Via Lazzaretto, 15, 20124 Milan, Italy
ARTISTS:
Marco Andrea Magni
Luciano Fabro (Collezione Ramo)
Marco Andrea Magni answers questions from
Irina Zucca Alessandrelli, curator of Collezione Ramo
What is your relationship with drawing and Italian art history of the last century?
"Life is what is produced in the very act of exercise as an internal delight in the act, as if by dint of gesturing the hand would eventually find its pleasure and use, the eye by dint of looking would fall in love with the vision, the legs, bending rhythmically, would invent the walk. "1 For me, drawing is the biography of an encounter involving matter, space, behavior, and art history. Drawing is the first measure and the first vision we have: a dialogue between first ideas or real projects to be translated into the three dimensions. For me, art history is my history, an open dialogue and a yard of necessary confrontation. Art historians always offer a certain perspective on history that needs to be rethought, thoroughly studied and returned in a new light because we are not only talking about works, but also about biographies, lives and great labors. Drawing in relation to art history often speaks of a childlike amazement restored through an adult consciousness. For Collezione Ramo I present two types of drawings, Manifesto and Tirabaci. Manifesto speaks of an urgency: to reflect on the world and its nature. Manifesto presents the possibility of communication through its medium: the sheet - world. Cellulose and calcium carbonate (marble) have the possibility to transform into a white sheet and are its raw material. The white sheet refers back to writing, it is the exhibition of a place of depiction, it is the power without the act, an element that depicts itself. The white sheet conceals itself, slips from presence, throws into the background everything that might hinder its being a mere place of depiction. The place of depiction is poised, a threshold, a nothingness of presence, it stands in the middle. Hence the rebirth and revenge of nature: the world itself as the sheet is self-exhibited and exposed as a body in a new landscape made of trees (cellulose) and mountains (calcium carbonate). The second series of Tirabaci drawings is about an optical phenomenon produced by light reflected back to its source by a cloud (an effect called "Glory" or "Brocken's Spectrum"). More concretely, it is an illusion of a magnification of the shadow cast by the body from the observer, when the sun is low, on the surface of the clouds surrounding a mountain on which the observer stands. It is usually characterized by the presence of a luminescent corona around the head or otherwise at the highest part of the figure. This luminescent corona or halo in dissolving due to the movement of the cloud (in layers, bulges and cumulus) takes the form of a combing: the Tirabaci.
Why did you choose this work by Luciano Fabro?
Luciano, in addition to being my teacher in his last period of teaching at the Brera Academy in Milan, was a great artist who was able to translate the experience of art into the possibility of shared exercise. I chose and fell in love with a drawing of his that he called The Weight of a Hair. He himself in a beautiful and valuable book of his called Rules of Art gives back through conversations held at the Academy and the Artists' House great possibilities and insights. "I have noticed that all novelties of thought are born with a dialogue. You don't lay out theory, but you tend to make things come out of a dialogue."; and again, "The key is that you want to bring out a range of powers, that you have a positive attitude toward the world, because
1 Giorgio Agamben, Karman. Short treatise on action, guilt and gesture, Bollati Boringhieri, 2017
try to bring power, which is neither negative nor positive, to the state of being realized." Luciano also speaks of drawing: "You are going toward drawing: understanding all the lines as you carry them; matter is always made up of lines that accompany each other. "2 The weight of a hair is a line in power, an aptitude for delicacy and for something much more layered that can only arise through dialogue: with ourselves, with each other, with life.