Edoardo Piermattei: Ephemeral, forever

Absence, as I understand it, is a form. If you look at art history, in our culture it is normal to give a face, an image, a color to an absence. The key reference point in this conception is the history of art, which historically has worked on images coupled with the figure of the present-absent number one: God. Have you ever seen an image that reminds you of God? That’s what I try to do.

I have always been impressed by Leon Battista Alberti’s construction of the Sacellum of the Holy Sepulcher in the Basilica of San Pancrazio, which was designed on the model of a reliquary. Even the reliquary itself was actually a scale reconstruction of the Church of the Nativity, in Jerusalem. A model that contained differences, errors, that was not perfect but was designed to remind and contain the idea a huge, grand structure. From this model, Alberti built the Chapel of the Nativity. By changing scale, the work retains the dimension of a work but also becomes, in power, the model for a gigantic work. All movable works are works in themselves, but I always imagine them as potential sketches. All my works are actually great monuments, or missed monuments, they may always grow; they tell of the desire, the idea of always being able to do something bigger, of not putting a limit on what you can do.

I’m not sure that ephemerality in art is opposed to the ambition to last forever – Who would call Chris Burden’s “Shoot” or a performance by Antonio Rezza ephemeral, even if it lasts the time of a performance? Or thinking of a play, a pastry from Caffé Platti: are these works ephemeral? Everything has the ambition to last forever.

Obviously there are works and artists that I love and like very much, but I’m not sure that a “paradise” of mine would look like a collection. I generally don’t really like objects, canvases, museum-like displays, they’re kind of boring. Here, if I think of a paradise, I imagine it more as a place, a where, not something that is contained in that place. Like the Lascaux Caves, places within which those works have found their space and at the same time works in themselves.

I was born in Offagna, in the Marche region of Italy, and as a native of the Marche region, for sure, I have been greatly influenced by the imagery of worship, with which, after all, our culture is steeped. There is one part of the liturgy in particular that I really like, when the substance of which Jesus Christ is made is declared, and the formula is “Generated, not created.” My opposition is that art is always created and never begotten, almost an opposite of the divine formula, but it remains a great form of inspiration.

I actually believe that one can be emotional people, emotional artists, however, I am convinced that art itself cannot be.

Contro l’interpretazione is the title of a book by Susan Sontag, I feel the same way. In the interpretation of art there is a lot of vanity. Perhaps it is more interesting to reason about the term, if an idea, a work, is called “politically correct,” it seems to me that the speaker has already chosen a position. I don’t find myself being so rigid on the subject. A person who talks about political correctness implies that someone is incorrect, and this generates a very dangerous intellectual drift, with “incorrect” being used as a synonym for revolutionary, for “cool.” The term itself carries with it an intellectual moralism in which I recognize little.

A Mickey Mouse book that came out on 5th January 1992, which I received as a present for my 30th birthday.