10 Questions with Marco Almaviva

Marco Almaviva (1934 -) is an Italian painter, the protagonist of a long artistic journey that began in Milan in the early 1960s. Son of Armando Vassallo—an established sculptor who, in the 1930s, was excluded from the public exhibition circuit because he had defied the conventions imposed by the fascist regime—Almaviva initially approached the art world to reconstruct the dramatic story of his father. In the Brera environment, he came into contact with avant-garde groups and met Giorgio Kaisserlian, co-signatory of the First Manifesto of Spatialism. Kaisserlian confronted Almaviva with the disruptive consequences of Lucio Fontana's work: by breaking the support, the founder of Spatialism had irreparably altered the two-dimensional foundation of painting. Faced with the nullification of painting, the only way to be a painter would have been to create a painting without having a canvas (or a pre-established surface) on which to apply color. This is the eventuality that was formulated in 1965 with Kaisserlian, conceived as an unfeasible hypothesis to encapsulate the revolutionary character of Spatialism. But Kaisserlian's hypothesis itself demanded a direct and paradoxical comparison with the pictorial medium (one had to be a painter), as Fontana's pivotal moment originated within the realm of painting itself. On the other hand, for Almaviva, the world could not be disregarded under the banner of a purely self-referential approach to art. At the outset, the choice of painting assumed the role of bearing witness to a natural reality that presented itself as an organized system permeated by a primal instinct of domination. The painting stood as a representation that detached itself from the conventions of naturalism and the epigones of informal art to convey the inextricable tangle of natural forms engaged in an unceasing struggle for existence. Almaviva interpreted this state of affairs through the lens of Tonaltimbrica (1967): a two-dimensional painting in a single figurative layout characterized by a bristly and subtle texture of timbral color that defines the tonal masses. His relocation from Milan to Genoa (1969) coincided with the elaboration of a new pictorial code, named Filoplastica. The timbral sign within the filoplastic structure acquired the nuances of a soft filament that entered into symbiosis with the background draft. Evolving from a testament to life's drama, Filoplastica became a metaphor for continuous research that plunges into the depths of matter. Following an artistic journey comprising over 50 solo exhibitions, Almaviva recently revisited the fundamental question of the fatal consequences of painting due to Fontana's cuts. In 2019, Almaviva produced a series of artifacts, the Archetypes and the Rectoverso, which structurally correspond to the hypothesis formulated in 1965. These are artworks in which the painting is created independently of the pre-established data of the surface. They are effectively "oils on canvas" produced without the canvas to paint on. The possibility conceived by Kaisserlian has thus come true, ushering in a novel perspective for painting that is renewed in terms of a "wholly literal" artwork, free from the conditioning of flatness.

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ARTIST STATEMENT

“Art presents itself to me as the most immediate and, at the same time, contradictory attempt to give meaning to our existence. It is essentially an investigation. And even though it often becomes aware of the theoretical fragility of its own acquisitions, it stubbornly continues along its path, animated by an irrepressible desire for knowledge. Painting has condensed within itself all the weight of this labor, from representing the world to analysing one's own identity. An itinerary that I wanted to follow in its entirety, trying to broaden, in the spirit of innovation, our still limited realm of knowledge.” — Marco Almaviva

INTERVIEW

Hello, please introduce yourself to our readers. Who are you, and why did you decide to be an artist in the first place? 

I'm Marco Almaviva, an Italian painter engaged in the field of visual arts for about 60 years. Since my beginnings, I have viewed art as a process of knowledge capable of expanding our awareness of ourselves and our "placement" in the world. In this sense, my work, even before on an aesthetic level, should be considered in light of the contribution I have been able to make in terms of innovation. Various circumstances brought me closer to the world of art. One fundamental reason was my need to reconstruct my father's artistic story. But my full and irreversible involvement essentially depends on the same existential condition of man, who sees in art a possibility, however faint and inadequate, to react to the drama of life and attempt to grasp the meaning of things.

You have a long and successful career and have witnessed many changes in the art world. What was the art world like when you started? And what do you think improved over the years? Do you see an increasing democratization and more openness?

When in Milan, between the late 50s and early 60s, I began my "adventure" in the art world, and I found a dynamic and stimulating environment. There was a total openness to everything, from suburban circles to the most famous galleries in the city center. Certainly, by many artists and, in particular, by avant-garde groups, there was the desire to preserve their identity even with a certain distrust of others, but a dynamic conception of art prevailed, however, based on comparison. Even if it was sometimes not openly admitted, there was curiosity, if not the declared interest, about what others were doing, out of fear that someone might discover something new. The key principle was that of innovation: art as a research that pushed artists to confront each other. And this interaction took place "publicly", but primarily within the circle of artists. We were aware of the importance of institutional recognition: participation in the Biennale, and presence in public exhibitions, for example. But, in any case, the underlying belief was that nothing could alter the basic data of the artist's proposal. Even if there had not been the definitive recognition of Fontana at the Biennale of 1966, for all of us, Fontana was and would have remained the founder of Spatialism. No one, not even his detractors, would deny that the "holes" and the "cuts" were evidence of an innovation that was unique to Lucio Fontana. Since the end of the 70s, the intervention of public institutions in the field of art has become predominant. This has happened despite the awareness of the inherent risks. At an important conference in 1980, there was no hesitation in defining the museum institution as "hegemonic apparatus", "control structure", which would alter the original function of the "art story". I remember Benjamin Buchloh talking about an artistic work now reduced to a sort of "civil service" within the radius of public intervention, with the inevitable renunciation of any real critical commitment by the artists. The consequences are quite evident with the rise of "public monumental sculpture": the interplay between institutions and private capital has led to the spectacularization of practices, gigantism, and the material opulence of forms. Art seems to have become a matter of scale. It's clear that there's little democracy in these dynamics. Even the (partial) return to easel painting, as seen in the Transavanguardia movement, has not substantially changed the situation. It appears that we have returned to a smaller and more manageable dimension of art -after all, we are talking about paintings and artists. In reality, what is the object of democratization is the intention, at the individual or group level: everyone can make art. But the gap between established artists and "marginalized" has widened enormously. Art is what is recognized as such by the institutionalized system of art, regardless of the specific and private reasons that led the artists to create their own works. This, in a nutshell, is a well-known theory that seems to accurately depict the state of art today.

You come from a family of artists, as your father was a Sculptor in the 1930s. What did you learn from him? And how did this environment influence your practice?

My father's story was dramatic. He came into conflict with the fascist regime in the early 1930s. He did not accept its intrusion into art, the violation of the intimate dimension that the regime perpetuated in favor of the exterior of an obtusely celebratory art. When I was born in Novi Ligure in 1934, he was trying to reorganize his work. In Novi, just that year, he held an exhibition in which he had deliberately omitted to remember the recognition that, a few years before, he had received from the official critics, starting with Ojetti. The following year, my mother died. Now marginalized by the system, my father returned to Genoa, where he continued his activity in the context of funerary sculpture. I was contended by the two families. On the one hand, the upper-class and aristocratic world with rather important ties and kinship -my paternal grandmother was related to Giovanni Lanza (the Prime Minister who in 1870 decided on the conquest of Rome) and the Laganà family, the bankers who controlled the Teatro San Carlo in Naples and one of the most renowned artistic foundries of the time. It was a world, for me as a child, filled with perfumed and well-dressed women, of villas with halls full of mirrors and with tables lavishly laid. But above all, there was the fascination of transoceanic navigation, embodied in the figure of my paternal grandfather, Inspector General of Lloyd Sabaudo. On my mother's side, there was the reality of work, the vast world of the countryside. The raw impact with natural reality. While waiting for better times, I was entrusted to my maternal family, also for the presence of my mother's sisters, who could take care of me. My father represented sculpture for me. At first, I lived with my maternal grandparents next to a brick kiln. And with pride, I could show my father the heaps of clay from which I extracted the material for my terracotta. Everything seemed to come naturally to me, with extreme ease. Perhaps the deepest lesson dates back to the death of D'Annunzio. My father brought me a magazine with the image of the Vate on the cover. I asked him who he was, thinking of a hero or a leader. He replied, "A poet!" I couldn't have any idea of what art was, but I certainly understood that it was a particular sphere and that no one could dominate artists and poets. 

How did you develop into the artist you are today?

I start from the assumption that the artist is a person in difficulty. Difficulties that primarily concern his existential condition. This means having to seek answers being aware of the precariousness of one's own means and conceptions. And, in any case, it is always a question of giving concrete form to one's thoughts. It's always a question of representing a vision of the world in some way. And how to do it? When the style and techniques you adopt are already known, almost inevitably your thoughts lose consistency. In our work, it's the concepts that must account for the material and the procedures we follow. The indispensable need for originality, therefore, exacerbates the already precarious condition of the artist. All of this entails a constant search, which not only concerns the means used but also requires a serious critical reflection to be aware of one's results (and to defend them). I became what I am, as an artist, because I had to cope with an immense amount of difficulties and restrictions.

How would you define yourself as an artist today? And how did this definition change over the years? 

Let's start with a personal and, maybe, psychological note. I was defined as a "stubborn" artist. And I largely agree with this definition. Stubborn is someone who pursues his goals without giving up, despite adverse conditions. But it can also be read negatively as the condition of those who don't want to change their ideas, despite the evidence and strength of the contrary reasons. Well, I began my career as a painter in a context where painting was declared dead. The decisive turning point, as we know, had been made by Fontana -in Milan between the late '50s and '60s, there was no other topic of conversation. Avant-garde artists, consequently, defined themselves as "aesthetic operators" or in a thousand other ways, provided that their distance from painting was clear: the conceptual nature of art couldn't be confused with the low materiality of the pictorial medium. The reversal occurred with the so-called "return to painting" of the 1980s. But in a context in which the painter would prove to be a cultured artist, through the free citation of the models and solutions from a more or less recent past. In essence, the painter's work was redeemed, but without the possibility of speaking of innovation (and, even less, of avant-garde). Despite some uncertainties, I have always defined myself as a painter. And this for two simple reasons, linked together. The first is that I was convinced that painting still had something to say in terms of originality (and, in this regard, I created the Tonaltimbrica and the Filoplastica). The second is that I thought that the answer to Fontana's cuts had to come from inside the painting itself, by means of a painting that was realized without the premise of the surface on which to paint. After a few decades, I learned from Jaleh Mansoor that Fontana, in order to destroy "the actual plane that had been the unquestioned ground of centuries of painting", had to assume "an identity as a painter". She is absolutely right: Fontana "got his hand dirty" in the pictorial medium. At this point, I don't see why I shouldn't continue to define myself, too, as a painter.

Let's talk about your work. Why did you choose painting as your preferred medium? What does it represent for you?

Since I was a child, with my eyes closed, I saw, as I still see, images that are almost always in motion. They're often colorful, sometimes simply in chiaroscuro. It's hard for me to stop them, to find a fixed point of reference. They're bright and impalpable. Soon, I felt the need to capture them to know what they were. I could think that they were heavenly images, as I couldn't find anything corresponding to the world around me. Sculpture could have been a possibility to materialize them, but I would have lost a substantial part of their characteristics. Painting instead would have allowed me to somehow preserve their essence. This is the fundamental reason why I consider painting a research activity. Of course, I was aware of the practical distinction between my internal visions/representations and the world of real things. But in any case, my images, as far as I consider them representations, still exist. This is also why, as a painter, I have always had some difficulty in accepting the canonical distinction between abstraction and figuration. What appears as my representation with an indefinite form is an object of vision, just like things in the external world. It is not a matter of expressing the formless reality of our unconscious through figuration. There will certainly be this aspect as well, but the representation already has the characteristics of an image that could be reproduced faithfully, if it did not disappear so quickly in my mind.

You define art as an Investigation. What do you wish to investigate with your work? What themes and subjects are you most drawn to?

It is an investigation because we are faced with the enigma of existence. Initially, this need manifested itself in me by acknowledging the divergence between my visions and the natural reality. This was presented itself as the scenario in which the drama of life unfolds, in which living beings are constantly engaged in the harsh struggle for survival. Nothing idyllic. A bleak scenario that couldn't be justified by any spiritual principle. Painting, then, had to become, first and foremost, a testimony of this state of affairs. But precisely for this reason, it couldn't simply be an innocent window open on the world. I had to go beyond visual immediacy to bring out the structural character of the violence that pervades the world, starting from the biological sphere. But to take this first necessary step, I had to find suitable means in the realm of painting to "depict" the natural sphere. This is how the Tonaltimbrica was born: tangles of phytomorphic masses and animal entities in close and consanguineous interpenetration with the human dimension (but in the embryonic state). Probably only by going through this phase, I could have returned to the mental image. First, I had to address the issue of the origins of the world decisively, just starting from the internal mechanisms on the level of biological genesis. It was a matter of clarity, even on the "ideological" and moral level, against all those conceptions that offered me a consoling and mystifying view of reality. Once this phase was overcome, I could return to my representations, now conceived as clues to possible worlds and, for this reason, stimuli for further research. After all, Tonaltimbrica considered the natural sphere as an intermediate realm between the immediacy of what is seen and the possibility of a world that needed further investigation. However, this transition couldn't legitimize any metaphysical escape to a paradisiacal world that would redeem the drama in nature. The new path would remain within matter. Consequently, the multiplicity of situations of this world had to be interpreted as manifestations of a basic material substratum, as if they were germinations of a primordial substance. This new conception evidently implied a different reorganization of the pictorial space. The sharp and penetrating sign of the Tonaltimbrica took the form of a filament, soft and sinuous, that entered into symbiosis with the basic color drafting of the picture. The result is a construct with the peculiarities of a plastic, luminous and impalpable, in correspondence with a matter that, in its sidereal depths as in its most intimate interstices, free itself of those negative characteristics traditionally attributed to it. In this way, at the end of the 1960s, I developed the Filoplastica. 

In your opinion, what is the most challenging part of your work?

Undoubtedly, it is necessary to make the declarations of poetry correspond to a credible technical realization. For example, if Filoplastica posits the idea of an impalpable and expanding matter, the filoplastic painting must incorporate on the pictorial level this fundamental aspect. This necessary correspondence implies that the formal "arrangement" of the pictorial elements must be organized in a necessarily different way from what is already known. Otherwise, we would have a worldview, more or less interesting, that to express itself should adopt a style and a technique that belong to others. It's not a paradox, it simply means that we are not creating anything original. Alongside this fundamental issue, there is the concrete work: the realization of the painting. As I said, Filoplastica speaks of an autonomous reality that exists independently of us. Well, the picture must then lose all traces of manual action and assume the appearance of an entity that has self-formed. The challenge in this case is precisely this. My best paintings are the ones I can say that they seem to have generated themselves. In this sense, the artistic work has inevitably assumed the character of a reflection on the medium. With Tonaltimbrica and Filoplastica, I could claim to have achieved satisfactory results. I could defend painting by asserting that it was still capable of saying something new. Faced with the destabilizing impact of Spatialism, there was perhaps the possibility of an answer in theoretical terms in defense of painting, struck to the heart by Fontana's cuts. But it wouldn't have been enough, this was not the way. If the "painters were all left without canvas", as Kaisserlian had brutally synthesized, the only way to continue painting would have been to make a painting without the canvas (or a surface) on which to paint. Something impossible -or so it was thought. I couldn't then resort to a ruse or makeshift solutions, I had to concretely create a work able to surpass the new limit imposed by Spatialism. And in recent times, after overcoming quite challenging difficulties, I have arrived at the realization of a series of artefacts, called Rectoverso, which structurally correspond to the painting hypothesized by Kaisserlian back in 1965. It seems evident to me. Without the Rectoverso, my ideas, no matter how fascinating or ingenious, would have been lost in a sea of conjectures. 

With such a long and varied career, what advice would you give to a young, emerging artist nowadays?

My advice is always to check the information you receive. It can be trivial as advice, but it is the fundamental premise for our awareness as artists. There is a tendency, today as in the past, to grant exclusive legitimacy to others (art critics, curators, gallery owners) in interpreting and evaluating our work. This can be a fruitful path and, in a sense, a reassuring way: it always leaves the hope that someone will recognize our value in the future, without having to commit ourselves to defending it more than once. But those who venture along the tormented road of research must know that the first pitfall they face is the misunderstanding of their art. In advancing their ideas, artists often risk finding themselves alone. Therefore, it is necessary for them to know, more than others, who they are and what they are doing." 

And finally, what are your plans for the rest of 2023 and for the future in general? Anything exciting in terms of exhibitions or future projects?

First and foremost, completing the "Painting beyond Flatness" project is my priority, which includes the incorporation of the new artifacts. As for future exhibitions, I can't currently disclose the institutions I'm in contact with, partly because I'm not the sole person involved. In any case, I believe that the complexity of the challenges I must address calls for a further expansion of my activities, involving a "performative" integration into my projects. I'm sorry to be so vague, and I apologize for that, but I can assure you that if I succeed in my endeavors, it will undoubtedly be something truly exciting.

Artist’s Talk

Al-Tiba9 Interviews is a promotional platform for artists to articulate their vision and engage them with our diverse readership through a published art dialogue. The artists are interviewed by Mohamed Benhadj, the founder & curator of Al-Tiba9, to highlight their artistic careers and introduce them to the international contemporary art scene across our vast network of museums, galleries, art professionals, art dealers, collectors, and art lovers across the globe.