Via Alessandro Stradella, 7, 20129 Milan, Italy
ARTISTS:
Marcello Maloberti
Giorgio Morandi (Collezione Ramo)
Marcello Maloberti answers questions from
Irina Zucca Alessandrelli, curator of Collezione Ramo
What is your relationship with drawing and Italian art history of the last century?
I think drawing is a fundamental practice, it is a medium of expression that manages to maintain a naturalness that even painting cannot preserve. Drawing is like a Naked SING without background music, it is the imprint of the world, of pure thought.
I like to think of drawing as a HAPPY HAND, there must never be effort, one of my Hammerings comes to mind: DON'T MAKE THE ROSE DO WHAT THE ROSE WON'T DO. The naturalness of doing must be maintained, it's like an out of control.
It seems to me that a certain Italian-ness comes out in the drawing that I like. Giorgio De Chirico, Arturo Martini, Mario Sironi, Fausto Melotti, Lucio Fontana, Giorgio Morandi, Alberto Savinio are in my DNA, a metaphysics of Italian drawing. I also look at artists of other nationalities, but in the end I always return to the drawings of the Great Italians of the 1900s. ARTISTS ARE SHARABLE IDENTITY, you look at the world through the eyes of drawing, and I am a PADAN METAPHYSICIAN.
Why did you choose this work by Morandi?
I have always loved his drawings, they are lines of vertigo: you either stand on the line or you fall into the void. I chose this drawing by Morandi on the spur of the moment, on instinct, I was thinking about his being obsessive in his subjects, which are then worlds, this line of cups is a bit like circumnavigating the world, like embracing the world.
They are sharp lines, blades, the eye is my equilibrist balancing on Morandi's marks. His drawings are outside and inside time. In the moment of time there is death and life.
Drawing is like looking at life with Giorgio Morandi's eyes, it is a speaking in absence, a speaking in power, it is a feeling his lines stretched in space. Drawing is man's first imprint on the world, it is an idea of the past out of time. Drawing is the language closest to the gaze, to the mechanism of thought, it is thinking with the hands. It is the sublimation of the plane, everything is squeezed into my subtle infra eye. Morandi is a precipice of lines, one of the first minimalists. GIORGIO MORANDI IS THE MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI OF DRAWING.