time.
In Marat, Sciavolino’s perspective becomes definitely individual on the background of the great collective event, the Revolution. With these formally composed sculptures, Sciavolino somehow estranges the figures from their historical referent, taking them as the metaphor of art inside which all of the artist’s existential tragedy is celebrated. The universe of History, met at a point of its highest, deflagrating manifestation, as a revolution is, certainly turns around the emblematic figure of Marat. But on the background of the revolution, the political motivation makes way for a subtler reasoning around the ambivalence between identity and otherness, which the conceptual peculiarity of art consists in. Marat and Carlotta, the artist and his muse, are the antagonistic figures that are necessary to each other, in the role playing that the sculptor leads through his journey — dotted with nine sculptural stations, each one marked by different materials and composition methods — through the bathroom, the bathtub-sarcophagus, the intimacy of a man dying because we wanted to meet and did meet his own soul in Carlotta.
That’s it! On the forestage of history, the place of sculpture, which through Marat is its mirror, Sciavolino let the inner latencies, the tensions, the ideals, the moods, the passions, storm in. In other words, experience. It is a heap that demands to be represented and that, upon the almost ritual deed of the supreme sacrifice — a sort of liturgy of death-resurrection: the bathtub in which Marat is the Canopic vase of the soul, the initiation basin of purification —, plays a highly symbolic role, I dare say, a role of mystic elevation, although in the lay affiliation of the subject. For Sciavolino, sculpture has been first and foremost the concrete place of the word, of presence, of involvement. And parliament we should call our reasoning of it. For him, sculpture has been visible speaking, a challenging activity close to dramatic action. A parliament shaped like a plastic theatre. The philosopher Louis Althusser, about the Question, highlighted — Pour provoquer l’immobile à sa vérité: le mouvement qui change tout, these are the words — its character as a stage setting, which sets thinking in motion again, stirring up the soul, and causes in the onlooker a change, if not a veritable catharsis, in the sense of the Greek tragedy.
This calling to a sculpture that synthesises the image and the world, in which the presence and even the urgency of history often take the folk, symbolic tone of the myth, epitomises Enzo Sciavolino’s Sicilian character. It is the long wave of a tradition that ranges from the classics to Pirandello, to Sciascia, to Consolo, and which, as sculpture, in the Sixties and Seventies, Sciavolino has rendered in linguistic forms that are pretty close to Arthaud’s theatre of cruelty and a Living Theatre-like approach to performance. Then in the Eighties he gradually achieved a more intense lyrical concentration, to the extent of conjuring up innocence as a utopia surrendered to the dreaminess and lightness of imagination. Not least in the sense of the evocation that recalls the mythical dimension, quite predictably highlighted and inferred, even here, by two writers of wide Mediterranean breadth, such as Tahar Ben Jelloun and Vincenzo Consolo, and taken by Luca Antonini as the subject of a poetic reflection fit for a theatre of the word. And one can guess that Sciavolino reads the everyday character of the gestures, the deeds, the situations lived by the creatures through the poetic lens of the myths of foundation (first and foremost that of the creation in the original Eden) and delicate visions, close to dreams, of a childhood of the world to be rediscovered, in order to give meaning and history back to a contemporary reality that by now we perceive as an ephemeral passing. In the Eighties and Nineties through to this day, Sciavolino has given more and more way to the non evasive or literary or archaeological dimension of the myth, that he meant, actually, as the recovery of meaning, in an age that is more and more breaking loose from the anthropological roots of culture, the emptying of which is not made up for by the technological culture, even if this is the carrier of new myths. This is the primary need on which are born the great wood, marble and bronze sculptures of the cycles Il tempo e la memoria o della perdita dell’infanzia (1981-1990), Frammenti. Incontenibile leggerezza (1990-1996), Il circo degli angeli (1996-2007), works the expressive tone and poetic inspiration of which are in many ways antithetic to those of the previous seasons, but of which they take up and develop some subjects in terms of a very subtle poetic evocation. The theatrical conception of the space, as a place of action, is reconfirmed. Especially in the large ambient or situation compositions, that is, where the emphasis is placed on the recitative role of the setting as well as on the symbolic eloquence of the gestures. Look at the big wooden works: La tendina (1986), Le onde (1986), L’albero della libertà (1986-87), which foreshadow homey and Eden-like recognitions and revelations, in the announcement and accomplishment of a romance; and the bronze sculpture Ricercare (la scala), a work in which we see a sequence of actions developed in a continuity of space and time and in the visual unity of the place.
Il tempo e la memoria is a way of making history, no longer through a documentary referent but through the evocative and expressive drama and ambiguity — the theatrical one — of the objects, forms and figures that are by now made to resemble the magical and thaumaturgic and, in any case, the epiphanic function of the relics or the objects which actually consists of their own simulacra. Nothing changes if the artist touches every time a different key, ranging from passion to irony, from poetic quotes to the nearly-detective-like mummification of the findings of everyday life in reliquaries-sarcophagi, which look like places of exile for preservation rather than for remembrance. Just look at Gramsci (1987) and the many still lives on easel and Plexiglas cabinets, to illustrate the allusive and expressive versatility of the wood and marble sculptures of the Eighties and later years. The first one is a work of spiritualised intensity, of dried-up matter, turned into pure essence and inner vibrancy; the others, equally built around the concept of the relic, are reliquaries of painting and sculpture placed on an easel, veritable simulations of a life which, exposed under glass, such as the stuffed animals or the alabaster fruits (Piano inclinato, Sarkofag, 1986), suggests the simulacrum of a pictorial still life in the sculpture.
If Sciavolino hadn’t sculpted it in wood, made alive with astral light with the trick of optic fibres, we should have called for a Klee-like Angelus Novus, a winged creature carrying the message. Sciavolino’s angel, his eyes stunned in contemplation of a world of simulacra, prints, memories of lost integrity, is the carrier of an estranging and somehow magnetic beauty, imbued with the subtle charm of the time that wears out the being in its flowing and which can best be sensed in the marmoreal fragments. And, as to the marble that at this stage makes its appearance and takes centre stage in Sciavolino’s sculpture, I would like to highlight the special attention he now pays to the possibilities of the poetic modulation of the form, which are offered above all by white or polychrome marble, then by the other, different materials, tackled and moulded with such a delicate hand that can be considered itself a gesture of loving communication. Or better, of revelation, because Sciavolino does not, or not only, entrusts the materials with the image of the world or the evoked dream, but with the synesthesia of the multiple feelings aroused by looking at the intrinsic qualities of the matter. Sensory qualities that immediately introduce the “light” climate of the dream, which the tale unravels from.
The Frammenti in snow-white marble, partly painted over, are moments of everyday life modelled from fragments of excavations from the classic world, that is, from a vestige of the continuity of the memory. The fragments are the source of Incontenibile leggerezza (1991-1992), a poetic escalation of tenderness and grace into a heaven that is still possible, to be left to children and poets who recognise its voice in their hearts. In 1993, Sciavolino stated: «I propose fragments of stories, of life, of realities that are portions of dreams, of memory, in the battle for the truth, which is after all poetry itself». In his works so far, he has never stopped attempting the way of the fairy tale and the moral fable through images of enchanted simplicity. In the triptych of “lightness”, a winged putto climbs up a rope anchored to heaven; a child rides a bewitched broom; a little girl goes on a swing, with a heaven of budding branches on her head. Farther away, Sciavolino’s scene fills with other mini-heroes in the guise of a winged putto, busy, like a classic charioteer, riding a rocking charger (Cavaldondolo, 1996-67); or revealing its heavenly affiliation by swinging from the rings in Agli anelli (1994); or riding a hippogriff with a proud bearing (Ippogrifo, 2007); or balancing on a rope pulled between two overhead trampolines on the dizziness of the void (Funambolo, 2007); or attempting other acrobatics and parades and appearances and travels, in the circus of the earth and its trapezes or on the waves of the sea, which Sciavolino has collected in bronze basins or dissected in the marble of his stele-islands. I think it’s no coincidence that, just in his mature and just with the protagonists of these fairy tales around the idylls of the creatures in the naivety of the re-found Eden of poetry, Sciavolino has created some important works that have been placed outdoors and always in places of socialisation.
With Il tempo e la memoria o della perdita dell’infanzia, Sciavolino overturns the view of the world of childhood: from the fairy tales, lived as the possible projection of reality, to the reality of the present time of disenchantment and disillusionment, not liveable except as a simulacrum, as fiction, as a metaphor. For such a powerful sculptor as Sciavolino, such meta-linguistic profession sounds like a slightly intimate retreat, a sort of escape from reality. I think that, in his real or ideal reliquaries, the artist “traps” the fragments of a dream to be saved, so as to revive and launch it again into the circuit of a world that needs such messengers. In one of his marmoreal “fragments”, Sciavolino has portrayed a hand holding a dove. Whether to keep it prisoner or to release it, that’s not known. It is up to Sciavolino to dispel our doubt as passengers of the land-and-water spacecraft that carries us, like an ark, through the deluge. And let the dove come back, with an olive branch.