PEINTING

TIME, MATTER AND ARTIFICE

Time, We are yuite used to considering works of art statically. Por example, the idea we have of a pluriseculurpainting usually corresponds with a fixed image in our minds, an image which repeats the impressions we formed the first time we saw it.~ in a particular moment, place or photograph. Involuntarily we tend to exclude the impact of the time factor before or after that instant. However, the work af art clearly undergoes the transforming action of time: that is why so many people in different periods huve experienced it differently. The transformation is fundamentally chemical and physical, hut, with time, there is also a change in the psychological attitude towards the work. The atmosphere, dispvsition und .humour of art and of the world change towards it.
When Luigi Stoisu used images from past works of art, he did not simply duplicate them manually orphotographicully, as has often happened in recent years. On the contrary: he re proposed them very actively, starting off a process of fast change in them until they finally disappeared. The ineluctable movement of each work, left to itself, towards cancellation, forms part of a general evolution cycle found in hoth the universe and the living: the distinction between life and death is mere conuention. Neverlheless, hecause of this very convention and the veneration which we have for art, we feel obliged to preserue it from the deteriorating effects of time: Destroying a work of art or simply leaving it "exposed to the negligence of time" - also this expression is indicative of an attitude towards art - is something that we consider a real tahoo. At the moment when he provokes the cancellation of the image, .Stoisu is not spurred on hy a desire to reduce or, worse, to denigrate the work of art. He only deviutes our uttention, in particular to the value which the work of art has on the level of ideas and heuuty, us well as its physical consistency, beyond fetishness.

(Installation  Declert Gallery  - Grand 1986)

Matter. Behind the canservation of a work of art, and of things in general, there is also the prohlem uf how lang the experience will last.
We can emotionally take part in an event which is taking place thousands of kilometers from us. It is possihle to reuch the venue of that event in a short time.We can penetrate deeply into its reasons, thunks to our considerahle resources and knowledge. All this gives us a feeling of certainty and of omnipotence which, however, also has as its negative side the feeling of precariousness associated with aur presence in the world. Our forefathers commanded space and its cultural dynamics, not so much for their cupucity to explain phenomena, hut for their strong identification with and mirroring of these phenomenu: svmething which is harder for us to do nowadays.
In u time w.hen muny products are not used more than once and in a time when ingeniousness experiences shorter moments of glory, we aspire to the eternal and live with the obsession of being everlasting. We desire at all costs that things should remain: they must be non-deformable, insensitive to atmospheric agents und their cokmrs muust not chunge with time. But then: when have organisms and things euer been eternal.
Only in recent times hus u duruble muterlal been produced: plastic is possibly the closest to the concept of eternity. .So plastic s useful, economical, with a wide range of uses and operated to such an extent thut it hus become representative of the last few decades, bvt we, ungrateful beings, have started to hate it. Plustic - supple, ready to bend for the most disparate needs, willing to face the attacks of externul ugents and to feign other realities - has emotionally been identified with the artificial, the inuuthentic and the transitory.
What is normully hated most is the so-called superficiality of expression, of passions and of experience in generul. To this is opposed the idea of rooting, of slow absorption and of sedimentation. The durution qf signs and the consistency of form are closely linked to the latter. Luigi Stoisa operates in this opposition, discrediting what at times is a commonplace and establishing a wise contradiction. Stoisa uses uhsorhent or friable surfaces for his images: for this, penetration corresponds to cancellation, the opposite of permanence. In rooting itself, the sign vanishes. To bring this about, his favourite muterials are tar and sandpaper.
The determination with which the artist performs this action can only he defined "iconoclastic". In the 20th century the myth of conservation has become very prominent: few artists, even those belonging to the avant garde, have serenely accepted the idea of their works possihly disappearing. If we think of Italian art in the last few decades one of the few who without complexes accepted the challenge of time and its destructive action, was Piero Manzoni. The physical conclusion of many of his works can be verified less and less: his breath, shit, eggs and living statues deny the ohjective consistency of art. With these works he refused the concept that the qualities yf art lie in the mere physical and formal characteristics of its manifestations.
Iconoclasm is one of the fundamental peculiarities of the art of our century, even if it is ulways disguised by the necessary contractual exploitation of the object-commodity (lf the latter weren't the case, there would not be an art market). Moreover, the need for something sacred, which vanished with the failure of organized religions and with progressive secularization, has found an outlet in the almost religious adoration of works of art. In Luigi Stoisa's work the iconoclastic aptitude, so typical of the 20th century artist, re-emerges radically, without pretence or ambiguity.

Artifice. Art is a complementary construction to what exists in nature. This definition seems to ,fit Stoisa s works better than others. He lives in the country in Piedmont (northwestern ltaly): ever since his childhood he has known that life depends on seasons alternating, on the produclive cycles of the earth and on atmospheric events. It is the farmer's awareness which has definitely determined Stoisa's choices to a large extent. Using materials which in a relatively short time transforms the urtist's handiwork, the artifice of a different form from what we find in nature, means wanting to create in complementary terms with nature. On the contrary, it is possibly hetter to say that Stoisu inserts his work into the flow of things so that it may be part of the creatures of a complex ecological harmony. Works and installations have as common denominator spatial penetration, literally physical with what preceded them.
References have been made to works ofgreat artists: Giotto, Paolo Uccello, Caraval;gio, Van Gogh, Boccioni and Malevic are those that come into mind. Parallel to environmental integration, we also have to consider cultural integration, historic awareness and the desire to engage in conversation with the past (which at times shows itself in more explicit terms. Prohahly it is, among others, Malevic's square - a fixed point for about 70 years of art - which helps Stoisa to express the philosophy of his work: essentially but completely, without taking away anything hut without adding anything either.This elementary tar figure, on a light prepared support, changes little hy little as time goes hy: it fades rep to the point of making holes or cancelling the physical consistency of its support und thercfore itself.
At this point it is quite acceptable to wonder: Where does the value of the work like this question can be asked for Stoisa's work, and, obviously also for the work of many other prominent protagonists of contemporary art.
The value of the work lies in the contribution it gives in the field af ideas. A work af art is precious if it focuses on and spreads ideas, continually and without following fashions (in any case, quite functional nowadays). The production of some artists, from the moment when it is presented for the first time, is always a source of comparison and continuously creates interest and dehate. Art must he considered an idea in happening, a changing form, which exceeds the physical manifestatian of the moment when it leaves the artist's studio and regenerates itself in its constant impact with the outside world.

Giulio Ciavoliello

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

(Narciso - 1984-96 - Berlin)

TAR

Luigi Stoisa's art is fragile, light, intense, oblique, unstable and free. It lives in its deep internal coherence with inedited formal inventions from which echoes of a  more or less recent past emerge. It is an art loaded with a manual and mental sensitivity which acts and reacts through the direct expressivity of the materials involving surfaces, objects, environmental space and time. In his work a rare painting ability continually interacts with a conscious, intelligent installation strategy: the results are strz'king because theyprnduce dimensions suspended bettwin image and material concreteness: never static but peruaded with a subtly vibrating energy.
Right from the beginning in his researchhe chose tar, a material of fundamental importance. It is used as painting-colour, as support-surface for his works and as pure matter with its primary charcteristic. Tar is present in most of his works: it acts as a connecting element, as a catalyzer of aesthetic reactions and as an out line of the artist's actions and gestures. Tar often gives the impression of absolute blackness, a matter of organic origin which radically  opposes light, a negative dark "mirror" which sucks up all colours. One of its specific characteristics is that it reabsorbs, up to the point of making it disappear almost completely, any painted image, thereby priming an inverse process of the artist's work, which in a certain sense tends to nullify his expressive energy.
In this process the temporal dimension is at stake: it makes one think of the ephimeral nature of puinting und of its suhstuntiul evanescence as a concrete, real fact.
An exumple of this cun he.found in his work on Narcissus, which was exhibited in his first onemun show, orgunized hv Tucci Russo in Turin: a pool of tarflowing out of a rusty iron barrel (turned on its .sidel on which the artist painted (quoting Caravaggio) a rejlection of Narcissus' face. Here, in a fuscinuting operation of self reference, the painting re-echoes, also mythically, the enigma of representution und of identity (the painting's and the artist's).
In the other works (with reference to Malevic) the limits of the representation coincide with the uhsoluteness of the hluck squure; the tar surface is no longer only painting but also the place of pulsuting muteriul tension, which is physically evident. Realized on a roomwall, the square becomes a meuningful signal af the space it forms part of. Painted white, it invariably tends to reappear when it progressively uhsorhs the coating and becomes a kind of thresbold towards another space: a dimension uf the negative and of absence, but also of the potential memory of any mental image, which goes beyond the here and now of the surrounding reality. On some occasions Stoisa worked with tur on window panes: in this way he emphasized the threshold between internal and external spuce, und he contrasted the normal function of a window, namely of bringing light into a room and yf seeing whut is huppening outside.
There is not only the relationship of tar with space, but also with the most varied objects of all shupes und sizes: it covers the bottom of basins full of water (with painted goldfish); it appears as tyre trucks climhing up wulls; it duplicates the blackness of school blackboards with the writing of pupils; it fill.s white howl,s placed on shiny metal surfaces it covers lamps and lightbulbs (also here turning light into durkness); it runs into oblique gutters and covers the surfaces of imaginary tables; and so on.
In Stoisu's- work we also find other materials, of course, ranging from glass panels to iron and leud sheets, from the ahrasive surfuce of sandpaper to elements in wood; but it is almost always the presence of tur which characterizes, as it were, the soul of the works and of theirproduction; with its fluid und, ut the same time, thick consistency, it touches nature and culture with the utmost freedom und intelligence, alwuys leaving a clear, punctual sign of the artist's identity.

Francesco Poli

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