COMMENT

THE PLACE OF CHANGE

For Luigi Stoisu a work of art is the hinge around which the changing force of intellectual processes, generated hy a continuous stream of perception and knowledge, revolves.
As the place of necessary fiction, produced by the imagination, it contains both the internal and the external sense of things joining forces. However, it is not a mere 'mise-en-scène' of an antithesis, but rather a 'work-in progress' in which the qualitative expansion of one element becomes necessary for the absorption of the opposing force contuined in the other one.
In this suspension, the empty linearity of time opens up to the internal rhythm of a process of growth and of configuration which, through disintegration and reuniting, generates form.
So the present is only the threshold, the field of reciprocal action where the paths of the past and of the future sepurate and meet. The work of art becomes the witness of this stream, in which whut remains pervades the outline of what is changing, and scans the vacuum of what is disappearing, but is also suhject to the luws of what is to come.
Projected towards its disappearance, the work of art experiences time as a slow but ineluctable modificution. And it is not only its external formal character that changes due to the action of time, but ulso its meuning which in time changes with interpretations.
Stoisa's work does not represent an absolute condition beyond time, but expresses a state of permanent relation hetween the dimension of essence and a budding figural quality.
Tbe use of tar, of sandpaper and, in his most recent works, of photographic emulsions become symhols of Lhe wear and of the metamorphosis which time causes in art.
Form is affected hy the intrinsically temporal order of events, which are realized in it as a rule, hirth und development.
Therefore the spuce defined by the work of art becomes virtual in the sense that it is gradually modified us the colourgets swallowed up by the tar or the photographic emulsion absorbs more and more light until u hypothetical point of saturation is reached.
A complex event which traces the trajectory of a process, the work of art is as such this transformation of itself while waiting for its inevitable end to see, like a tree full of blossoms, how its beauty will fade until disuppeuring into the deep, glowing blackness of its substance, leaving behind the glowing re/lection of deuth.
The aesthetic act is something which lives without hesitation, like a never-ending renewal of itself, like u rhythmic relution of u heing with the forces of what is coming.
It is possessing something which cannot be possessed definitively; it is life viewing itself in its extreme limit like absence; it is a saying which includes itself in the double movement which it primes. Stoisa s works do not follow specific rules, like centripetal force in whose nucleus things, with
their generating power, are interpenetrated by the parabola of their existence.
It is the mental screen on which the perspective field of light is projected, as well as its overturning into the field uf durkness.
In the douhle virtual spiral, druwn with the constant alternating of these projections, he puts into action a conjunction of opposites which can formally be compared with the figure of the antimetabole: a figure of overturned duplicity and of reversability capable of projecting thoughts into the field of temporulity.
ln the double interuction of what you oppose, you can overcome the flat, horizontal schematism of the isolution of opposites, to open up to dynamism and verticality, which overcomes the closure and isolation of extremes
And so, through chunge and life, art proceeds towards the darkness of death; and while following the dark roads of death, it finds the light of life.
Bernardo Mercuri

from Luigi Stoisa 1982-1992 - Piacentia Arte - Piacenza (I)

SURFACE AND DEPTH

Placing himself in the heated, unresolved contrast between surface and depth, Luigi Stoisa has chosen the position which operatively allows him to follow the phases
through which the one condition changes into the ntHor
Probably Baudrillard quoted all too often in the last few years - would see in that form of behaviour another way of restoring the equivalence between life and death. Equivalence and - we can add - reversability of the two conditions: each of which is called the threshold of the other.
Stoisa's is obviously an artist's privileged position, or rather a person's who can focalize each single change in an object in one direction or another. In order to do this, the artist adopts another equivalence. 'Let's consume, consuming ourselves'; he wrote a few years ago. In such a way that the first result of the same action means surviving consumption; while the second, achieved only in appearance and passively, represents the end of suruival itself, but not of
wear.
So, going back to Baudrillard, we could say that Stoisa stacks so many cards on the table that he indefinitely pushes away the
moment when the Western man chooses to exclude the concept of death from his actions (an exclusion "which is the very basis of the rationality of our culture'). Wear is therefore a modification which goes on and on in phases, without ever meeting the premises for a final solution: the chemical reaction of consumption hetween the materials stop meaning a logical process and become a pictorial destination projected in time and in matter.
All this helps to introduce that particular concept of change which is so typical of Stoisa and his work. The idea which sustains him is the lack of an end, of a landing place: then there is also, in contrast with the shade which peruades his work, the absence of night and darkness (An absence due to natural causes, on which the determination and decision with which the artist decides to extract the premises for his work, firmly depend).
This means thinking of art as capable of implying the only form of modification in which wear does not hehave in a fatal way: conclusive, yes, but not fatal. In the same way, the disappearance of the iconographic referent - for example, from one of Stoisa's panels - is simply a moment of passing from the one condition to the other: the consumption of the surface actually coincides with the strong affirmation af the depth which preceded it, and which now lets it real essence come forth, capable of referencing itself in its own material consistency.
In short, the disappearance of the image does not only prove its precariousness, but rather its heing an intermediate stage, almost a falsehood. The consumption, through which the physical suhstitutes the ideal, thus embodies a duration and emphasizes an idea of season as a unit of measure, a foundation of order which the rebuilding can be made to start from.
In the same way also Narcissus (who was the emblem of Stoisa's work) sucked up by the tar and therefore into history, creates the premise of his own myth. The fact is that it is the work of art which follows itself up and settles in the bed of an ancient order of natural and therefore insuppressible jlow.
At this point Stoisa inevitably meets photographic paper. Like tar, it brings about a modification which cannat be quantified physically, but can be translated into a behavioural measure. It is a guestion of a surface which can be applied to a number of referents, all equally precarious from the structural point of view. It becomes darker, the more light it receives it is blinded by the glare: but at the same time, it can let out a part of the unrevealed brilliance where it is lacking. Photographic paper is like the chemical eye of all living matter:~ today it shows its brightness and tomorrow its evanescence.
More specifically, in this particular moment of the artist's work, there is a link with the expansions and ahsorptions of Francis Bacon, the great 20th century English artist who Stoisa clearly respects and admires. Moreover, the obsessive flight from light of Bacon's figures results in a total darkening in Staisa: it abandons to matter that which is the only plausible result of light, namely the image.
But the painted image disappears into itse f that is, it gets dragged to the bottom by means of the support which it was resting on. And it is the artist who has brought his work to the threshold of disappearance and has based it on the inevitable alternation - in time and matter - between surface and depth.
A work of art produced in this way remains central, apart from its compositive structure, exactly like a reflecting space remains such, even without rejlecting.
Eugenio Gazzola

from Luigi Stoisa 1982-1992  - Piacentia Arte - Piacenza (I)