Antology show – Casa del Mantegna, Mantua

Shapes, concepts, sounds

Amalia Del Ponte, who in the 60’s conducts an own and personal solitary and original search in sculpture, is always different, so that every time she amazes and surprises us; each encounter with her is detection of new ways by wich the profound structures of matter can be probed and take form. We are initiated, through the vision, at matter as light, as energy: at the many ways an object can be perceived. This enchants and certainly destabilizes and upsets us.

The lithophons, the sounding stones, are the object of her present research, started in 1985. With them she returned to carve perfect shapes in stone. Also to speak the ancient language of marble; however she does not search for the soft purity nor for the sweet drightness ( Hegel), but the relation between shape and sound. Her lithophons are shape-sound, that send back beyond the visible to find the invisible of correspondence that join the geometrical shape with it’s measure to the musical and color scales. The sound materializes this correspondence.

Order and harmony : the lithophons are geometrical shapes: rectangular, round, moon shape.
The big slabs prevail, is first better describe them: they are parietal and hung a little bit away from the wall, so to be ‘hit’ from the front in a tolling way. They are not basrelif but sculptures with graffiti, preponderantly on serpentine of the Alps, rectangles of Carrara marble or , as more recently in an exhibition in Rome, slabs in Travertino, memorial reference to the local stone: exalt the cosmic perturbation and the sound-visual micro movement. The same that we can find in the new image of matter with it’s turbulence that Prigogine gives us. Or the abstract universalistic blow.

Then, the shape-sound are in front of us in their consistency, but their shape of perfect measure and the suggestions that derive us by the graffiti make, whole make the starting point of a fabulation by which it comes out of it’s self to find it’s self again in a cosmic narration.

They conduct us at a sound vision in the imaginary. Matter is an energy in which all the worlds and everything is originated and developed; and the thought searches and devises hidden harmonies and correspondences. The artist finds the sound quality of matter, that is present in myths and in the imaginary of ancient and ‘different’ cultures. And, with an attitude typical at the a-vanguard, approaches the music grammar to the grammar of structures of matter: looks for the correspondence between luminous and the sound waves; she operates on the physical factors that preside at the organization of shapes and sound in the purity of vibration and energy. The sound breaks the petrifaction of the world: the waves dilate matter in space and introduce time: the research on the shapes meets the one on the structure of sounds in the freedom of matter from inertia, that gives back to matter it’s voice, it’s inner rhythm, it’s temporality. The sound nature of the particular stone shape reveals it’s timbre and voice when hit.

And then the universe appears to us (or it deceives us) as constituted by harmonic proportions, as ”alive that dances with musical laws” (Marsilio Ficino).
The artist is bearer of a ‘synesthetic’ conception of art: establishes a unequivocal relation visual and auditive, also tactile, striving to expand to all the senses in accordance; and, as we said she wants to convene on it (with a duchampian taste) extraordinary references to other civilizations (oriental and archaic) and also presocratic and renaissance. This respite is suggestive, while the motivation is straightly of the 900’s in this ‘synesthetic’ meaning of the a-vanguards (according to the same famous baudelairian ‘correspondence’, whit some allegoric technique presented as ‘metaphysic’).

As a matter of fact for the Buddhism also the mind is a ‘sense’.
The graffiti refer to complex symbolic orders, while they are valid for it’s self with it’s own formal suggestion. They materialize and announce the invisible. The straight cone surmounted by a turned over cone – or double drum or crucible – sends us back to an ancient image-symbol of the universe, that “takes as a model the sky and as figure the earth. Looking for them folding on him self”, says an ancient text.

In the graffiti, startling concretions gleam through, presence of fossils, memories, traces that move us from a limited zone of time to the infinity series of structures and of living. These are archetype values that allude at the elements: air, water, fire and earth, and to there movement, vibration e sonority: they lead us to the sound vision.

Lithophones can also be disposed in a series, as litic-poles, with their different measures, four or seven notes. Extraordinary and of great expressionist intensity, the last version of a litic-pole (“Acqua nell’acqua”) composed by four slabs crossed by big pelting waves. The lithophones want to be played and so they become the heart of an event, meeting of two artistic expressions, very evocative, while giving back in all it’s complexity the relation of men with stone, the first matter of the world.

The path of research

The starting point is important: hers is with Marino Marini, from whom she acquires not only the knowledge of the working of materials but also the taste craftsmanship of sculpture, that remains one of her important characteristics. But what drives her is the need to go beyond sculpture ( becoming, according to Arturo Marini “dead language”, so to research in new forms). Her references move in Klee’s direction and of the russian constructivists like Gabo, Pevsner, Moholy-Nagy.

The working of plaster is characteristic of this period, that fascinates her for it’s malleability. We find an original openness and constructionism, right from the start, for the destabilizing and estranging intention that characterizer other it.
The marble and bronze constitute the beginning of a research that break the staticism of the form and leads to the inner and profound structures of matter. The scale models, that are complete works of art in themselves, show exactly the shattering of the formal uniqueness.

If we examine the model in black marble of Belgium, we can see that its’ the result of the encounter of two forms that don’t match perfectly, giving place to a disparity, to a folding, to an ample cavity, that confers him an unusual gait of movement, while it suggests somewhat of unfinished and empty inside, opens a space of emptiness. In the bronze one, shapes multiply and meet in a dissymmetrical way: the sharped edges, nervous create in matter a sequence of leaks and of obscure inner zones.
A research on emptiness, instead of fullness, of inner instead of outer, of discontinuous instead of continuous, of dissymmetrical instead of symmetrical.

The prisms or Tropes (1965 – 72) are the foundamental youth work. Transparent bodies, “lenses and screen in the meantime”, this is how Vittorio Fagone defined them (1967), also observing how the “doing” of the artist operates “on the extraordinary optical potentiality of matter itself, that with an operation… of ’formal transformation’, inside the borders of a formal language”.

The Tropes are solid elements, shapes or ‘primary structures’, we said, perfectly geometrical with an expressive intention. Identical and different, change under our look and they destabilize the environment in which they are immerse. Or, if you want, they create “environments where the moldable object takes action as driving force with the inflow of light” (Gillo Dorfles).

The results is a sort of impact “on the tens thread of symmetry” (Fagone), a persistent and iterative putting in evidence of the geometry of the physic world: which results in a disquieting and ambivalent destabilizing of the object itself and of the environment being “the rational game” predisposed by the edges and levels strictly calculated, results “without completion”: a game of reflections that denies and affirms together.

Fagone’s view insists on immateriality: on the breaking in an artificial world, or on an inner space, a sort of negative of the real world. But certainly the art pice has a clear and supplementary physical presence, that broadens with refraction; it does not produce to zero it.

The term tropes, is by Vittorio Fagone, whom presented the exhibition in ‘67, to be intended in tension and extension. It’ worth while to remember the wide semantic range of the word tropos of Indo-European root, that together indicates movement and transformation, the turning towards, and changes of meaning the words put next to it. Therefore it’s both a word of differences and of putting in relation.

The ambivalent nature of the tropes , for Anne Marie Sauzeau, comes from the “virtuality” of their body, from their being “a directional place, a position of referring to something else (like the metaphor)”.

Prisms are presences that put in question the idea it’self of sculpture, giving it a new way of being overturning the terms. Also the highlighters that modify, braking and multiplying the environment in which they are merged. The sperimentation and the use of new technological products, like plexiglas, melted to form up to two meters high prisms. And this together as enclose, in contradiction and clash, in the new technological society: with the idea of humanizing appropriation of these new resins from which our lives are invaded. And also with the idea of, structuring multiples, of art for everybody.

Certainly a “sculpture-absence”, according to Sauzeau, but also for me, the emerging of a leibnizian, ‘metaphysic’ idea, for which the points are unexpanded centers of power and activity and measure express the things itself.

Reality shows itself at the glance only through the endless profiles that are offered at the observer, so the reality of the world does not subsist in itself, but it solves in the endless and inexhaustible prospectives that are offered to her.

And she also gives the tropes a totally imaginary realization, simply by tracing them on the ground with iron wires and making appear on the walls their equally virtual projections.

In the San Paolo Biannual (1973) she creates a real and proper perceptive area, constructing a room with no 90° angles, annulling the prospective vision deeply changing the perception.

And as we know, after Maurice Merleau Ponty, perception is donation of sense to the world: through art thought can be placed on an originary ground in which the world and our body mingle.

A second series of works, that comes right after the tropes, is produced combining plexiglas strips to cement block or to iron slabs. Here the trope reflection capacity of light in the environment, their capacity to amalgamate and of putting in relation is ‘controlled’ by opaque masses, or better it strives inside it’self. This produces a strange contamination between opaque, rough and transparent, but overall creates a ghostly opening in matter, an illusory entrance in the inside.

It is, as Guido Ballo says (1972), “suggesting the idea of a primary rhythm that expands in the near space: not only for the recalling of the structural levels with an opening towards the ambient, but for the colour of the materic joints”.

It seems to me that in these works the strong plastic tendency of the artist absorbs the phenomenology of the a-vanguard of the ‘70 in a game of refraction and mobility. The hallucinogenic vision already here tends to other senses. There is, has Gillo Dorfles wrote, “the sharp interest for the objectual aspect of vision, both in the sense of constructing the single object and the relation with it with the environmental space”.

The prism placed on a easel , pointing on a newspaper cutting with Curcio’s photo a very dramatic fragment of his life and of the lifes of us all, turns the invention on the vision and in the light as close investigation on the detail: it takes it from the annihilating totality.

Vedere is the title of this already conceptual work, presented at the Biannual of Milan in ‘72: marks the detachment from this phase that closes on the focalization of details, on the capsizing of objects, on the pure creation of virtual spaces.

It is worth while to remember that, peculiarly the word tropos has also a musical meaning.

In the Greek music, the tone, the note at the base of the major system in it’s transformation and, in the medieval, is the melodic formula that not always crosses the entire octave.

The installation of ‘77, a conceptual operation: on top of an ancient Persian carpet two books are laid one next to the other: one is a photo album dated ‘68 – ‘76 (recording by images the first eight years of her daughter) and the other two images of other worlds: a botanical plan of the 600’s with flower and ovule, with a ribbon say “eiusdem floris et virginae magnitudo” and a mutilated paper with marks of an unknown language, a fragile, mysterious moment of an unencoded life.

Her own motherhood experience is joint, shiningly, to other forms of generation and growth, and to the different ways of thinking it in order to question others and one self. First of all there is life in two, of mother and daughter, Lea Vergine (1977) said: “it’s a genetic, evolutive map, the trembling and penetrating research done by Amalia Del Ponte on the relationship mother – daughter”.

A roll and a map, “report of eight years of life in common, the story of a duality, of a couple of entities between which elapses a essential relationship for both, a detailed topology (the map) of a not too vast territory. Nothing escapes between mother and daughter, everything is recorded and sometimes transfigured, and a magnetic shield is created, rich of aggressive and loving impulses”.

Certainly here we have an intimate experience, together tender and dramatic, nevertheless it is transcended and referred to other meanings with the numeric symbology (eight is the infinity, the eternal) and with the combination flower – seed – vagina to another way of being and thinking, to a primary natural: alchemic and scientific knowledge are here combined in antagonist polarity, according to Anne Marie Sauzeau.

Del Ponte undergoes the appeal of maps, that matches wemm with the strong mental characterization of her work. With them we think and put in squares the the world, but we also create and imagine it. Thought and vision stay together in infinite games. The maps are, as she says “images of mental paths” not of the single object, but of one’s own experience. And certainly they open on the experience of feminine and daily, clearly. The femininility is experience of the world or more simply one’s own way of expressing the world? or both things together?

A crystal, two copper wires, a plaster hand, a pedestal: Amalia starts the rear of crystals, immerse in their specific solutions. She starts another way of probe the profound structure of matter, or of nature, their intelligence, their ambiguity: she wants to put in question the distinction between alive and inert, between organic and inorganic, the mental and the corporeal.

“Here the process tempers it’s own materials in an other more magic and allusive, the one of alchemy, that tends to grasp the intelligence of matter”, as Achille Bonito Oliva says (1978).

The interest for alchemy is profound and genuine, that sees also in ‘86 her participation on this theme at the venetian Biennal with a work, Uroboros, in which appears the snake – dragon of the circular idea of time.

Alchemy, as we know is also path of transmutation of interiority. It’s another way to think the world and to feel in communication with it; It’s an extraordinary storage of symbols, of archetypes that not only art, but also science it’s self go back to revisit.

A very small , perfect pearl with an egg shape, Senza titolo, senza nome (1978) placed on a column at mens hight is still an allegorical process, that sends us back to something else.

But there is also a mental essentializ that invests the materials. The use of fragile and anti-hedonistic materials, recalls aspects of Japanese art defined sabi or wabi . To break the too full and the continuous and to research the empty, that is not nothingness or absence.

Musica da camera per sei strumenti – exposed at New York in 1980 – starts the strong audio – visual correspondence (with an expanded perception) based on the suggestion of the “only formal” aspect of the cases. The work is definitely conceptual. Francesco Leonetti (1980) gave an accurate and punctual description (that is reproduced in this catalogue).

The peculiarity of the artistic invention of Amalia Del Ponte that contaminates materials and concepts lays in the will of involving all the senses with the multiplicity of the materials, wood, alabaster, poison, cerebral material.

In conclusion, it is also singular the stylistic irregularity: there is no path, one single language, but more ways of forming also inside one single period. This operation (formerly duchampian) is proper of the poor-art a-vanguards, it is not post-modern: it never gave itself eclecticism, but it always remains strong the regulation abstract formal. The inner wire remains strong and coherent, mental that crosses the plurality of the investigation lines, that her self explicits, work after work, with poetic statements, is also in two books: Atlante (1978), La forma del suono (1993), where conceptual thought and visual thought are one next to the other.

Eleonora Fiorani

In the form, through the form

Already in 1965, with the Plexiglas structures – transparent prisms – in contact with concrete and iron, Amalia Del Ponte worked on the optic phenomenon’s, energy and aesthetic drived by the strange alliance (or mésalliance) between opaque, rough, and the smooth crystalline matter that reminded the crystal of Rocca. With edges and adjoined faces, a new series of optical dislocations was born, geometrical contrapositions and virtual spaces that the look, with the slightest movement, could as it pleased dissolve or recompose. Like a kaleidoscope. I also remember the photos of some of these Plexiglas sculptures, erected in the middle of industrial structures, among erecting pillars: exalted and in the same time denied the idea itself of sculpture, because yes, they where there, but also deceived the sight. There ‘accrossable’ physicality changed in presence of the virtual, in irradiant power, in pure light energy.

Strange project the one of virtualizing the physically of the matter of an object, or better, to well an other physically: the dematerialized and mobile of energy itself, if in form of light, of rainbow, of colour, of electric wave, memorative faculty or sound vibration (I am referring myself to the many aspects of the artist production). Anyway, those minimal sculptures of the 70’s, that the artist called tropes , term that well describes how virtual their body was, rather it was a directional place (tropos) of movement and recall of something else, like the metaphor.

But recall to what ? “What I would like to express it is not the conscience of a form but the possibility that the conscience has to expand” wrote in those days Amalia.

Actually, in the contiguity of heterogeneous materials, you could follow the chance of light but also the adventure of an other energy, the one of conscience, compared with intuitive geometry that it was offered her. Enriched by it, precisely ‘expanded’.

Strangely, far apart from the far away constructivist promises of their formation of sculptor, Amalia Del Ponte does not work on the form but in the form, across the form, re-ascending through the form to the memory of matter. If her obsessives research is at the antipodes of any other ‘informal’ and ‘materic’ choice (and in consequence expressionist) is because of the profound conviction that under the most chaotic magma, under the most irregular lumps of matter, hides an amazing atomic and reticular structure, that evolves and transforms according to rigorous spatial coordinates, that is according to a ‘geometrical’ memory.
Amalia Del Ponte bears an bachelardian curiosity towards every scientific knowledge, from the more positivist to the more mystic, from the more archaic to the more Fantascientific. With extraordinary ease, she attains in particular to the theory of mineralogy on the structure of crystals, or at the more surprising of biology and those systems of liquid crystals that are for example at the base of the cerebral matter. Amalia is fascinated by the paradoxical hypothesis that, being the difference of the stalactites on the vault of a cave and the human brain made only of a minor or major degree of informative organization and specialization of the atomic reticula, to the mineral reign is not precluded the access to intelligence, in future and infinitely improbable times. Therefore, of this “sidereal intelligence of crystals” exists a discreet anticipation, produced by men, in the third generation computers, in which crystals artificially associated ‘think’… Amalia trained her brain to this intuitive type speculation, she expanded her conscience, in the equal adherence of the modern scientific theory and the mnemonic researches conducted by Giordano Bruno. With equal passion and sense of actuality.
At the roots of the structure of matter (for what concerns the memory of it’s codes of multiplication or it’s avatar between necessity and case, between repetition and changing jumps) there is no substantial difference in the development of mineral matter (a crystal), a biological life (the body of a baby) or of thought. So, through the form, what Amalia questions is the nucleus of matter, the memorization code of matter, maybe her unconscious. And, as Gaston Bachelard did for the fluctuating forms of air, earth, water and fire, by him followed beyond the exact science in the poetic imaginary, Amalia Del Ponte does for the inter-reign that involves the mineral world and the cerebral world (between senses and conscience). She questions the memory of matter, the drive of matter to grow, the energy busted matter: that is a volumetric change or of the superficial grain, or even light thunder, or sound flow…

Twenty years ago, she ‘cultivated’ (and exhibited in the following phases of growth) a series of hard crystals, careless of human manuality, determined only by there chemic memory and by a suitable liquid environment (it comes to say ‘amniotic’). The spontaneous and gradual formation of crystals reminds us that the mineral reign, and more in general the reign of inertia, possesses, against all the appearances of the human timing, a secret dynamic energy and a will of form which needs only an other timing. So, matter grows, like the body of a baby if you bear him.

Always in the 70’s Amalia exposed, in an ensamble of objets trouvés apparently heterogeneous and a little exotic, located with secretly on a carpet on the floor, the trace of a very different growth, according to human timing very intimate and unrepeatable, the timing of life. It was the diary of her motherhood, the growth of little Nicol, her daughter.

If the stone has an atavic memory and grows in it’s most secret structure, if besides it accumulates a circumstantial memory, accidental, geological, the most easily readable in the scares left by the many cataclysms of the earth’s history, well, any block of stone – not only the fascinating geode – has many mistery to unveil, to tell.

It happened to me to visit a marble quarry, in Carrara, with Amalia. It was the first of January, a polar cold, the crystal air that gives neatness to everything, to the traits, to the colors, to the noises, to silence. It seemed to visit a temple, in company of the due sacerdotal guide. Without any need of explanations, I understood that, in front of a reef of raw marble, you can read and hear (because this invests several sensorial orders), a boundless narration on the transformation of matter in the flow of time, at a micro and macroscopic level.

It is the “cosmic narration” of which Eleonora Fiorani in 1988, in occasion of the first exhibition of the “sounding stones” of the artist, that since some time was looking to find “the form of sound” in stone, the voice of marble or of the travertine. At the moment of the percussion, the sound kept aside in the slab will come out. In this way the energetic wave is liberated, the vibration that is propagated as heat or light, that expands from the closed universe to the open universe, beyond the borders of ower limited acoustic perception. The sound tells about this propagation from the heart of stone.

The energy of whose playing the stones will tend to syncronize immemorial, harmonious and impersonal rhythm. The care of the artist, instead has been the research of the proportion of the slab, for gradual adjustments like in the tuning of a musical instrument, so that the ‘fair’ voice would come out. Later, the reading and underlining of the symptomatic signals appeared in the stone, a potential that has to be cultivated, brought to conclusion, make flower in a visual narration that will be stressed by the sound of percussion, like the base of an organ: within those symptoms, the allusion to the power of thunder (and of thunderbolt) in the white flake right in the middle of thr gray slab, or the rustle rhythm of marine wave mentioned by the irregular surface, or the imperceptible trace of the lowered eyelids on the invisible, that slightly make the surface of the rose slab wave.

The sounds of the sounding stones produce long primordial narrations, among which the origin of the musical sound and the harmonious sound; or the origins of the baudelairian sensorial ‘correspondences’ between hearing, sight, touch etc., that superimposed experience that Amalia calls “light from the ears”; and overall the narration of these meditative practice, in front of light, of mountains, of poetry, of music, in which an exact science accepts to expand itself like a big breath finding the diapason of the communion with things, in the original fluid state.

Anne Marie Sauzeau Boetti