Photo courtesy of Studio Salvati
Photo courtesy of Studio Salvati
Photo courtesy of Studio Salvati
Photo courtesy of Studio Salvati
Photo courtesy of Studio Salvati
Photo courtesy of Studio Salvati
Photo courtesy of Studio Salvati
Photo courtesy of Studio Salvati
Photo courtesy of Studio Salvati
Photo courtesy of Studio Salvati
Photo courtesy of Studio Salvati
Photo courtesy of Studio Salvati
Photo courtesy of Studio Salvati
Photo courtesy of Studio Salvati
Photo courtesy of Studio Salvati
Photo courtesy of Studio Salvati
Photo courtesy of Studio Salvati
Photo courtesy of Studio Salvati, table done in Trend post consumer recycled VITREO & BRILLANTE glass mosaic in conjunction with B&B Biagetti.
Photo courtesy of Studio Salvati, the table is done in Trend post consumer recycled VITREO & BRILLANTE glass mosaic in conjunction with B&B Biagetti.
Exhibiting a Postmodern Imagination: Viaggio nel Giardinio Magico
Antoni Salvati's journey In Search of Lost Time
By Natalie Fasano
It's easy to fetishize the cliches of childhood and the imagination, proffering them as a romanticized devices, typically described to encourage (vaguely comical) vehicles of escape. Used as a sleight of hand to neglect and rhetorically chisel away at the complex personal and sociopolitical conditions that inform and infuse the singular experience of the personal pronoun, "I," its power, as a faculty, often vanishes at the moment of its evocation.
But not in the hands of Italian architect Antonio Salvati of the legendary Studio Salvati.
Instead, this creative and intellectual powerhouse boldly embarked on an aesthetic and philosophical journey that led to “Viaggio nel Giardinio Magico,” the exhibition that debuted at Milan's Salone del Mobile this past April 2010. With the display, which included contributions from came an examination of ideas about nostalgia, childhood and the strange pathways that lead towards the visions we create when we try and re-collect, and in the process, forge our histories.
This interactive exhibit, most aptly expressed as a proverbial tour “down the rabbit hole,” explores both the role and alteration of childhood memories, when transposed onto an adult world. Salvati neither poses as Alice nor desires her youth; instead, he creates a Wonderland in which the past is presented only as a guide, a white rabbit that urges us on our journey yet dissuades lingering too long. Salvati examines this fleeting nostalgia and the strange, ciruitous pathways that lead him to the visions created from imperfect recollection.
Salvati dates the beginning of his “adventure” into the visceral past of childhood at 2001. He felt a desire to more closely examine the dual worlds of children and adults. In his exhibition, he manipulated children’s drawings, or what he terms “scrawls," into finished works of art.
Metaphors abounded, as questions about tension between the "natural" and the "cultural," remained an important subtext in the exhibition. Salvati’s professional manipulation of children’s artwork seeks to validate their personal, often uninhibited interactions with the world around them, without chastisting them as naive and nostalgically innocent.
He granted The Curated Object an interview, after the debut of his exhibition, to explain the process that informed the production of his artistic coup. The depth and profound nature of his inquiry is evidenced by his evocation of art philosophers—explicitly with Winckelmann and perhaps more cloyingly, perhaps, with a Benjamin-ian aura?—art historians, modern French authors and the forerunners in contemporary design technology. His vision is thus astonishingly rich and well-developed. Salvati looks not to the past to relieve it, not to the future to change it, but takes parts of each to better understand the present.
Of his role in the worlds of art and design, Salvati provided this fitting prelude to our interview: “I am the spokesman and the technical mediator of this kind of world [of children]. I would like to be seen as the ‘saviour’ of a part of our childhood, or that expressed by scrawls and drawings. I would like to be the interpreter and the archaeologist of a lost language.”
And our inquiry into the dynamic mind of Salvati: “VIAGGIO NEL GIARDINO MAGICO”
CO: Without having attended the Viaggio nel Giardino Magico, the experience may have been lost in translation. Looking back on the evening, did the experience suit your initial vision? Was there anything in the audience reaction that surprised you, that made you think of the installation in a new light?
My “viaggio nel giardino magico” starts like the adventures of Alice who fallowed the White Rabbit into the wood and then fell into an unknown country, where strange and weird things began to happen. She arrived in Wonderland and got into the lost paradise of childhood.
Today, I keep this interest alive and I enrich my own experience with new creations both in painting and design. The transformation of furniture designed by children (askew and twisted objects) into finished interior design items, treats these drawings as worthy artistic expressions and not as childish scrawls. In this way drafts turn into 3D objects. So drawing becomes an emotional turning point in design. To realize this process I have used the "poetic chromatic frottage," one of my aesthetic innovations and an expressive technique inspired by the experiments made by Max Ernst since 1925.
CO: How do you approach your role as an architect? What moves you to create?—your chosen profession appears not only to be founded in structural beauty, but in the deeper, more philosophical roots of art history and, perhaps, technology.
For me, working as an architect is like making a journey together with every client through their habits and their desires. It is like a voyage to a land that does not exist yet, but that we are creating through spaces which, in the end, are like itineraries and paths. Different sources of inspiration are the suggestions coming not only from the discipline itself, but also from art in general, like music and movies. The reason for that is to allow for potential contamination, from one world to another. I am sure that an architectural project can not be limited strictly to discipline or geometry.
CO: The concept of poetic chromatic frottage is aleotory; it provides the means to arrive at images, concepts and personal truths, yet it has no control over the images themselves. How would you describe this process and your relationship to it?
The poetic "chromatic frottage" is the unifying element of drawings. Mine are postmodern artworks. They are created by one single artist, but at the same time by many (the children who drew them.) They represent the vision of a child changed into a composition created by a professional in visual arts. They also appear to be drawn by the same child, despite different graphic themes. The process of transformation is divided into eight steps.
The first is the selection of the drawing; the second, the enlargement of the chosen draft. In the third stage, the paper is moistened; in the fourth, it is crumpled. In the fifth stage, the paper is opened up and dried; in the sixth, the drawing is stuck on to supports. In the seventh, the drawing is imprinted with wax and pencils. In the final step, the painting emerges and chosen drawing is fixed. Thanks to these operations, the “discovery” of an underlying secret is both integrated and imprinted upon the world of adults.
CO: “Dada, surrealism, and Futurist all applied an aesthetic of shock and a panoply of approaches in order to transcend the linearity of normal consciousness: free association, frottage, and automatic writing. Such was the path to the subconscious and the dream.” Can you be fairly considered a disciple of the Dadaist and Futuristic movements, described above? What is your interpretation of this point of view?
Yes, I am a follower of Modern Art movements like Dada and Futurism, but most of all I am a disciple of Galliano Mazzon, a painter who took part in the “movimento arte concreta” and was a state school teacher since 1946. He created a unique movement, the “Scuola Mazzon”. It had great influence in Italy, but especially abroad. In thee years, the school exhibited its pupils’ works throughout Europe and the United States. These were also enthusiastically welcomed by celebrated artists.
Picasso, when visiting an the exhibition in “La Hune Gallery” in Paris in 1953, wrote in the guestbook: “We need to learn from these kids, not they from us”. Marc Chagall viewed a private collection in California, and said: “An expert would not have been able to create such a mysterious portrait of Fiorella Cesana”.
CO: The multisensory approach to art has been rendered more accessible in the “Age of Technology,” which we are arguably still in. Though electricity was still new in his time, Tesla left behind volumes of notes describing, in detail what he would do, if human intelligence could provide the means. Hawking’s time machine, Da Vinci’s machine gun; all were envisioned before the pieces could be put together—are you similar to these men? How would you take your “Magical Garden,” your work, further; would you?
As far as design is concerned, with this method children are part of adults’ scenario. They are provided their own feelings and objects, scenarios illustrated by pure fantasy. It is an experience best explained as Proustian; it is movement from the “’lost child’ to the ‘recovery child.’ A wind of freedom blows in a squared, mechanical and scheduled world.”
Through transgressive design, objects shift from formal functionality to pieces of a boardgame. It is, however, through the use of technical knowledge and history that artists can successfully understand and utilize unconscious, creative methods to generate meaning. It was the same with Leonardo da Vinci, Pietro di Cosimo and Max Ernst, whose frottage is for painting the equivalent of automatic writing.
CO: Can truth, artistic beauty and perhaps reality be defined in images arrived at by chance, par hasard? Is the purest path to knowledge, of not only ourselves but also our quality as human beings, to be discovered in “automatic” and uninhibited reflection?
Jean Dubuffet said:
“Children’s drawings make me a little bit confused. I usually like them very much. Children have less inhibition than adults. Inhibition created by the prestige of the official art. What they do is for fun, without being scared that people could laugh at them. They do not feel the pressure to create something beautiful in a proper way. Children can do whatever they want. This is the right attitude towards a genuine artistic creation.”
CO: Why do you select the memories of childhood as the best vehicle to achieve your desired audience reaction? Did you have a desired reaction; what did you hope that your audience would feel?
I hope that my audience would let me take them by their hands into a journey in their past experiences. I hope they reconnect with their childhood, to temporarily detach themselves from the tough, common, boring and conformist world.
CO: Are there any memories or emotions from your own childhood that you had forgotten and that resurfaced over the course of this project?
Our vision of the world, its images, its dimensions change while we are growing up.
I found myself adult in a smaller world, an inverted relationship, but my world is still colourful.
Johann Joachim Winckelmann in his History of Ancient Art (1764) said of the relationship between beauty and colour: “Colour is part of the beauty, but it is not the beauty. It highlights it and its shapes. But, since white rejects most of the light, it is more perceivable. Whiter a body is more beautiful it would be and when it is naked it would look bigger than it actually is.”
For me as an architect colour is also a moving element when I am in front of works of architecture this is an attitude typical for children.
CO: Is there anything else you would like to say about exhibit? Will you continue to grow in this process, to utilize it in future projects?
I would like that my experiments go beyond art and design to reach architecture, where colour has been essential in many projects. My wish to enrich and transform spaces with colour will realize itself in a naïf plan that will include production sites, big spaces for shopping malls, urban interventions and residential areas… I do not understand why the house issue should always be dealt with heavy seriousness by adults who do not remember their past.
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