Pietro Calabrese

rust,
and the playing

To me, rust on canvas means playing,
circling a canvas framed by building site boards, dancing and watching the dance of those plates which, one after another, I allow to penetrate the canvas for hours, layer by layer, day by day, thought by thought, rust by rust.
Is it rust, that part of you which lives within you and steals space from the other part, the part you would like to be but aren’t? The part, perhaps, that you are obliged to be?
And then everything is reversed,
the rusts begin to emerge, casually, and they say: “we are Pietro’s rusts”.
And you are a child again…….as an adult.
Rust emerges from iron? So you call on your blacksmith friends and ask: “got any iron plate leftovers?”, and they give you them, pieces of every shape and size, and you examine them, you sand them down, you wash them, you prepare them…..
Rust needs water in order to come into being? So you place a canvas in that water and you begin to dance, you begin to jump, from one iron plate to another, from one iron leftover to another.
Iron plates need weights in order to sediment on contact? So you begin filling buckets with water, more and more buckets, more and more water, buckets everywhere, buckets from everywhere, days spent looking for buckets to adopt, and then you fill them, with water, and you move them from one plate to another, until the whole canvas has been filled with iron plates buckets water moods thoughts.
Then you take them away, they’re heavy, you take away everything, everything, all that remains is the canvas the frame some water, and rust, freshly emerging.
You look at it, and each time it’s different, with each plate it’s different.
And you begin again, you put the plates back in place the pieces of wood to distribute the weight of the buckets and the buckets, the playing recommences, plate on plate, and within those plates, those days placed one on top of the other, you discover some surfaces, between the layers, and you enter.
And then you play the game of playing, and begin to push, move and block, reduce and expand, dilate and compress, you begin to burn and dilute, using your head, your shoulders, your hands, that space which you had never brought to conclusion on a surface.
Until you stop, because it is no longer rust, it is Pietro’s rust.

And it has a name.
Its own.

....The canvas, Calabrese feels, is “an area of events”, just as it was for Pollock or De Kooning. It is where the potential of imagination and fantasy meet and merge with the potential of materials. In this particular case, sediments, rust deposits on large linen rectangles, born of the consumption of iron in various shapes and sizes.
A vital part of the procedure comes from patient, plodding, part- blind creative ritual. Indeed, arranging the traces, the clamps – see the intensity of the effects, how they invade or fade, melt and spread to this or that part of the area, all this is a long and troubled procedure. It requires slow growth, the interaction of circumstance, necessity, intentions, accidents. The former relate to a plan, a mental design, an idea; the latter to method and quality of the staining: the range of colours, shapes, direction, grain, intensity, transparency. The function of chance ( chaos ) as something discarded, an excess, an intrusion of the unpredictable in the fantastical organisation of the pre-figurative - gives art “possibilities which are not yet fact (pictorial fact)” (1), but which announce its presence. Breaking the suffocating hold of stereotype, its deathly fixity.

The work is born from this jumble of premonitions, prophecies, delays, things created and destroyed. The wanderings stop – and the work is created, flashes suddenly into being out of the darkness of chaos – when a new, unknown, tension cuts through all the signs, all the traces, all the chance happenings, and it grips your attention, and doesn’t let go. It is done. From now on each viewer will encapsulate the semblance: now stagnant, now dry land, now beginning of motion, now golden swarm. The oblique scansion of some emerging stripes of brown rust convinces me of the tension of the settling (the passage, placing the traces, in their varying degrees of saturation, one on top of the other, shows the depth; a minimal depth which essentially serves to confirm the flatness of the canvas). The roar of a battle echoes from a dark blonde frenzy of splinters besieging a white light wound. The erosion of an edge – its transparency due to a certain fading of colour, or a surface continuing to absorb – speaks to me of the beginning of extinction.

This is not about metaphors, it’s about sensory timbres, flow, bodies, movements. In a word, forces. Contrary to what most believe, painters are less anxious to “reproduce and invent shapes” than they are to “capture forces”, paint forces. A far more appropriate distinction for categorising painting styles than the traditional division of painting in abstract and figurative. Gilles Deleuze was convinced of this. “This is why no art is figurative (…). The purpose of painting can be defined as the attempt to make invisible forces visible. In the same way music tries to make sound from forces which have none (….) Isn’t the genius of Cezanne just this – his using all means of painting with this purpose? Making visible the force which roughens a mountain’s surface, the forces in the germination of an apple, the thermal forces of a landscape? And didn’t Van Gogh also bring to life unknown forces – the unprecedented force of a sunflower seed?” (2)

Pietro Calabrese’s work stems from the same seed, it explores the same territory of the forerunners of abstract expressionism, that same territory explored today by the surprising inventions of older teachers, such as Twombly, Brice Marden, Howard Hodgkin.
Using different tools, materials and procedures, Calabrese attempts to paint the pure sensation that requires a “hand-to-hand fight”, physical confrontation between what’s happening on canvas and those on the threshold (Calabrese’s frames are in fact doorframes, architraves, vaulting beams), those who are willing to cross the threshold without being led by all things narrative, symbolic or allegorical, and personally experience the internal ferment, the wandering. I believe this is why he tends to increase the size of the canvases, make them life-sized, conceived for the entire human body, not just the eyes. Architectural size, which tends to absorb the physical space of any environment (and with it, the viewer), and creates a wave moving from “objective” to “virtual” (in the sense of Brunelleschi, not of cybernetics).
Naturally, I remain convinced that “the influence of subjectivity, together with the expectations born through our emotions (desires, fears, unconscious layers) are our prompters”. (3)


Notes



1 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon. Logica della Sensazione, Macerata 1995
[Francis Bacon:The Logic of Sensation, MIT Press 1994]

2 Gilles Deleuze, see above.

3 Gino Gorza, Via piana della figura, Torino 2003

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Distillerie Clandestine, Rome :: 2003
Loggia dei Mercanti, Sermoneta :: 2003
Gallery “l’Arcolaio”, Viareggio :: 2003
Gallery Giardino Segreto, Roma :: 2004
Spazio Espanso, Roma ::2004
Lo scrittoio, Roma :: 2004
Gallery Acquario, Roma :: 2004
Beyond Boxes, Roma :: 2004
ART BASEL, Raul Carrasco Gallery, Miami Design District, Miami :: 2004
Lo scrittoio, Roma :: 2005
S/ago/me 547, Traforo Umberto I, Roma :: 2005
Loggia dei Mercanti, Sermoneta :: 2005