CONVERSATION WITH PAOLO FERRARI by Luciano Caprile

As soon as you cross the threshold of Centro Studi Assenza you are immediately aware that now a world is outside the door and a new one is at hand.This feeling arises from the vista of the interior architecture, from the silence, from the muffled sounds, from the presence/non-presence of descreet persons and then the cadenced partecipation of works of art converging and determining a sort of suspension. Here we find Italian medieval sculptures, primitive art forms of various origins and paintings on the different pathway levels which are arranged into installations and set in the study rooms. The paintings are by Paolo Ferrari,many of them created by plotter-painting technique. The end result derives from a sort of "wild" gesture which resembles the "new German expressionists" and even, going further back, the exponents of the "CoBrA" group. But this is just a first impression because, as we are going to see, what Paolo Ferrari states is much more complex and does not only concern the artistic result, which, nonetheless, is still an important parameter of evaluation. It is so important that the conversation with Paolo Ferrari starts from a statement/suggestion: we think that his works acquire further depth and thus generate an area of greater emptiness (that area he is especially interested in) between the initial image and the surface result, provided that this surface, after computer processing, is enlivened by repeated painting.

It is Paolo Ferrari who begins talking:

"You were especially interested in the stage of matter rather than in the de-materialized digital process. Instead I had already abandoned the first and having detached the heart I had made the final result colder, emptier to the observer. As I am accustomed to working in a state of emptiness, in-Absence (in this case with you), this condition implies that all the information concerning this coupling enter me without any hindrance and so I process it extremely quickly.

What happened when we first met induced me to reconsider works which were already finished. As I felt you were particularly interested in the processes of stratification, I intervened again painting digital works on which matter was silent. For example, on a plotter there was just a sketch of a face: I decided to stratify that surface further and let that image emerge from the plane I had momentarily fixed it on. I inserted the picture of a sixteenth century wall into the work, according to the technique I use in the transformation process by building up and breaking down stratifications. So I used a black and white photocopy of a colour photograp I had taken of one side of the Sforzesco castle in Milan where there is a very well designed bridge, which I believe is by Bramante. Then, I went to work on this insertion - which is typical of a certain phase of my artistic process - veiling it with a transparent sheet of graph paper, with a view to establishing a particular relation - also of localization - and momentary fixation in transparency. By this gesture I intend to state that what comes out isa concrete reality ready to manifest itself and, being a concrete object-thing, it is necessary it is veiled by a sort of net which makes it less striking, less evident. In this way the object can begin to reveal itself before manifesting itself as pure expressivity.In the end, I inserted a small stone of this ancient wall in my work."

The elements added have given rise to further depth....In fact the picture of the wall acts as a window opening onto the inside of the work. It is like a surgical operation...

"Yes, it’s true - although in a less brutal way...They are inclusions in accordance with certain laws I have laid down about complex systems of absent origin. At the very beginning I didn’t know whether to call these forms I was creating canvasses, drawings or something else, because for me, they weren’t as concrete as the objects in art and painting generally are. The whole I have dedicated myself acts as a hole of nothing which the observer feels the urge to go through to eventually encounter a new stage of ultra-sensitive and ultra-retinal observation and understanding...

There is memory, which is the remote part, and then there is the present intervention: in the between there is space...What is then the meaning of the flowers you sometimes insert in your paintings?

"This is a very recent operation...But also in the past I used objects and forms of any kind to budge concrete matter which obsessionates the mind of Man in this evolutionary phase. Years ago, a small tree, for example, used to appear on the right end of my paintings, reduced to the simplest terms almost like a tree of a child drawing. It, too, had no symbolic value, at least as far as its formal evidence is concerned. It was meant to break any attempt of the mind to fix or schematize that the painting could induce.Insertions of every kind exist in these forms of nothing, as I call them: this painting in front of us, for example, refers to subliminal space and time; here the clock on the background photocopy shows the kind of temporality I am studying. In my opinion, when painting, one does not only work in the spatial dimension of surface and depth but also in relation to a particular kind of temporality. In this dimension the relations one notices affect the specific activity of a space of recent exploration in the brain, which, in its turn influences them: the impact of the work of art on the observing subject gives rise to a new temporality, different from his own life and the whole history of the world."

It is the time of relations....

"Yes, it’s the time of the relations of new kind, of in-Absence requiring that time is no ordinary time, yet subliminal time, as I usually call it..."

There is a time connected to time...

There exists a central point in which time stops or, more exactly, in which ordinary temporality we are accustomed to changes, thus producing a modification of the whole complex system. My works belong to the category of complex systems in the way they are thought of also in the scientific domain. This means that my works place themselves on the edge of chaos in a natural way, gathering and embracing the most various issues of reality, without compelling them into schemes, into impoverished abstractions...In my works I want to include traits of the history of the world and of its nothing, yet, at the same time, I do not want to lose the expressivity that every-day life and the contingency of phenomena produce within and around things. The final result as a whole has to show the existence of a condition which is other, different from what has been seen and experienced so far...A reality which has moved even just a little beyond.."

 If it’s true that the work of art modifies the sensitivity and the attitude of those who observe it, it, paraphrasing Duchamp, also modifies their time...

Yes, it’s true. Those who oberve and feel involved ...no also those who don’t, enter a different temporality.
Duchamp worked also according to a temporal and not only a spatial category..

In a canvas of mine of some time ago, I introduced an African person, a wise man reading the Coran, I think. It has been something extraordinary to resume working with painting materials, acrylics on canvas, as at this point I almost worked only on multilayered paper supports which were to be scanned digitally."

I have enjoyed the fact that you have resumed your gesture in painting as I consider it to be still very important: I think it can offer a spur, a further reading opportunity for the observer.....

One of the advantages of the digital transformation is that I can have any enlargement I want rather easily, although some information is lost...But this is not so important for my works, because the digital system thinks by difference and this makes good to my works... The same applies to the reproduction of a detail. According to the law of the complex systems on which I work, each detail is an absolute: that is, it is free from any linkage to form and content from which it derives."

A work can reveal new worlds and new perceptive occasions either in its dimensional evolution and in its extreme parcelling out...

"In my works exist the two sides, together with a continous variation of the perceptive datum which is due to a controlled instability originating from a stratification by subsequent forms and times which are disposed in the final accomplished unity. The relations intrinsic to the operations I carry out are just fit for producing that empty space, a kind of activity of the brain which is other, and are therefore capable of generating a further shift in respect to the main Duchampian issue. I say: look at the centre, don’t divert your attention...a special emptiness is there, the new nothing can arise there which is a reality just slightly shifted, flaming with light and very rich in forms beyond the imagination you are used to... an extremely sensitive and clarifying silence is brought about there.
What we are looking at now, is the detail of a head.."

Which now takes on another meaning...

"One should take into account that the in-Absence heads I realized with different techniques are composed by very many figurations, as the head is in general, par excellence, a complex system on the edge of chaos..."
By their breakdown I obtained a series of puzzles. I verified that each point in this space-form has a relational significance: the composition of all the pieces-points will tend to give rise to that new stage of reality of the present and of the future which is the task of art to offer. As already Duchamp knew by intuition and as the birth of art suggested in the course of human history, art, and Duchamp in particular, promised the existence of a new kind of time, of space, of sensitivity and reason, introducing into reality a system of values and countervalues which could let reality change at its foundations."

How did your contact with art come about?

"At home where we often, especially at dinner, had discussions about the most diverse cultural topics, art was often theme of discussion: I had even two grand-aunts who were painters of the ninteenth century Piedmontese tradition. But at that time I felt more tempted by music and experimental writing closely connected to the development of the scientific method. I have a degree in medicine, I chose to specialize in psychology and in this field I also worked on experimental psychology developing an interest in the processes of memory and learning, and so of highly complex processes of the thinking activity. As early as a student, I had published a few essays about experimental research in that field. Already at that time I intended to acquire a rigorous method on the foundations of which I could let new branches of expressivity grow as far as literature, art and philosophy are concerned as well as discover new scientifc laws."

What incited you to dedicate yourself concretely to painting?

When the Libro blu whose real title is Paolo e il suo compagno senza morte was published by the historical art gallery Apollinaire of Guido Le Noci in 1978 he told me: "I prepared a Klein blue cover for you because your book has aroused the same feelings as Klein’s work. Why don’t you devote yourself to art? It is not possible that the person who expresses the creativity which has emerged from these pages has no desire to paint and draw."
I answered that I was not yet ready. I started two or three years later. I was already involved in photography at that time. Almost all the photographic images from which my paintings derive are my own work. As I still do today, I was looking for those specific relations within the things of reality which could produce the particular mental activity in which I had started to get involved. I also adopted a particular technique in the dark room, which I can’t remember that well now, which allowed me to avoid the change of whites and blacks which, as a rule, takes place in the passage from negative to positive. It was one passage too many. This becoming of form and time was one step too many.The particular image I had captured at the instant I pressed the button and which resulted as a phase of reality disposed in a sort of spatial and formal condition in the negative - yet without appearing as a wrong vision or a technical mistake, given the special relationships of brightness and structure that in that moment had come to observation - had to come out in that way in the end. Therefore during the development process the passage which causes the negative to turn into positive had to be skipped: The final image was to come out as a negative, the way it had been impressed on the film at the instant when the diaphragm had opened. This method of subtraction of phases, that is of time, is what has guided me in the subsequent operations in the artistic, musical and scientific domains. I think that at that time - before becoming so involved in painting - I was trying to make my way within tradition, and beyond, into the field of experimental painting applied to photography. Not so different from the research Man Ray did, for instance, with his works on light, the famous rayograms; yet in his case, the imprint on this kind of negative maintains the clear sign of this side for the observer, in a different way from what happens to my photographs on which, when developed, the difference between the two sides - the positive and the negative - loses its feature of reducing limit, allowing another to emerge which pertains to a reality of a new kind. This explanation is so complicated. But it seemed to be really necessary if one wanted to understand something of the logic which is at the basis of my work..."

What was your first work?

"A drawing which retraced a page of music: I drew signs as if they were notes."

Chiari worked on musical scores...

I didn’t know him at that time: I was told later that some of my works of the music-painting-sign series resembled Chiari’s interpretations. But those early works were clearly different from Chiari’s works because the writing-painting of the scores was a total invention: I graphically constructed abstract relationships according to a logic by difference, and within this difference that void was being created..."

It wasn’t music to be played then...

"No, it was music to look at and intuit with the eyes of the mind."

 And then what happened?

"A similar approach and other kinds of beginning which took place at the same time - for example the studies on the features specific to the matter of space - led to the more figurative series of the Little Human. At that time I was also concerned with clinical work in the psychological field where, for the therapies, I followed new avenues of research and experimentation. At the same time, as far as painting is concerned, I was interested in experimenting with dotted signs on the potential of the mind-brain and body activity of the person in front of me. It wasn’t difficult for me to perceive the subtle state of the configuration of the person with whom I was in contact; then, I transferred the meaning onto the drawing paper by means of a sign language. The areas of greater and lesser condensation of dots and lines appearing on the page like a sort of x-ray composed places of space-matter - no differently in their formal appearance from that which occurred in the graphic works of Micheaux, as I was told later - also telling me much about the Antecedents - as I later called them - that is the not unconscious premises for the acts of thinking of the person I had referred to. And this is what still happens today. If I meet a person, his signs invade me because my system is constantly empty, it is as if I didn’t exist in usual existence...."

But you didn’t use the drawings to interpret the patient...

"Absolutely not. Art and science, as well as literature, music and drama, which I am used to practice, exist as separate fields, which enrich each other in their mutual relationship. But there is no direct contamination between them.That would annoy me terribly...I would like to keep away from this as much as I can."

When did the colour arrive?

"I think at the beginning and then, in a more consistent way as early as the Little Humans. I drew them with coloured chalks. At that time I began going to specialized shops asking for information about the use of the various painting techniques. An acquaintance of mine was a a good painter. Yet, since mine was a self-generating process which I felt was growing strong and free within me, I did‘t want there to be any useless contamination, as I aspired to letting this thing manifest itself in an autonomous way as much as it could.. I had realized that my gesture was very quick, in a coupling with the activity of my mind: I therefore had to find a medium which could favour this speed. At the end of the Sixties I found the technical solution in acrylics: they dried quickly and gave me the brilliant transparency which would be so useful in the development of my painting..."

By means of computer or through painting on canvas or paper you have created a basis of memory (photos) and a gesture of the present moment, so as to leave between memory and this gesture a void in which to let thought in....

Into this context comes graph paper..."

which when superimposed on a background landscape turns into a map, a reference point in every sense, as a stage of measurement."

"Then, when the work is finished, I insert a window-frame, as element to catch the attention or, at the same time, as a decontextualizing element..."

In some points the multiple stratification with its transparency almost resembles a restoration test which makes it possible to see the body laid bare, the wound...

"It’s true, it is also like an x-ray of the depths..."

What about stratifications, in particular those of the present phase?

"I start to work on the drawing, or, more recently, on the initial photograph by putting it through the photocopier, then drawing and copying it again and again, sometimes even years later, superimposing a transparent sheet of graph paper on which I work in certain stages of the operation and then I photocopy the resulting whole. So, a continous stratification is obtained, through subsequent temporal stages and, at the same time, with no solution of continuity. In the present phase of the plotter-paintings, in the second last stage which concludes the stage of processing which I call analogical to differentiate it from the next digital stage, I use the colour and sign which will be definitive. All this is finally ink jet printed onto photograph paper and then mounted on panels made from different materials according to whether they are to be dispalyed indoors or outdoors..."

How much did your friendship and close contact with Guido Le Noci affect your resolution to paint? I imagine that you visited his gallery and that you got to know the works of certain artists close up....In your works one can see a mastery of the gesture and of the choice of colours which is not easy to achieve without a "school", without control....I am also thinking about what you were telling me, that is of your capacity to put yourself in a mental disposition of absolute creative freedom. I don’t think you are looking for a condition outside reality, because you are very present when creating...

"This is an absolutely natural position for me. I could immediately start painting a canvas which I already have whole in my mind given all the relations which have been produced here and now and which we are experiencing, even in the coupling with the suggestions from the history of art that I have deep within myself. I could even explain the processes which go through me and which compose and breakdown the structure of my works in different ways according to the method I intend to apply both in the interpretation and construction of the work, for example as synchronic and diachronic structures at the same time. In a similar way to what has been said to happen in living systems according to the theory of biological evolution, or like musical scores of a music whose basis is the logic of systems on the edge of chaos. It is as if in all these years I had been cultivating this particular quality of thinking which allows me to learn and store at extremely high speed an infinite quantity of data, information which nontheless does not encumber me. When necessary, in an elementary way, as if it were absolutely natural, what is useful for my work and the relation of the present bubbles up clearly within and outside my mind.
That which differentiates me in a particular way from other artists is the considerable scientific background which is by now an integral part of me and which comes into play in all the process I have just described."

As we have seen your positioning is a method which enables you to move from one discipline to another....

"When I decide to enter into relation with a certain artist or with a certain historical phase of art I am ready to work in a very close relation to all this, anticipating, one could say, the moves of that artist or that phase. No differently from what occurs in the musical field. It is on the contrary the prototype of what I call Doubling in-Absence If, for example, I am listening to a piece by Schönberg or by Dallapiccola I can sit down at the piano and play simultaneously what I call the Antecedent of those composers, being in a temporal relation which anticipates their creative activity. The same can occur in art.

What I paint already exists in reality: I am not interested in imagination. What I use and interact with is a visible matter that I "see" in a natural way but that the other cannot see, since it exists in an empty space that I call in-Absence. The reality I exploit to work in the artistic field is on the one hand completely new in the eyes of others yet, at the same time, already constructed because Giotto drew it and Masaccio thought of it. It is possible for me to enter a particular relation of understanding and activity with them by means of that path of the brain-mind that I discovered and allowed to emerge. All this is absolutely amazing!

What is reality, then?

An objective reality exists to which I can couple myself. Now I try to explain myself using a paradox. in logic: Should objectivity be pushed to its extreme limit, and beyond it, the world, as objective being, would tend to disappear: I, as well as anybody, could no longer have a relationship with the object because the object would reach infinity acquiring the specific characteristic of absolute objectivity, where absolute means free from any link. This objective absolute which is place-matter of infinity and which has been reached by the object in the stage of objectivity beyond links, is the plane on which I place myself and work..."

I read somewehre that objectivity doesn’t exist because an object is perceived differently by each individual person: an object is many objects, as many as the number of the people looking at it...The fact that each person recreates it each time, means that this object in actual fact doesn’t exist or disappears...

"I work on these disappeared objects, on the world which becomes so objective that it disappears.From this world, this world so disappeared and absolute, in the state I called in-Absence, these works originate. The world known as it is, empties itself in the in-Absence condition and becomes objective, yet not closed within its pure and geometrical formal abstraction: from this place which is equivalent to the disappearance of reality as it is, a new level of reality emerges..."

Let’s go back to Guido Le Noci and to the artists he promoted which probably influenced you to some extent...

"I liked Fautrier very much, so much that I conceived a series of paintings I called Defeats out of regard for his Otages. Wols fascinated me too, but Fautrier interested me more than anyone else. I was fascinated by Fautrier’s matter which became other. His capacity for containing and going beyond a matter which was disposed to become abstract seemed to me quite close to mine: all my works are made of an abstract matter of a particular kind, where abstraction, in the Hegelian sense of the word, is that which having emptied itself, passes onto another level and takes on its essence".

Did you give names to your pictorial cycles?

Yes. They are cycles which suddenly come to an end and that sometimes I have taken up again on a different level in the subsequent years: besides the Defeats we have just mentioned, the Great Humans, the Little Humans, the Little Heads, the Great Heads and then the present cycle of the Plotter paintings in-Absence which has not yet come to an end."

When you gave the title "Defeats" to the works inspired by Fautrier’s Otages

did you want to indicate the inadequacy of gesture to recount an event?

No, I am so "presumptous" as to believe that reality can be recounted in full.

But then why call them ‘Defeats’?

When I thought of that series on wood or on other solid materials like the plexiglass with a centre composed of a photocopy processed several times and veiled by a transparent sheet of graph paper, a few words which could indicate an abstract centrality came to my mind: words like configere, fictus, configgere per entrare. But Defeat is also an empty concept without a literal meaning a word bringing about estrangement, decontextualization in the Duchamp-style. The way I used it, has lost its ordinary meaning and is ready for play, for nothingness, for laughter as for example in Kafka.
There is also the philosopical significance of the presence of a window placed in the centre, an empty hole which defeated the Parmenidean Being. The Being is able to open itself onto this world and the next; the dramatic meaning of the word configgere is defeated because it now allows itself to be passed through."

So, it is important to be defeated...

"It’s fundamental. Man is an animal who agreed to lose his instincts. The activity of thinking arose from a defeat. If this thinking activity is able to lose further, it produces this other level called in-Absence. It’s the absence of the world as it is.

The activity of thinking originated from a defeat within the animal body. If the activity of thinking of present is able to lose further, that is to be "defeated", another more complex and abstract stage which I have called in-Absence is generated: it is the absence of the world as it is.