INTERVIEW: Marc Vinciguerra

by  George Upton  I  digiQualia.com

You studied Philosophy of Religion at the Sorbonne, but what drew you to sculpture?  

I actually discovered both at the same time when I was seventeen — my room had philosophy books from floor to ceiling and there were clay maquettes everywhere. Then I had to choose a University. The natural choice would have been the Academy of Fine Art but I wasn’t interested in studying mark making and have nothing to say in my art. So I went to study Philosophy and left the arts to read books for seven years. I felt it was necessary to understand the world before you attempting to represent it. 

How did you get into sculpture, did you study or pick it up independently?

When I was studying philosophy at the Sorbonne I was walking down the street after a class towards the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris. There’s this old Amphitheatre where the great anatomist, Paul Richer, taught and there’s a vast collection of crocodile skeletons and elephant skulls. Whenever I had free time I went to the anatomy lessons there, trying to reconstruct the human figure, bone by bone, muscle by muscle. 

I also spent an enormous amount of time at the Rodin Museum, which helped. But I was an emotional sculptor, not a technical one. It was only when I studied with Robert Bodem that my technique skyrocketed. But strangely enough I managed to have important commissions of sculpture in Paris and Los-Angeles before I got any training. My first figure I created, Homo-Crucifix, was sold to five private collections and won the election for the annual show of the National Art Club in New York.

One of the materials you use frequently is bronze. What attracts you to bronze and what do you look for in the materials you use?

I have done a lot of Bronzes both in Los-Angeles and Paris. In Los-Angeles I was bringing my sculptures to be cast and saw a bust of Frankenstein on a shelf. I asked what it was and the foundry workers told me that the daughter of an actor who played Frankenstein in the Forties cast her father’s face and never came to collect it. I’m attracted to bronze because it has a presence, almost a human presence, and it is very solid. I also use a lot of marble. I was trained in the Carrara Mountains where Michelangelo sourced his marble and I look for its sense of light. While brass reflects light, marble radiates light from inside and it is this difference between these two mediums that I cherish very much. 

What role does figurative sculpture play in the art world today?

Today it is important to recognise that we don't know what art is anymore. I feel there are two major movements, contemporary art, which wants to be new without connecting with the history of humanity, and realist art that wants to be old without connecting with the future. In my opinion, neither of these movements are art. In a way there is not much difference today between the urinal of Duchamp and a perfect realist painting as they both avoid the question of the essence of man. But to see a perfect realist painting today that could tackle this question then you would have a masterpiece. An artist who could do that would have understood that art is no longer about the evolution of form but the evolution of content. 

Which artists do you most draw your inspiration from?

When I was a teenager growing in Paris and had a bad week, I would take the Metro to the Museum, climb the fences and look at the Rodin statues, sleeping in the moonlight. It would calm me. Years later I founded Post-Contemporary Sculpture, an organisation that seeks to expands the heritage of Rodin in the 21st century. Through my organisation I organise some of the best sculptors working today who are carrying his mantle. 

I also greatly admire Francis Bacon . He depicted the essence of man in his own time. I find his painting perfectly honest and very sculptural. Francis Bacon is beyond genre though, he is a realist and is not at the same time, but his figures are in unity with a temporality and that makes him great artist. 

Photo London 2015

by  George Upton  I  digiQualia.com

The inaugural Photo London was held across three wings and several floors of Somerset House last weekend. The largest ever exhibition dedicated to photography, with 70 galleries from 20 countries, 3 commissioned exhibitions, 2 installations and a comprehensive programme of talks attracted over 20,000 visitors to Somerset House. 

It’s location, a palatial 18th century building on the banks of the Thames, was notable for avoiding the vast, makeshift gridded expanses of most art fairs, and this added much to the experience. In a setting that encouraged you to wind your way around the stunning architecture of high ceilinged rooms, the photographs are discovered, appearing and disappearing, and exploring the fair became an all consuming experience. 

Here, digiQualia presents a selection from the vast variety of photographs at the fair.

London, 1954 © Marc Riboud, courtesy ATLAS Gallery (London)

London, 1954 by Marc Riboud - exhibited by ATLAS Gallery (London)

ATLAS Gallery exhibited this image of London in the 1950s taken from a series of photographs by the French photographer Marc Riboud that documented his journey ‘From Paris to Peking’. A year before this photo Riboud joined Magnum, the celebrated photography agency that also included Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Cappa, and went on to make his fame as a photojournalist for his extensive reports of the East, especially his unusual access inside Maoist China. 

Evoking a very different London to the one in which it was exhibited, this photograph with its rich contrast, saturated with the language of desolate industry, speaks of the newly found prosperity that would go on to fuel the burgeoning economy of the 1960s. In the same year that this photograph was taken, rationing finally ended in Britain and the austerity which had followed the end of the Second World War nine years earlier began to ease.

In Pursuit of the Object at a Proper Distance #7, escheweiler ©Conor Clarke, courtesy Galerie Pavlova (Berlin)

In Pursuit of the Object at a Proper Distance #7 by Conor Clarke - exhibited by Galerie Pavlova (Berlin)

As the debate on climate change becomes ever more one sided, the evidence for man’s effect on the planet indisputable, stock images of smoke billowing from chimneys into the atmosphere and blocking out the sun have become ubiquitous illustrations to news reports on the subject. Conor Clarke’s photographs then, titled In Pursuit of the Object at a Proper Distance #13, take this trope of man-made armageddon and instead muses on its suitability as a photographic subject, cropping closely despite shooting long distance, and subtly gives comment on the struggle to find the right approach to take on climate change by governments worldwide, when the problem is wrought large in front of them. 

Encouble #32 ©Delphine Burtin, courtesy Gallery Fifty One (Antwerp)

Uncouple #32 by Delphine Burtin -  exhibited by Gallery Fifty One (Antwerp)

Delphine Burtin’s work falls into the long tradition of still lifes, traditionally a style of painting that has always been an arena for artists to demonstrate their skill and compete with their peers. Here Burtin is reimagines still lifes, confronting their role in the age of photography and conceptual art art where the idea has become more important than the skill used to make the work. This is done through the skill used in taking the photograph itself, the image beautifully minimal, crisp and delicate in tone but also through the subject matter - paper. Paper was the foundation of imagery until imagery was digitised. This photograph therefore succinctly looks back through the history of art while demonstrating how far art has come.

Richard Diebenkorn at the Royal Academy of Art

by  George Upton  I  digiQualia.com
The work of Richard Diebenkorn defies simple classification - at once inheriting the tradition of Abstract Expressionism from his American compatriots and at the same time flirting with figuration, often on the same canvas. His paintings constantly question the nature and purpose of painting in a process that explores all aspects of art, what it is and what it will become. A concise and informative survey of the artist’s work at the Royal Academy of Art in London runs until 7th June. Its fittingly simple title - ‘Richard Diebenkorn’ - belies the artist’s uniquely inquisitive and experimental approach to art and art making.

Richard Diebenkorn 
Cityscape #1, 1963 
Oil on canvas, 153 x 128.3 cm 
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Purchased with funds from Trustees and friends in memory of Hector Escobosa, Brayton Wilbur, and J.D. 
Zellerbach 
Copyright 2014 The Richard Diebenkorn Foundation

Cityscape #1 from 1963 evokes the sun-bleached languor of California where Diebenkorn spent most of his life, the shadows stretching long at the end of the day. A nod to Cezanne in the work’s simplified flat plains and colour palette, here Diebenkorn toys with abstraction. After all, at first glance and when encountered at close range in a gallery space the painting, not overwhelmingly large but still sizeable enough to be reduced to unintelligible blocks of colour until you take a few steps back, is an abstracted reality. It is sanitised of the ephemera of street furniture, unpopulated, condensed down to an idyllic, idealised concept of a certain place and time. 

And yet this work has none of the self assured, bold, uniform treatment of paint of his AbEx forbears such as Rothko or Hofmann, or even of his Cali-contemporaries such as David Hockney. For, once you have invaded the painting’s personal space, the forms of roads and condos not only break up into forms but the forms themselves disintegrate to reveal a rough, intensely worked surface, a gentle violence subsisting beneath the indolence and prosperity of suburban California.

Richard Diebenkorn 
Ocean Park #27, 1970 
Oil on canvas, 254 x 203.2 cm 
Brooklyn Museum. Gift of The Roebling Society and Mr. and Mrs. Charles H. Blatt and Mr. and Mrs. William K. Jacobs, Jr., 72.4 
Copyright 2014 The Richard Diebenkorn Foundation 

Cityscape #1 is crucial as it anticipates a series of 125 paintings that Diebenkorn executed between 1967 and 1985, the last eight years before his death in 1993. The Ocean Park works carry through to a purer form of abstraction Diebenkorn’s soft, faded pastel colours, as if they have been left in the sun to discolour.

It would be easy to compare the Ocean Park series to Mondrian’s work -  the thick white bands that break up the geometric, coloured forms, the vague evocation of a mechanised landscape, seem to acknowledge this precedent. But while Mondrian draws attention to the flatness of the canvas through a perfect uniform surface, denying the three-dimensional, liquid properties of paint, Diebenkorn makes a point of the materiality, the almost sculptural nature of painting. His works are riddled with pencil lines that show through painted regions that are not solid forms but fragile and translucent layers of suspended pigment, manipulated in an imprecise, essentially human manner. 

Richard Diebenkorn 
Ocean Park #116, 1979 
Oil and charcoal on canvas 
208.3 x 182.9 cm 
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, museum purchase, gift of Mrs. Paul L. Wattis 
Copyright 2014 The Richard Diebenkorn Foundation 

As a result there is a depth and emotion to Diebenkorn’s paintings. As the painter and Royal Academician Ian McKeever observes there is a pregnant space, a sense of expectation that prefigures the conceptualisation of meaning throughout all of Diebenkorn’s work. The paintings are waiting for the indeterminate landscapes of abstracted place and time, first depopulated and rid of purpose, and now with form obliterated, to be reconstituted from the incoherent mass of pencil and paint. But ultimately Diebenkorn’s work is a celebration of painting, of the simple joy of applying paint to a freshly primed canvas. 

Richard Diebenkorn 
Berkeley #5, 1953 
Oil on canvas, 134.6 x 134.6 cm 
Private collection 
Copyright 2014 The Richard Diebenkorn Foundation 

Alberto Biasi at Tornabuoni Art Paris

by  George Upton  I  digiQualia.com

Despite the eclecticism of contemporary art - the myriad of styles and mediums and concepts - the vast majority of artists working today have attended art school at some point in their lives. It is significant then that Alberto Biasi, who is being exhibited for the first time outside Italy at Tornabuoni Art in Paris, studied not Fine Art but Industrial Design at the Institute of Architecture in Venice. It is clear that this object and engineering based approach has influenced his work which is characterised by its physical space and experiential necessity.  

Alberto Biasi, Senza titolo, 1998 acrylic on canvas
cm 60 x 60 / in 23.6 x 23.6 Courtesy Tornabuoni Art 

Born in 1937 in Padua, Biasi founded Gruppo N in 1959 with Ennio Chiggio, Toni Costa, Edoardo Landi and Alfredo Massironi in 1959. With them he conducted his first “optico-dynamic” experiments which drew him into his first exhibitions of lumino-kinetic art. Biasi likes to consider his work with Gruppo N as separate from his personal work and that rather than the Group influencing his personal work, his individual practice was absorbed by the collective. It was an exercise in stepping back from the ‘cult of personality’ and subjectivity through which Biasi could concentrate on research and exploring new materials. Nevertheless, this spurred Biasi on to develop his work and increased his renown through the 12 exhibitions the group held.

Alberto Biasi, Light prisms, 1962-1965 (detail)
wood, plastic, glass and methacrylate, electric motors and light projectors dimensions variable
Courtesy Tornabuoni Art 

One of the most distinctive works in the exhibition, Light Prisms, was first exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1964 and later in 1970 at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome. The work expands on the theme of movement in the artist’s practice as it consists of four unequal, asymmetrical prisms that rotate, causing ever shifting permutations of refracted light to be cast in a darkened room - specially made over a year and a half for this exhibition. Referencing the scientific approach to optics of the late 19th century that resulted in pointillism, Biasi manages to translate new and original images in a non-pictoral way while acknowledging an art historical precedent. 

Alberto Biasi, Yellow rain, 1992
PVC strips
cm 103 x 88 x 4 / in 40.6 x 34.6 x 1.6 Courtesy Tornabuoni Art 

The title of kinetic artist, however, has never sat easily with Biasi as only a few of his pieces, like Light Prisms, actually move. Instead the majority of his oeuvre, and this exhibition, focuses on sculptural optical effects that require the movement of the viewer. It is this which makes Biasi’s art so engaging (and so unphotographable) - you are compelled to move around the artworks, to engage spatially with them. The viewer becomes the kinetic element of the artwork, a practical manifestation of the idea that art only exists once it has been consumed. It is highly effective - minimal and yet through its almost infinitely varied views, endlessly engaging.

The exhibition runs until 27th June at Tornabuoni Art in Paris.

Alberto Biasi, Variable square image, 1962-1991 PVC strips
cm 98 x 98 x 4 / in 38.6 x 38.6 x 1.6
Courtesy Tornabuoni Art 

Interview: Levi van Veluw

by  George Upton  I  digiQualia.com

A monochromatic room, lined with large, tall bookshelves onto which are neatly placed 1500 icosahedrons, is subject to an inexplicable force. Slowly, leisurely, gracefully, the shelves fall into one another, the shapes drifting to the floor and scattering, until the action slows further and finally stops. 

Archive, 2013, charcoal on paper, 205x120cm. Courtesy of the Rosenfeld Porcini Gallery.

Cohesion is a series of short films based on drawings that aim to explore the struggle between order and the forces of nature. Such fundamental questions about the nature of our universe run throughout  the practice of Levi van Veluw whose major exhibition at Marres Maastrict, The Relativity of Matter, opens in October. The product of a year’s work, the show will cover an area of 400m² and comprise a series of interconnected doors, corridors, atmospheres, perspectives and colours. digiQualia spoke to Levi as he was preparing for the exhibition.

What attracts you to working in wood?

In my work I'm questioning the way we look at chaos. Mankind developed a way to look at the world with their own logic and rules. It's a ongoing conflict between nature and the laws of physics, and our obsession to control our surroundings. The material needed to support this concept - wood is a natural material grown in a organic way. I find it interesting that we shape the organic form of the wood into something symmetrical, something that relates to our logic. The struggle of men to control there surroundings can be found in this reshaping of wood.

SPHERES, 2014, single channel HD video, 9'45". Courtesy of Rosenfeld Porcini Gallery.

When figurative, much of your work is based on photographs and scans of yourself. Why is this? 

I started making self-portraits at art school. The choice of using myself was more practical than conceptual. These works were a way to experiment with something so familiar, in combination with materials that we experience in daily life. These I applied as a structure to transform the face into an object. But as my art evolved, using my face became a choice. At the moment self-portraiture does not feature in my work, but my new works are conceptually linked to a fascination with myself.

There seems to be a tension between technology and the manmade in your work. Could you expand on how you view this relationship?

The choice of not using digital manipulation is quite simple. The whole concept in my work is that it is about reality while appearing surreal. It is a combination of performance, experiment and aesthetics. The use of digital manipulation would interfere with this concept. For example, a cube made on a computer means total control, total perfection, whereas a perfect cube in reality is relative. 

Throughout art history, artists have always been confronted with new technology and materials - it’s nothing new. I think it’s very uninteresting when artists make a point of using new technology like 3D printing. Of course, new technologies are valid, it just shouldn’t be solely about the technology. Anish Kapoor was given the opportunity to work with Vantablack, the blackest substance known, made of carbon nanotubes. The material is already so amazing that I’m curious how he is going to make an artwork that is more than the material itself.

SPHERES, 2014, single channel HD video, 9'45". Courtesy of Rosenfeld Porcini Gallery.

You recently presented the video work Spheres at Moving Image New York. What was your inspiration for this new work and your thought behind The Collapse of Cohesion, the series from which Spheres was taken?

The high-speed camera I used (1500 frames per second) captures the moment where our logic is exposed to the force of nature, turning the controlled surroundings and structure into something new. By exposing this transition the cohesion becomes more comprehensible. 

Bernard Plossu at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie

by  George Upton  I  digiQualia.com

The Maison Européenne de la Photographie was founded in 1996 in Paris. Situated in the Marais, just south of the Pompidou Centre, it is not often listed amongst the top locations in the city. Like its hidden, unassuming entrance, this exhibition space, lecture theatre and library split between a 18th century house and a contemporary extension, is a secret, underrated gem.

In addition to revolving programme of exhibitions, the MEP also draws from its vast collection of over 20,000 works of art, mostly photography, from which it also forms exhibitions. When I went earlier this month, I was introduced to the fantastic work of Bernard Plossu in a comprehensive display of his photographs of Italy.

Bernard Plossu's exotic beginnings, born in Vietnam in 1945, seem to have inspired a wanderlust that has run throughout his life and work. With most of his practice he documents his travels across the world and it is with his lens turned to Italy that the exhibition focuses on at the MEP.

For Plossu Italy has always contained a magic that evokes his distant heritage, art and the landscape, and it is this sense of a personal take on Italy that permeates the photographs. It is undeniably Italy - the vast, changing countryside from Piedmont to Sicily, the beaches, the people and their fashion - but it is not a cliched Italy of tanned fashionistas eating ice cream and pasta. The weather, for example, is often far from the typical Mediterranean sun and there’s a simple truth in Plossu’s Italian clouds and rain that makes the work convincing. As Plossu himself said: ‘bad weather is good weather for a photographer’

But more than this, both the black and white and colour photographs exhibited at the MEP are not rendered in sun-bleached hues but an altogether more nuanced and original palate. For colour, Plossu’s images are faded and the contrast is blurred, as if his film has been developed with chalk. They are rich but subtly so, unnatural in a natural way and timeless but, in the case of many, contemporary.

Although Plossu’s technique for colour is spectacular, and these digital representations do not do it justice, the highlight of the exhibition was his small format, black and white landscape photographs. Tucked away in a low-lit niche, these images were taken over the past twenty years but dismiss being set in a particular time. They are small and to properly view them you have to go close, your periphery washed out by the large white boarder around the image - an effective piece of theatre that disconnects you from your surroundings. Richly contrasted and printed with minute detail, there is nothing lost in the small size of the reproductions and they are all the more engaging for their peephole-like apertures onto ancient hillside villages, black foreboding hills, and glistening modern infrastructure.

This is not the Italy of the cinema and travel brochures. But neither is this the Italy that you can experience. This is Italy as understood by Plossu - a compelling, nuanced and original perspective that liberates a country often calcified by its rich culture and traditions.

All pictures copyright of Bernard Plossu, courtesy of the MEP

Cesare Lucchini at Rosenfeld Porcini

by  George Upton  I  digiQualia.com

In one of his trips to the region in 1841, the English painter J.M.W. Turner made a watercolour sketch of the town of Bellinzona in Switzerland, near the boarder with Italy. In a style that has become particular to the painter, he manages to blend the detail of the buildings with the vast, indistinct forms of the Swiss Alps, drenched liberally but precisely in colour. 

It is fitting that Turner is one of the first antecedents that comes to mind when looking at the large, richly coloured paintings of Cesare Lucchini, who was born in the same town exactly 100 years later. Currently exhibited at the Rosenfeld Porcini gallery in London, at first glance Lucchini’s paintings appear completely abstract. On closer inspection, amidst the colour there appears human forms, most mutilated, often disembodied, amidst the detritus of battle - barbed wire twisting over and into limbs.

Quel Che Rimani, 2011, oil on canvas

From Battlefield to Paradise, then, is an appropriate title for the 74 year old Swiss artist’s work. On meeting him at the exhibition’s opening, the artist had a liveliness that belied his age. It would be easy to presume that the scenes of suffering in his paintings, the remnants of war revealed as the dust settles, are imagined. But, having been born in the middle of the Second World War, in the centre of a continent engulfed in fighting, Lucchini’s work speaks of the destruction that was being wrought in Europe.

Like his contemporary Anselm Kiefer, there is a sense of coming to terms with the mechanised warfare that erupted and subsided around Switzerland in the middle of the last century. Lucchini has always focused on catastrophic events throughout history, reflecting the 2010 oil slick in Mexico, the drowning of many refugees attempting to reach Sicily and the use of child soldiers in his work. In this series of paintings, however, the artist speaks more generally about the human condition and its inability to overcome its limitations.

Those Who Remain - The Fall, 2013, oil on canvas

Significantly, echoing Turner’s sketch of Bellinzona further, through the windows of the many rooms in his paintings Lucchini has depicted snow covered mountains, suggesting he is placing his rumination on human suffering within a context he is familiar with. The Swiss backdrop can also be understood as the unattainable heights that man attains to, but can never achieve. They are the paradise that, invented by man, invented by Lucchini in his paintings, sustains those who face death.

There’s much meaning in Lucchini’s paintings at Rosenfeld Porcini and, as evident in this review, it is easy to overlook their formal qualities. And yet as much as the artist can discuss the universal, elemental nature of humanity, he also has a masterly command of his medium and colour. In these works the barbaric, horrifying scenes are made more poignant, more significant by the striking and attractive way in which they have been painted. Their content aside, Lucchini’s paintings are horribly beautiful to look at. 

A Very Rough Path, 2015, oil on canvas

From Battlefield to Paradise runs until 21st March at Rosenfeld Porcini in London.