Sleeping and Shining • Ilaria Margutti
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Matthias Bergemann
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SLEEPING AND SHINING
SLEEPING AND SHINING
di Maria Livia Brunelli
Maria Livia Brunelli
In un mondo in cui ostentazione e protagonismo dominano la vita quotidiana, è forse per reazione che sempre più
artisti sentano l’esigenza di indagare
quei momenti nascosti in cui l’uomo
non è sotto i riflettori del giudizio altrui, sotto lo sguardo vigile della disvelante frenesia diurna.
Anche Sophie Calle, artista tra le più
apprezzate dell’attuale Biennale veneziana, dove espone al Padiglione francese, aveva in passato sondato questi
territori defilati invitando ventotto amici e sconosciuti a dormire nel suo letto,
per spiare e fotografare il loro sonno
per otto giorni con turni di otto ore
ciascuno, stendendo poi un resoconto dettagliato della loro permanenza
insieme ad alcune interviste (Les Dormeurs).
“Nel progetto - spiegava l’artista in
un’intervista - la gente si metteva nel
mio letto e io ero libera di chiedere
loro tutto quello che mi passava per la
testa (fino a che età hanno fatto pipì
a letto, cosa sognavano) e loro rispondevano. Era geniale, incredibile: il pretesto artistico mi permetteva di andare
dove non avrei potuto in condizioni
normali”.
Una simile componente voyeristica si
ritrova nel lavoro di Ilaria Margutti, che
chiede ad amici di posare fingendo di
dormire o simulando il risveglio, fotografa questa finzione iconografica e
poi la riporta su tela. Ne risulta una
pittura nodosa e materica, sanguigna
e vascolare, che attraverso tagli inconsueti e ingrandimenti di alcune parti
del corpo proietta lo spettatore dentro
intimità immaginarie, con una precisa
volontà di coinvolgimento che trova le
sue radici negli espedienti scenografici dell’arte barocca. Le inquadrature
avvolgenti, infatti, unite agli sguardi a
volte assenti, a volte stupefatti delle
persone ritratte al termine di un simulato letargo notturno, tendono a calamitare altri sguardi, quelli di noi “acerbi
voyeur che li spiamo, forti della veglia,
inconsapevoli che presto ritorneremo a
dormire a nostra volta”, come sottolinea l’artista.
Vulnerabili, intorpiditi, silenziosi, i corpi di chi dorme o si è appena svegliato sono liberi di giacere nello spazio
senza condizionamenti, innocenti nella
loro disarmante naturalezza, nudi o avvolti da pesanti coperte, mentre sono
gli occhi a svelarci lo stato emotivo
dei protagonisti di queste sequenze
mattutine, di volta in volta sbigottiti,
impauriti, teneramente abbandonati,
placidamente inerti.
Se Ilaria Margutti ha operato una catalogazione pittorica dei sonni e dei risvegli, Claudio Ballestracci ha eseguito
una operazione analoga attraverso una
modalità squisitamente concettuale.
Ha distribuito a ciascun amico e conoscente una federa di cotone bianco su
cui dormire, scrivere sopra la data di
consegna e di ritiro della federa stessa, e il proprio nome di battesimo. Il
sonno di ogni persona è rimasto così
appuntato sui singoli pezzi di cotone:
secondo le parole dell’artista, una sorta di “federa sudario, federa pellicola,
federa nastro magnetico, federa cartina
tornasole, federa documento, federa
carta copiativa, federa diario. Una federa nelle cui trame rimane impigliato
il sonno (da cui il sogno) perché più vicino al capo adagiato, con il suo piccolo carico d’afrore, di rugiada biologica
proveniente dalle nuche. Dove, più che
in altre zone del corpo, si caratterizza
inconfondibile l’odore personale”.
Accanto a questa catalogazione di sonni, tre poetiche installazioni che hanno
come protagonista una selva di piccoli
letti. Sono roccaforti del sonno sorrette
da esili gambe in metallo pericolanti,
un villaggio di sogni costruito su palafitte. Alcuni appaiono dalla penombra
come luminescenti teste di meduse sospese nel vuoto: protendono verso terra i loro lunghi tentacoli, quasi fossero
cordoni ombelicali indecisi tra la dimensione onirica e quella terrena. Altri
sembrano palpitare di vita, animati da
una presenza minuscola che guizza al
loro interno, come un embrione impaziente di vedere oltre la placenta. Altri
ancora, di gusto vagamente retrò, hanno la sembianza dei letti appena rifatti
da una zelante cameriera d’albergo:
ordinati e composti, costituiscono un
omaggio ad alcune pensioni della riviera romagnola che non esistono più.
Claudio Ballestracci ne ha recuperato
la memoria, riutilizzando le coperte da
letto originali di quegli alberghi, impregnate di ricordi, rese uniche dall’usura.
I nomi e le immagini sbiadite di quelle
pensioni ormai estinte sono stati anch’essi oggetto di recupero, e adesso
occhieggiano da una serie di scatole
retroilluminate, sottratte all’oblio e al
letargo del tempo.
In a world in which ostentation and
“protagonism” dominate the everyday
life, the fact that many artists seem to
feel the need to investigate those hidden moments in which the man is not
under the limelight of others’ judgment
could be seen as a sort of reaction
towards the watchful eye of the revealing daily frenzy.
Also Sophie Calle – one of the most
appreciated artists at the current Biennale of Venice, where she exhibits in
the French Pavilion – did in the past investigate these “defilated” territories,
as she invited 28 friends to sleep in
her bed, to spy and take pictures of
their sleep for eight days, with eight
hours shifts, writing then a detailed report on their stay, together with some
interviews (Les Dormeurs).
In an interview, the artist explained that
“in the project people slept in my bed
and I was allowed to ask them whatever came up to my mind (till what age
they piddled in their bed, what were
their dreams etc.) and they answered.
It was genial, incredible: the artistic
pretext allowed me to go there where
I could have never gone under normal
conditions”.
Such a voyeuristic component can be
found in the artworks of Ilaria Margutti,
as she asks friends to pose feigning
to sleep or simulating the waking-up,
photographing this iconographic fiction and then transposing it on canvas. The result is a knaggy and materic,
sanguine and vascular painting. Through unusual cuts and enlargements of
some parts of the body, Ilaria takes the
spectator deep into imaginary intima-
cies, with a precise will of involvement
which has its roots in the scenographic
expedients of baroque art. The deceiving framing, together with the (sometimes absent, sometimes stupefied)
glances of those people portrayed at
the end of a simulated nocturne lethargy tend to attract other glances, those of us “immature voyeurs who spy
them, strong of our wakeful status,
and unaware of the fact that we’ll soon
ourselves come back to sleep” as the
artists points out.
Vulnerable, numb, silent are the bodies of those who sleep or are just
awake. They are free to lie in the space
without conditioning, innocent in their
disarming naturalness, either naked
or wrapped in heavy blankets. All the
same, the eyes are the key that unveils
the emotive state of the protagonists
of these morning sequences, as they
are from time to time astonished, frightened, tenderly abandoned, placidly
unarmed.
If Ilaria Margutti has carried out a
pictorial cataloguing of sleeps and
reawakening, Claudio Ballestracci has
developed a similar path through an
exquisitely conceptual way.
Claudio has provided friends and acquaintances with a white-cotton pillowcase on which they had to sleep,
writing on it the delivery and return
date and their first names. In this way,
the sleep of each person has been noted down on the single cotton-cases.
In the artist’s words, this gives shape
to a sort of “shroud-pillowcase, filmpillowcase, litmus paper-pillowcase,
document-pillowcase, diary-pillowca-
se. A Pillowcase where the sleep (and
therefore the dream) get caught in the
wefts, because it is closer to the lying
down head, with its burden of smell, of
biological dew coming from the nape
of the neck. A place – the nape – where the personal smell is characterised
more than in other parts of the body”.
Beside this sleep-cataloguing lie three
poetic installations, having as a protagonist a forest of small beds. These
are strongholds of the sleep, propped
up by thin and precarious copper legs:
a village of dreams build on palafittes.
Some of them loom out in the gloom,
as luminescent medusa-heads hanging
in space: they stretch out their long
tentacles, as if they were umbilical cords unable to decide between the oneiric or the earthly life. While some other
of these small beds seem to palpitate
with life, animated by a tiny presence frisking inside them, as an embryo
eager to see beyond the placenta.
Some other, gracefully retro, look like
hotel beds, freshly made by a zealous
chambermaid: tidy and neat, they are
an homage to some of those typical
Romagna’s guesthouses that do not
exist anymore nowadays. Claudio has
recovered their memory, re-using the
original blankets of those guesthouses, soaked in memories, made unique
by the wear. Names and faded images
of those hotels have themselves been
recovered, and now they are peeping
through a series of back-lighted boxes,
put out of reach of time’s oblivion and
lethargy.
Sleeping Box • oil on wood • 25x25x7,5
NOTTEM
The first Day’s Night had come
And grateful that a thing
So terribile – had been enduredI told my Soul to sing
She said her Strings were snapt
Her Bow – to Atoms blown
And so to mend her – gave me work
Until another Morn
(E. Dickinson)
Veglia e Sonno V • oil on canvas • 50x50
Night: a word that leads our thoughts and imagination towards manifold meanings, from the trivial interval between dusk and dawn,
to the dark side of our psyche, with its [load] fund of dreams, nightmares or absence.
Nottem isn’t a mistranscription of the Latin word “noctem”, but it
is in fact the name of a sleeping pill, a drug that can ferry the sleepless towards the shores of dream. With its archaic sound, Nottem,
bring us back to something ancestral, just like the beds created by
Claudio Ballestracci, recall us the idea of palafittes, as they stand on
their long, thin legs. This fragile height seems to be meant to protect
the dreams, as they lie in a dimension which is hardly reachable by
the conscious man. On the other hand, the dreamers appear to
be the subjects of Ilaria Margutti’s painting, where sleeping women
with their trousseaus made of painted boxes are the means through
which she explores the connection between reality, sleep, dream
and memory.
The poetics of these two artists appear, thus, to be complementary;
one’s artwork ends where the other’s begins. Margutti’s paintings are
suspended in an atmosphere swinging between dream and reality,
while Ballestracci’s installations have already crossed this threshold,
leaning out over the limen (this time according to the Latin sense
of the term, which contains, all in one word, the meanings of limit,
border, threshold) of the real.
The two artist show many similarities in their artworks: the beds as
means of sleep, that dimension of corporeal abandonment, which,
all the same, also implicates a subtle feeling of trust.
The blankets worn out and mended, in order to let somehow leak
out the dream of that person who slept on them, or the caring feeling of those who wanted to protect these dreams; the single beds
and the sleepers seem to give shape to the isolation that slumber
conveys; the elusiveness of dream, as it is constantly evoked but
never directly showed; the memory, both in the piles containing
images of deserted buildings and in the boxes containing lost reminiscences.
Such a night, so full of meanings, in the purpose of the artists, aims
at pushing the imagination of the viewer– at least by means of contraposition – towards a (re)awakening, intended as a rebirth, as a
little revolution breaking through the contemporary liturgy of life.
Sabrina Massini
Soporis I • oil on canvas • 150x150
Soporis II • oil on canvas • 150x150
Falling asleep means to consider the other trustworthy.
It is a creditworthy form and Ilaria Margutti and Claudio
Balestracci are two very good interpreters of it. Their
different journeys have long since focused on the same
part of the existence, modulating two illustrative performances. The sleep – the period of time we leave our
body which reappears showing itself – is described from
the sleeper’s point of view. The sleeper gives in himself
and his integrity.
Sleeping is a display of trusting: if you are awake and
watching, you can’t expect it. You can only receive this
display of trusting; the receiver should find it very difficult to accept our fragility.
It’s understood then that the way one person abandons
himself to sleep means unilaterally that intrusiveness
and fraud are excluded. It is necessary that our own
security must be held either by controls and guarantees
or by intimacy. These elements allow to take part in the
game.
Ilaria Margutti performs this serene abandon showing
us couples of sleepers or single-sleepers abandoned on
their beds. She shows us reality, but she handles it with
care. The glance is blank in front of these bodies and
their languishing attitudes softened by their youth. The
unsteady blankets and sheets are in action and the setting is full of smells, intimate deposits and spurs of the
active routine which will be regained the following day.
We don’t know anything about their history: are they
lovers? Are they friends who are sharing a single night
together? Are they sad singles? We don’t have enough
information to say it and we are invited not to search for
anything else. The sleeping kit which hugs their bodies is
their only shield against the observers’ attacks.
The central point of Claudio Balestracci’s work is the
fear of an excessive intrusiveness. This trepidation turns
into an unsteady matter. We live in a world of suspects,
therefore sleeping means to open risky niches. Sleeping
means that we are willing to show our unprotected flank
and to be left at the mercy of the others. Taking up the
bet, the artist changes the roles, making devices and
filiform installations where sleeping is hung and inaccessible. The sleepers are not visible. They are invisible to
our eyes and our task is not to get closer to them and
not to be cumbersome. Claudio Balestracci gives form
to transparency through artificial-lighted installations,
which are very similar to theatre installations. Danger is
allowed because it can also be a possibility. Silence and
attention are requested to keep the agreement with the
artist. It is about the possibility (even when it is grim) to
find the narration opportunity in these structures made
of copper and poor materials.
Matilde Puleo
Nottem I • oil on canvas • 150x150
Veglia e Sonno III • oil on canvas • 50x50
Nottem III • oil on canvas • 140x140
Veglia e Sonno IX • oil on canvas • 50x50
Soporis III • oil on canvas • 120x120
Veglia e Sonno VII • oil on canvas • 50x50