20
18

Mantra

Ferruccio Ascari here returns to using the technique of fresco transferred to canvas, typical of his painted works. But there is an element of innovation: the element of writing, previously used episodically in the fabric of his works, becomes the key element of this work, which is also a text.[read]The range of colours is limited to just two: a very dark green for the almost-black background, and gold for the words of the text flowing across twenty-seven canvases, hung not in a line but in a pattern that recalls a musical score. At first glance, the text seems unfathomable, but as the title suggests, it is a fragment of a mantra of Vedic tradition. The text is a threshold to cross, an enigma to decipher in order to reveal its content of truth. Mantra is part of a cycle of compositions the artist has been working on since 2017. They all fall within the same province: a spiritual tension, a questioning of the sense of our being in the world in this historical period of radical transformations. The sense of these works that refer to different religious traditions lies in their quest for a common core, able to preserve us from hate and intolerance. The message contained in Mantra goes in this direction, but not only. The artist’s formal choices are in themselves a declaration of intent: the drastic reduction in figurative elements as well as the gold and the dark green make this work an object of meditation with a contemporary slant and with an implicit reference – also via Malevich’s Black Square – to the icon and its theological as well as artistic significance, its being a ‘presence’ and not just a simple artistic depiction.
[BIAS 2018 – Biennale Internazionale di Arte Contemporanea Sacra delle Religioni e Credenze dell’Umanità (Padiglione Filosofico) – MUSEO RISO Cappella dell’Incoronazione, Palermo][/read]

Mantra. Fresco transferred to canvas, gold and iron, 27 canvases, 30×40 cm each, 2018

20
09

Respiro

The sculptures and installations of this period are joined by works on paper, often large in size: while focusing on questions that cross the entire artist’s oeuvre,[read]certain of these works offer us a chance for perhaps a closer approach to his personal sphere, almost to his physical being. We might talk about a proximity that is exposed to the gaze, in a cycle of works on paper under a single title: Respiro (Breath). The large sheets of paper lined up in overlaid rows are crossed by bundles of sinuous lines that flee to the margins. The observer is attracted by their slenderness and, at the same time, their evidence, deceptively like filaments, or hairs embedded in applied onto the paper. The sign is actually obtained with ink, but – as the artist explains – the result is possible only through particular physical and mental preparation: “To obtain this sign, it takes a gesture done with a special brush, with long bristles, dipped in ink. The ink held by the bristles is deposited with a wide, flowing, continuous gesture. Breathing is important: the exhalation accompanies the whole trajectory of the sign on the paper, and the air contained in the lungs is released in synchrony with the release of the ink from the bristles. The lines that cross the sheet have their own shape. Those modulations can be compared to the signs made by a seismograph: the point of the brush records an inner state, just at the tip of the seismograph records telluric movements, or the encephalogram records brain activity.” It is breathing, then, its rhythm, that determines the fluid movement of the lines that cross the paper.[/read]

Respiro. Ink on paper, 6 sheets 66×101 cm each, 2009 [D0391]

Respiro. Ink on paper, 6 sheets 66×101 cm each, 2009 [D0392]

Respiro. Ink on paper, 6 sheets 66×101 cm each, 2009 [D0393]

20
11

Compianto
[Video]

In this video, as the title indicates, Ferruccio Ascari goes back to a subject that belongs to the tradition of Christian sacred art, namely the Lamentation of Christ,[read]a theme that begins in the 1300s with Giotto in the frescoes of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua and then becomes popular in Italian art over the next two centuries.
Once again the artist starts with visual material from two previous installations – Luogo Presunto (Presumed Place) and Sapiens – also used in two other videos in the site, Artisti contro il nucleare and Prometheus which are interconnected in a subterranean way. The fixed shot, short time span and singular soundtrack – a traditional Lucanian chant belonging to the genre of the lamentation – determine the character of this video whose theme – that of death – intertwines with that of pity and horror regarding the massacres perpetrated by human beings against other human beings.[/read]

[vc_column width=”2/3″ el_class=”.box1″]Compianto. 00’26”, 2011

[vc_video link=”https://vimeo.com/141037666″ align=”center”]

20
11

Sapiens

SAPIENS is a ‘lighting body’ made in iron rod. The silhouette and dimensions are those of a tall adult man,[read]over six feet tall. Its tail is an electric cord and its head is a light bulb.
SAPIENS is a hybrid object, both a sculpture and a lamp, and exists at the border between art and design. One could describe it as a poetic thought that casts light, or just a presence. Sapiens was conceived and realized in different versions, each characterized by a specific posture of the arms and hands, in the position of pointing at either the sky or the ground; of offering or welcoming…
Every piece of Sapiens is unique.[/read]

Sapiens, 1’41”, 2011

[vc_video link=”https://vimeo.com/119112963″ align=”center”]

Sapiens. Iron wire, lightbulb, electric wire, different sizes, 2011 [S0029]

20
07

Pittura
per Ciechi

In the works on paper from this period, with a dizzying shift of perspective, the artist’s gaze is directed into a compositional plot that tends to erase distance,[read]in a near mingling, as if to fully know its innermost structure. But this is not just a case of “learning to see” things as they are intertwined in the plot of nature; it means feeling a sense of belonging to that same plot. This is what happens in Pittura per ciechi (Painting For the Blind), a series di gouaches made on the pages of old Natural History textbooks in Braille, or in works like Bianco/Nero (White/Black) Bianco/Rosso (White/Red), where the shortening of the distance between the eye and the represented object produces effects of distortion, overlaps of figures that appear on the single sheets, disrupting their order: each of them thus appears as a fragment of something whose overall view has been lost.[/read]

Pittura per Ciechi. Gouache on Braille paper, 24 sheets 25×33,5 cm each, 2007 [DG0078]

Pittura per Ciechi. Gouache on Braille paper, 9 sheets 25×33,5 cm each, 2007 [DG0079]

20
08

Fiori

“There are no givens, only events and movements… Reality is not composed of things that essentially are and accidentally become[read]- the artist says, speaking of these works – but of processes, i. e. of an essential becoming… Things are not in time, they are time.” A becoming that unfolds before our very eyes in Fiori, a colony of hybrid objects in continuous transformation that are captured and fixed for an instant inside a process of ongoing metamorphosis.[/read]

Fiori. Terracotta, 24 elements 9x11x20 cm ca., variable sizes, 2008 [S0023]

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20
08

Insiemi
Instabili

Insiemi Instabili, like Odradek, Fiori and Vayu, belongs to a group of works in witch the multiplicity of parts “lacking a clear, recognizable order[read]- as the artist says – seems to respondd to a pure need for growth; almost as if they were following their own secret impulses, expanding in the direction of least resistance”.
The form – the infinite, varied form through which life manifests itself – is the result of this impulse that knows no calm, driven by an overwhelming generative will that seems to have no goal other than reproduction. The cones of black terracotta of Insiemi Instabili are arranged in pairs, as if attracted by a magnetic force that urges them to make. The expand on the floor surface, in scattered order, in keeping with a movement that changes each time in relation to the host space. “There are no givens, only events and movements… Reality is not composed of things that essentially are and accidentally become – the artist says, speaking of these works – but of processes, i. e. of an essential becoming… Things are not in time, they are time.”[/read]

Insiemi Instabili. Terracotta, 140 elements different sizes, 2008 [S0024]

20
08

Latte
Nero

Latte nero is an environmental installation composed of 83 parts in white terracotta that remind us of the form of the female breast,[read]though they are hollow and reveal a dark chasm. Similar but of different size, the individual parts are arranged along the wall, apparently without any order. The work’s title refers to a famous poem by Paul Celan that begins with a disturbing oxymoron: milk, the symbol of nourishment and life, is reversed into its opposite, into denial of food and therefore death. In the work by Ascari, the contrast takes the form of the opposition between the fullness, the turgor of the form, and the black void it reveals: a void that is not just subtraction, but a dizzying attraction towards the infinite.[/read]

Latte Nero. Terracotta, 84 elements variable dimensions, 2008 [S0025]

20
08

Odradek

Odradek is composed of many parts: small ones, in red terracotta, that remind us of something that we cannot say, perhaps a top, something that seems to have lost its function.[read]The title, not coincidentally, refers to a famous short story by Kafka that has to do with a forgotten object said to be extraordinarily mobile; it eludes the grasp, its form seems senseless, yet complete in its own way. Like Kafka’s Odradek, each part of this installation can roll, producing a subtle sound “like the voice of one who is without lungs.” Odradek, like Insiemi instabili, Fiori and Vayu, belongs to a group of works in which the multiplicity of parts “lacking a clear, recognizable order — as the artist says — seems to respond to a pure need for growth; almost as if they were following their own secret impulses, expanding in the direction of least resistance.” The form — the infinite, varied forms through which life manifests itself — is the result of this impulse that knows no calm, driven by an overwhelming generative will that seems to have no goal other than reproduction.[/read]

Odradek. Terracotta, 235 elements, variable dimensions, 2008 [S0026]

20
08

Vayu

Vayu, like Odradek, Fiori and Insiemi Instabili, belongs to a group of works in witch the multiplicity of parts “lacking a clear, recognizable order[read]- as the artist says – seems to respondd to a pure need for growth; almost as if they were following their own secret impulses, expanding in the direction of least resistance”.
The form – the infinite, varied form through which life manifests itself – is the result of this impulse that knows no calm, driven by an overwhelming generative will that seems to have no goal other than reproduction.
In Vayu the twenty parts, with similar forms but different sizes, are scattered on the floor. The title is a Sanskrit term that can be translated as “wind, air, current.” These are jars, containers without bottom, so that paradoxically they can contain nothing. Vessels destined never to be filled, whose form evokes and at the same time negates the empty-full dialectic that is part of the form and function of any container. Crossed by air, these jars evoke the void and, at the same time, the impossibility of its representation.[/read]

Vayu. Terracotta, 20 elements, variable dimensions, 2008 [S0027]