We have talked about many different earths in this issue: rare earths, land masses, landslides, excavations. But also earths as territories, places of belonging, places of emotions. Trying not to give answers, but shifting and broadening the questions, we met Giulio Saverio Rossi (painter, class of 1988), who has been investigating the boundaries between matter and image, representation and fruition, for several years. Going back to an age-old question – if a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it, does it make a noise? – we could ask: if a work is lit up at night – when the museum is closed, and there are no onlookers – does it give off light? When we look at a work, when we stand in front of it, how far are we willing to be “illuminated” by such an encounter? How much are we used to directly experiencing things rather than looking at them through the brightness of a screen? Trying to find our way through this forest of questions, we met the artist, seeking to recover the sound of his research and the vibration of his works.
I would like you to describe the earths you decided to use. How did you make this decision to work with these materials? What was the effect you hoped to achieve?
I first became interested in rare earths because of the charm of their name, I was impressed by the sound as if it was something extremely sophisticated, almost unobtainable, but which also referred to its exact opposite, the earth, and from here the bond with the world of pigments, where in fact names play a key role, just think of ultramarine, mummy brown and dragon’s blood, to name but a few of the most evocative. I didn’t know how, and if, I could use these materials, and after a first sketchy idea, in which I would have obtained the rare earths by recycling them from the various technological devices in which they are used, with a reverse process to that of production, I decided to focus on Europium, a rare earth mineral used in the production of screens and background lighting, from which fluorescent pigments are obtained.
I have always been interested in rethinking the boundaries of the pictorial language and the attempt to develop a critique starting from the analysis of its parameters, in which one of the main aspects is the relationship with light. This has been a major issue for many centuries, and, by extension, implies the bond between work and place. Being able to use Europium and its phosphorescence led my research to investigate the dualism of screen and canvas, understood as a dualism between added light and own light, in a mixture of painting and technological dimensions.
The effect I wanted to achieve was that of seeking a relationship with the work that could be associated to our way of using new technologies, referring in particular to when we use a smartphone in the dark before going to sleep or as soon as we wake up, making it part of our biological rhythm and our subconscious. From here came the idea of exploiting phosphorescence to make a night-time flower appear, recalling oriental gardens where plants are designed to blossom at night. At the same time, I wanted to underline the relationship between rare earths and landscape, as today these materials are central to increasingly invasive mining policies.
Nell’opera Il giardino di notte la variazione della luce ambientale trasforma la scala di grigi con cui sono dipinte le superfici in uno scenario di una flora luminosa, secondo un processo in cui l’opacità dei pigmenti si converte in fosforescenza, ossia in una materia portatrice della propria luce. Da questo punto di vista l’opera è particolarmente felice perché sfrutta, in chiave analogica, lo stesso meccanismo che, nelle nuove tecnologie, presiede all’illuminazione dei nostri schermi, generando un’opera che oscilla tra due regimi luminosi opposti: luce ambientale e luce fosforescente.
The canvases appear as phantasmagorical presences, in both the shadows they produce in daylight and their momentary appearance in the dark. How important is the ghost of the image to you, and how does this suit this material?
Ghosts play a key role in my work, and particularly in this context, as they become a point of convergence between image and light. The word itself refers to a series of meanings that come from the semantic roots of eidos (idea, image, simulacrum) and phos (light, ghost), indicating both convergence and conflict. In my work, these concepts come not so much from the Platonic definition on one hand and the Aristotelian definition on the other, but rather from their use during the pre-cinema period in optical devices and theatrical staging, as in Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon or Robertson’s Phantasmagoria. The first was a theatre of natural objects and the second a performance in which the theatre became a space for evoking the ghosts of famous people. My work falls in this sphere, inheriting and redeveloping the poetics of a mechanism of vision, which set out to create immersive settings. It is worth mentioning that, as they found no space in the art world, these practices were downgraded as entertainment, seen as fleeting moments subsequently eliminated by the advent of the cinema.
On the many occasions I have exhibited my work, I have noted a preference for the fluorescent night-time version. In fact, as you underlined in the question, the version with ambient light is also absolutely spectral, these works are in scales of grey/green, soft and lifeless colours in which there is no clear desire to move towards pure abstraction nor to allow figures to emerge. The idea was in fact to create works in a deadlock, constantly waiting, somehow similar to blank canvases. In the version with ambient light, what emerges most is the general configuration of the work rather than any single element. The set up consists of two canvases offset from each other, one canvas resting on a chair, two rolls of canvas in the corners of the room, a rag and some overalls. It deliberately refers to an artist’s studio, a reference that comes both from the dialogue with the final destination of the work, i.e. the Casa Masaccio art centre in San Giovanni Valdarno, and from the reference to Masaccio himself and his brother Lo Scheggia, who were born and raised in this place. And so, the viewer is faced with a place of production, a pantomime of the artist’s studio, where everything is ready to be painted, but nobody is working there. The production on the other hand comes from the action of the europium and its appearance in the dark, referring once more to a final reflection on the word ghost. Karl Marx did this, in relation to optical devices, according to which the transformation from utility object to goods takes place three-dimensionally as a form of entertainment before our eyes, exactly in the way that in the work we can watch the phosphorescence emerge gradually from the painted surfaces. And from here, the last meaning found in my work – and the most current one – is that of the relationship between museum, work and fruition. Il giardino di notte is designed for a museum collection and, consequently, to light up at night, when the museum is closed. The function of the work lies in its phantasmagorical nature, even without any external observers, giving the idea of a self-generating work that lives in space, whether or not people are present, where they are and what they are observing.
