The Skin of Naked Fragments

In Luca Trevisani’s artistic practice, everything takes place there, in the matter and on the surface—on the very skin of things. Sometimes the surfaces are grainy or smoother; at other times they are dried or in an advanced state of dehydration, printed with citrus fruit juice, treated with dyes of liquids and leftover food, worn away. Matter is modelled, excavated, grafted, manipulated and hybridised with organic elements. Each action thus opens up possible glimpses into time, stories and places, to manifestations of ideas that slowly mature and translate into gestures that leave a trace behind them.

In these processes where change and the unpredictable coagulation of material tension—both in its sculptural and physiological domain—mingle with narratives and the incessant becoming of identities, the forms generated take on the appearance of fragments that may be glimpsed by eyes blinded in the light of a new emerging reality: performative images that, on appearing, show the emergence of a gaze that goes beyond time.

The precision of language, thought and hand. In Trevisani’s research, the challenge towards the cyclic vitality of matter and its constant questioning pass through these intervals of investigation, translated through a series of rules and experimentations rendered in the form of sculptures, images, actions, writing, books, magazines, videos and exhibitions. Matter as nourishment to be moulded, as a voice to let echo across as-of-yet unexplored landscapes, as a continuous flow of pulsations, inseparable from the rhythmic punctuation of our very existence.

I’m thinking here of the series of works the artist put together for the project Flour Fossils of Lemon Flavor at the Mehdi Chouakri Gallery in Berlin—presences where the concept of exposure in terms of nudity appears in its most singular expression: the nudity of thought, of the artmaking process, of the material and body of things. I retrace the sculptures in space, as if within a contemporary wunderkammer, and I see the search for the essence of a gesture emerge, one that becomes a work—an image-work. In Dry Garden’s Sobs, Submerged Tale, Pocket-Friendly Tragic and The Melancholic Zombie (all 2022), the touch is both powerful and delicate, bordering on playful irreverence. Leafy fossils are tattooed with imagery of a political nature, loaned from thinkers, architects and artists. “Printing onto 320 million years is temporal vertigo, a desperate cry, a perverse and subtle trap,” the artist tells me. A sediment of plant or animal origin, the fossil is a mineralised fragment that leads us to take a temporal leap on the spot, dismantling the mythical time of the ever-the-same. “The fossil is an undigested clot, spat back into the world, and never assimilated. Fossils undermine any idea of paternity […] In their world there are no inventions, just discoveries, hybridizations, syncretisms: theirs is a grammar that proceeds by pollination, the product of a collective metabolism.” [1]

With similar—and perhaps even more penetrating—sensitivity, another gesture triggers a process of naked emergence: pieces of lemons are crushed onto irregular slabs of black marble and along their edges. What remains is a decorative layer that ‘hardens’ the surface of the sculptural material par excellence, here mocked in an ironic yet thoughtful manner. “I use the material and all its wisdom to talk about the hard and the soft, the sensitive and the resistant, the porous and the delicate,” Trevisani continues. In The Rock That Drinks, The Cute Ink Fossil and Of Lemon Flavor (all from 2022), the ‘maquillage’ that the artist recreates manually on the skin of the marble comes across as a constellation of imprints and residues deposited within the matter, emerging only now on the surface, as if after millennia. The surfacing of a camouflage, a seductive, multiplying mimicry. Trevisani’s gesture is one capable of being both inside and outside. A gesture that places itself on the margin, while viewing this margin as both a point of access and exit at the same time. Neither inside nor outside of the era, neither inside nor outside of time.

This margin also feeds the imagery that reflects on our relationship with nature and the ephemeral boundary that lies between nature and artifice. What would nature think— “assuming it even exists,” says Trevisani—of being at the same time the body-object and body-subject on which our projections of it are printed? So it is that in the two-dimensional sculpture series Notes for dried and living bodies (2022), banana tree or equatorial palm leaves are dried and flattened, embellished with floral motifs taken up and reworked by other artists. Everything happens there, on their skin: touched, viewed, felt and torn by our constant construction of interpretative models of the natural world.

Time generates form—and indeed time is formed—fixing what remains and what passes. The two metamorphic sculptures Daniel Day Lewis (2022)—named after the British actor who left his Hollywood career for a period of time to work as a shoemaker in a workshop in Florence—are made up of pre-existing uppers onto which the artist applies bread soles. “Bread is the technological object that has most determined the world as we inhabit it, and I thus make cheerful yet cutting phantasmagoria of it,” says the artist. Previously used as wearable objects—and now on show on an ebony wood structure—these bas-reliefs sum up history, time consumed and both the personal and collective past, in a gesture of cultural archaeology and of the ‘shaping’ of the sole that brings out the part of the object less familiar to us, and that here has fossilised: an imprint of everyday memories, of encounters with foreign bodies, of potential postural metamorphoses.

Even in the two sculptures entitled Il Sale delle Suole (‘The Salt of the Soles’, 2019), “each sole is a totem of walking, of curiosity, of restlessness.” Deformed and curved, as if to make them dynamic and ‘fatigued’ by the coming and going of the water that flows in and out of them, these trainers are textural collages of juxtapositions, as dreamlike as they are real. Like sea breezes—“the sea being only place where we do not walk, where man does not indulge in the force of gravity,” Trevisani points out—salty hints of shells, crabs, claws and octopuses, clinging like skeletal fragments to the last layer of a series of overlapping strata, these stiffened close-ups circumscribe atmospheres of the depths, and push observation towards a feeling of abstraction of the gaze and thought. And so the dissemination of this gaze in a plural symphony of bodies becomes a fundamental posture, in the impossibility of any single vision, a single measure or a single rhythm. A gaze that, when reduced to its bare astonishment, comes to a halt, as if suspended and incapable of truly understanding what it is observing, in the impotence of fully knowing what encounter awaits it. After all, “the best way to make an exhibition is to leave space for this encounter.” [2]

–Giovanna Manzotti
Translation by Ben Bazalgette

[1] Luca Trevisani, ‘Tender and Morbid. The Fossil as Project’ in Dune Vol. 002 No. 001, June 2021: pp. 64–65.
[2] Meet the artist: Luca Trevisani, MACRO – Museo per l’Immaginazione Preventiva, 2021: https://www.museomacro.it/it/extra/video-it/meet-the-artist-luca-trevisani/

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Photos © Andrea Rossetti