Lanusei - Sardinia - Italy – Valerio Pisano – Contemporary archaeologist
Free Arts 04/02/2024 Art and Literature
By Anna Landolfi
There are artists who follow the evolution of a society which feeds their creativity. They would not be so, if they had not been touched by observing the customs and daily rituals which are carried out automatically in ones’ everyday life.
Like biological clocks, marked by the rhythm of life, work, family relationships and the passing of time. I observe, bored stiff, how I live, because little of what happens startles me. Art evolves. In that, there is no doubt.
Valerio Pisano
Whether it is a message to beauty or a cry of desperation, it is in any case an act of condemnation and that is a right to make an action public, be it subversive or repressive.
Well. I came across a revolutionary worker of the arts, I use this term because the word artist is too experiential. He carries out controversial actions starting from the banality of an object, which we no longer notice, to the point of transforming it and making it perpetual and lose its intrinsic value as a pen and I am literally shaken up by this.
He makes the common object, an endlessly repeated media subject just like the works of Giuseppe Capogrossi (1900-1972), an Italian painter who painted entire brick facades with the same brush stroke, transforming them into a conceptual fresco.
The observer interpreted his sensations without meaning. A paradox? Yes!
Valerio Pisano does this. His Bic pen is his contemporary metaphor: he uses it without transforming its structure, he produces a graphic module, a decorative panel, a garment, a sculpture.
And here, I ask for your full attention, as he replies when I ask him:
From pure graphics to sculpture, you take a giant leap in art, coining a term that I call Archaic Pop Art.
A gamble! You "dare" to make an icon out of a commonly used object, such as a very banal ballpoint pen. But you do more: you send the same object back in time and create an archaeological excavation.
The future is predictable, the past has happened. Do you know what I think? That your genius is a teaser. Historians would be astonished to find a bronze statue holding a contemporary object. Doesn't this make you smile?
It gives me more than a smile. It satisfies me to know that the journey which began when I was a child, as an escape from lessons, has progressed and still accompanies me today.
The thing I like most is that it's not over yet. Further progression is planned and will be shown as soon as it is finished.
My Bic pen has already walked through history, appearing in some hieroglyphics found in Egypt. It was represented in the Nazca Lines, in famous paintings of various eras and in Leonardo da Vinci's notes.
It has always appeared though on paper. Now with its bronze casting, I have crowned this very fortunate journey.
In all these creations, teasing is an ingredient that I use as much as possible. Just the fact that a pen retracts and reproduces itself in hundreds of situations opens up an immense world.
It can transform into almost anything or anyone.
The irreverence of Valerio Pisano lies in this genius. Taking a modern object back in time and turning it into an archaeological find. It's a backwards in time operation. The extraordinary thing is that the excavation brings to light a contemporary object.
It confuses us. A bronze artefact eroded by time. A Bic and its ancestral shape which, given the artist's Sardinian origins, take me back to the Giants of Mont'e Prama. Wonderful Nuragic sculptures found very recently in the area of Sinis of Cabras,
But those sculptures come from a very distant past. Valerio Pisano's bronze statues are something from today! So much so that I dared to define them as Archaic Pop Art.
Read on:
The "tease" has something science fiction-like about it: it undermines the hypocrisy of academics who, with boastful intellectual pomposity, make art an activity for the "few", as if it were a privilege for the elite of culture.
A bronze statue Bic pen is a mockery. It's a slap in the face to subtle respectability. You are a revolutionary. Did you know that?
No. I understand it now. And I like it. I have always wanted to be free to create whatever comes into my head in the most instinctive and even capricious way without following any rules.
Without shame and fear of being judged and with no fear of not being liked. Voice of the verb TO CREATE. This is what I have tattooed on my soul.
In 1984, three university students from Livorno found three heads in a canal which were attributed to Amedeo Modigliani. It was a sensational discovery. Streams of articles, journalistic reports, press conferences and important art critics were emotionally involved.
The discovery had worldwide resonance. The three students were guests on international television programmes and became famous. It turned out that the heads were unfortunately fake. What followed was a scandal, critics were mocked and journalists were furious.
The prank of the century. Well, apart from the enormous scandal, what the young students carried out was a message to the articulated and complex antiquated structures of academic art.
A synthesis that ended in a prank, which is not a joke: (they are very different things), undermining the system of academic presumption that has always supported Art as a component for the few, that is, the cultured (sic!).
Art belongs to everyone. It belongs to mankind; it belongs to the people. Art is on the street (Banksy). The jugglers you meet at traffic lights, the ‘madonnari’, the itinerant groups of vocalists on the street corners ( Måneskin).
I continue with my questions:
You create a revolution with intellectual detachment. With your Bic bronze statues, you create something visionary: in 4,000 years, your bronze statues will be what the bronzes of 2,300 BC are.
Your surprising artistic project is that the subject is not a human or animal figure, an everyday artefact or a god. It's a Bic pen! That is, an object from the 21st century. Do you realise that you will annoy many art "critics"?
Let me explain: the "wise men" of the arts almost seem to be the "chosen ones" of the Muses. Finding a bronze artefact dating back to the 21st century AD will make them blush.
Now that these bronze statues have been baptized with the name of "Archaic Pop Art", they have a godmother, they exist and have "serious" intentions, they certainly can't worry and I can't worry about anyone getting annoyed.
I do all this because I enjoy it, not to please any critics. I'm really lucky to receive more compliments than criticism.
Furthermore, luckily the world is full of artists to admire so the critics can avoid getting annoyed and prevent any blushing. BC and AD since we are traveling through time.
Valerio Pisano links the contemporary era with the past. He transforms and replaces today with yesterday, re-proposing objects as ancient artefacts.
He historicizes them and changes them into a humanoid (see the bronze Bic statues showing human features: the bow, the shields, the woman), all seen and reproduced with the lost wax casting technique, a thousand-year-old procedure for bronze casting and which characterizes the Sardinian identity.
Another planet. Another culture. Uncontaminated except by the sea and the wind.
Anna Landolfi.
