Clima Gallery

Via Alessandro Stradella, 5, 20129 Milan

TUE - SAT 11:30 A.M. / 1:30 P.M. - 2:30 P.M. / 7:30 P.M.
SUN CLOSED

ARTISTS:
Vijay Masharani
Lucio Fontana (Ramo Collection)

Vijay Masharani answers questions from
Irina Zucca Alessandrelli, curator of the Ramo Collection

Give a definition of what drawing is for you.

Inspired by Herbert Marcuse's Reason and Revolution , I have attained an awareness of drawing as an intentional displacement of the subject's entire activity on the page, just as the delimiting and dissolving of solid objects into a multitude of relationships is recorded in the trace of accurate mark making, arid inscriptions of dust and dirt, scratch carvings in the fibrous pulp of paper. A kind of synecdoche for drawing practice in general - leading upward and outward - arises in my more recent works.

What is your relationship with drawing? And with the history of Italian art of the last century?

Essentially, drawing is the origin of writing and thus closely related to it. Put another way, sensitive line drawing is the fundamental practice through which the historicity of the present and all its existing categories can be reached and, to that extent, affirmed as contingent, artificial, radically foreign, and already obsolete. I have come to an awareness of drawing as a practical expression of my search for a systematic knowledge of social-historical abstractions, and it is for this reason that my work takes on a diagrammatic, fractal, and psychedelic quality. As such, the "history of Italian art" does not figure in my work except insofar as "history," "nation," and "perception" are among the issues that can be reflected upon through -- and which turn out to consist fundamentally of -- the repetition of inscriptions and reinscriptions of dark signs.

Why did you choose this work from Collezione Ramo?

I am not interested in the more explicit intentions of the fountain drawing, which represents a study sketch of elements that would later be used in the construction of a piece of furniture. Rather, I am interested in the serial work, the elaboration in repetition, and the use of iteration, from which certain constant themes could be deduced, such that, among the eight squares of the drawing, there is no clear exemplary abstraction that can sum up all the others. In other words, Fontana's Untitled study exposes differences without a hierarchy, attempts at graphic delimitation in haphazard lists that could repeat themselves endlessly, were it not for the fundamental limit of the page, which corresponds to exactly the same limits with which we collide daily - space, time, and illness.