The Progressive Fall of the Centuries
2024, 197 x 197 cm, paper cuttings from magazines and books from the 19th and 20th centuries
foto Francesco Piva
This work is the first of a triptych dedicated to time and memory inspired by three different poems. To some extent they are graphics of poems
The images and texts are taken from magazines and books of the 20th and 21st centuries. The squares of paper line up towards the centre of the circle, where everything gradually becomes more and more illegible due to the dark colour and the thinning of the squares. Phrases that could be read in full, faces, animals, number tables, trees, buildings gradually become incomprehensible.
Source of inspiration a poem by Testori:
La calma, dolcissima caduta dei cementi;
la caduta solenne delle case,
dei petali di fuoco che i raggi rimandano dai vetri;
l’antica, fatale caduta delle piazze sulle strade,
delle strade sulle piazze (…)
l’antica caduta dei platani
e dei pioppi (…)
la dolce, calma progressiva caduta
dei secoli nei secoli e millenni
il rumore vano che lascia dietro di sé
il mondo
ed il silenzio (…)
Eclipse. There are not leaves enough to cover the face
2024, 197 x 197 cm, paper cuttings from magazines and books from the 19th and 20th centuries
The cut-out fragments of vegetation and leaves are not enough to cover the cutouts of faces that pop up here and there. The eclipse is partial.
This work is inspired by a poem of Wallace Stevens
There are not leaves enough to cover the face
It wears. This is the way the orator spoke:
“The mass is nothing. The number of man in a mass
Of men is nothing. The mass is no greater than
The singular man of the mass. Masses produce
Each one its paradigm.” There are not leaves
Enough to hide away the face of the man
Of this dead mass and that. The wind might fill
With faces as with leaves, be gusty with mouths,
And with mouths crying and crying day by day.
Could all these be ourselves, sounding ourselves,
Our faces circling round a central face
And then nowhere again, away and away?
Yet one face keeps returning (never the one),
The face of the man of the mass, never the face
That hermit on reef sable would have seen,
Never the naked politician taught
By the wise. There are not leaves enough to crown,
To cover, to crown, to cover—let it go—
The actor that will at last declaim our end.
The Plain Sense of Things
2024, 197 x 197 cm, paper cuttings from magazines and books from the 19th and 20th centuries
The clippings of lush vegetation and fragments of decaying houses sloping towards the centre become clearer revealing leafless trees: the bare branches show the plain sense of things
The Plain Sense of Things
After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir.
It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.
The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side. A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.
Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves, Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence
Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this Has to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge, Required, as a necessity requires.
DETAILS
installation view: Mariateresa Sartori David Rickard. Aether/Etere. La presenza dell’assente, Galleria Michela Rizzo, Venezia, a cura di Riccardo Greco, 2024
In foreground: David Rickard’s Cosmic Field (3.7. MHz), behind Mariateresa Sartori’s works about time