Media Formeln
Fremo Immagine, Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, Rome, 2019
English translation generated with AI from the original Italian text.
For days I have had on my computer desktop the reproduction of one of Monet’s many paintings of the cliffs at Étretat, chosen for the short blue and lilac brushstrokes with which the painter rendered the cliff against the light, at dawn or sunset, when the sky and the sea are more or less the same colour – here: filaments of yellow, pink, pale blue.
It is an artifice, yet through colours and contours that are in no way the analogue of what we would see, this image returns to us intact a precise representation of a place, a time and a feeling. Not once, but many times. In many different versions which nonetheless share the fact of being repetitions, minimal variations on the same subject. At the same time, this painting, like all the others in the series, gives us the exact measure of what painting is from a certain point onwards (and for a long time): a problem seeking its solution through surface, colour and gesture, that is, by remaining within the boundaries of the medium.
Somehow this image I keep looking at these days, and the way it works, seems to me to have something to do with Francesco Ciavaglioli’s work and with the pieces he has been working on over the past year and selected for his exhibition Fremo Immagine (if only for the tremor that the apparent typographical slip suggests).
The cliffs at Étretat are a topos of landscape painting: Monet painted them, but so did Delacroix, Corot, Courbet and others; they are, in other words, an available subject through which we can write a small history of painting. Fremo Immagine is an exhibition of landscapes, here too entirely situated (we can imagine that the Fucino plain, overlooked by Avezzano, the Abruzzo town where the artist has his studio, suggested these wide views) and yet appropriable: skies dotted with flocks; fields of maize, images repeated to prove their survival: landscape as a representation of the world; birds in flight as omen.
These two subjects are declined across different supports, as if to test their resilience: the image of the maize field recurs on a stretched canvas painted in oil, framed by a thin strip of wood that composes it and separates it from the rest of the space, and on a large curtain painted in ink, stretched diagonally to the wall and open in the middle. A painting and a screen are thus two equivalents, and in both cases the image is obtained by projecting a photographic reproduction onto the surface, whose edges are then traced and filled with colour – oil in one case, ink in the other.
The flights of birds, another recurring theme for the artist, reproduced on glass, paper or canvas, are obtained with a stamp made from a photograph. By overlapping several layers and using more or less pressure – more or less ink – spraying black ink on the surface, or adding a layer of blue plastic, the image takes on body and life, to the point of looking like a photographic reproduction.
And this too is an artifice: in the short circuit between painting and photography the image is made credible by our willingness to translate an arbitrary sign into a representation of the real. The yellow, pink and pale blue filaments Monet paints are not the sea, and yet they are. The black marks Francesco Ciavaglioli mechanically applies to the canvas are not birds, and yet they are. But both the filaments and the marks are also just marks and filaments: they declare the fiction and use it to make us look elsewhere too. In the case of this exhibition, to make us reflect on what happens in this (in every) mechanism that translates a sign into an image, or, conversely, an image projected into a sign – and since we are in a horizon of thought well beyond the age of mechanical reproduction, the artist’s gesture is not authorial, but already mediated from the outset: the found or available image, the mechanical copy rather than the interpretation, the series as the working method for building the single work. There are stumbles and clues in these screen-images, picture-images, window-images, archive-images: the repetition of the module, scratches on the surface, small incongruities that suspend the fiction and reveal the artifice. A children’s magic trick, but one that – as this exhibition makes clear – allows a reproduction as mechanical as it is digital to give thickness, density and body back to images. So that they are not dispersed.