Formless Indefinite Incomplete.
Sergio Risaliti, Florence, May 2007

“If the desiring machines produce something, they certainly do not produce meanings, representations and forms. As we have already seen they produce a flow that the next machine has to process.”
R. Krauss

It looks like a tray. The artist has placed a series of sculptures on this thin base of reflective sheet metal. Three, four pieces of beeswax. These things born with the color of honey have a scent of their own, an iridescent surface, an aura that stems from their natural existence. They are fruits of the human hand that have tiptoed into the workshop of the queen of the hive. Here the honey-sweet and the honey-like pass over into more noble and quintessential values. Radiation of gem and heart of flesh. The four (sacred-profane) pieces of wax pulsate and palpitate with inner light and sensuous pink forms in full efflorescence: folds, edges that open up and bend, inside-outside, in an exercise of sexual organs and planes of sensation. In the light of these wax roses steeped in the sunset of their own splendor, there is a memory of that warm luminosity that the church candle has on many occasions cast onto the skin of Mary Magdalene. Figure of melancholy and vanitas, the Magdalen lives secluded in the intimate space of her own desire and her own exaltation. An inflamed mirror of sensations and spiritual passions, she meditates on love, on yielding to and drowning in a physical principle that keeps the flesh at bay with the noli me tangere. Specular double of the candle lit in the room, whose flame evidently alludes to the mystic marriage between the beloved (creature) and the lover (creator), the lovesick woman burns to enjoy in spirit what the flesh does not possess, not being possessed. These digressions are just a way of saying that flame and honey have a role in the artistic work of Maria Novella Del Signore which deserves reconsideration. At the same time this digression into the imagery of mystical love is intriguing because many of the forms that preceded these last were related to fetuses and fetishes, to the point of resembling them, with eyes and mucous membranes. Formless pieces of organism and organisms in pieces. Embryos and organic residues, and what not. Mystically confusing (by a principle of anamorphosis) blood with mucus, drool with the sperm of life, wax with ectoplasm.

Wax, chosen because it is a natural, organic material, to be modeled without imposition into a plastic version, has been used by the artist in an antagonistic way to that of bronze or other patinated metals. To explain herself better, the artist has chosen to work with wax without straining its nature and quality, its values, its vital properties. She has resolutely renounced the simulation of nature and naturalness, forgoing the use of a traditional material – such as bronze or plaster – and of academically studied gestures, tried out even in the modern era when artists began to produce the formless with bronze (I’m thinking of Matisse’s highly amorphous figures) or ceramics (as in some of Lucio Fontana’s Spatial Ceramics), and then with marble (the famous “feet” of Luciano Fabro) and resins (for instance César). To practice the horizontal plane of being and existence without distinguishing between the ideal verticality of language and the functional one of the tongue, between sacred function and scatological narration. And so in the case of these “roses” (let us give them this name to celebrate their origin and kinship with the world of flora and with that of the Muses), the formlessness of the thing is nothing but the result of a transformation of the form and sign wholly to the advantage of the new statuesque quality of the deformed. Here the contact with the material, its manipulation, takes place through attraction and identification between the pair of generators or procreators: the wax and the artist. As chance would have it both declined in the feminine in Italian. As chance would have it demoted at the horizontal level, so that everything happens on the plane of a new verticality and monumentality, which is the one formulated from surrealism onward that has horizontally celebrated sizes and qualities and forces without making any distinction between high and low. But we will have to say that these generators of form have gone right up to that edge of existence of dimensions which usually cancel or eclipse one another: life and death, inside and outside, pleasure and pain, soft and firm, fluid and resistant, etc. We were speaking of a renunciation of monumentality or verticality, iconic for example, or rhetorical-symbolic: it suffices to think of the Paschal candle that stands upright and illuminates, burns, heats until it is consumed (comparable on one hand to the passion and resurrection of the flesh in Christ and on the other to the vanity and death of the human body). Or we could refer to other public works of these decades, i.e. to the renewed rhetorical and ideological monumentality of so much male sculpture, which has raised deformed and formless forms, putting true monuments back at the center of the square with vertical erections, with the deliberate intention of reconquering those categories that had been emptied by the modernist critique of the 19th century and its monumental practice, and of filling them with a new academicism.

The mirror polishing of an uneven, not perfectly smooth surface, indeed one that has been finished by hand, in such a way as to make creases, flies in the face of one of the fundamental principles of ancient art, that of mimesis: the reproduction or idealistic reproducibility of an orderly and perfectly legible world from the viewpoint of both the visible (the immanent figurative significant) and the invisible (the transcendent mathematical framework). A series of values identifiable with the masculine ones of the “objectivity” and “truth” of painting and then of photography: clarity, incisiveness, visual control, order and measurement, legibility too of the logical or noumenal framework within the forms themselves.

From the epistemological point of view, that is, the base functions as the equivalent of a horizontal plane (that of universal reality) or of a spatial dimension that is formless, in the sense in which one speaks of indeterminate and not homogeneous forms, of open universe, or chaosmotic structure. But the same series of notions should be applied, on the phenomenological plane, to the level of consciousness and therefore of experience, which here would also be a mirroring of the reality external to experience, because we shall then see that this experience, this awareness of self plunged into the world or awareness of the other and of the world, is represented in the sculptures: a lump of malleable wax that has first melted with the heat and then been poured out, kneaded, rolled flat, manipulated and finally fixed in forms that are certainly formless but also as beautiful as a flower or an exotic plant. So here we have in a few words what we see and feel to be represented in this installation and in these first objects of wax. Our life, our experience and the physical world, but also the everyday universe, reality in short, in which we live and have lived. That is to say, the lump also represents the immersed and the submerged, everything that we are or have been and are unable to represent to ourselves except as malleable and manipulable material that, passing from the heat (of life and experience) to the cold of recollection and memory, from the docile and pliable vitality of childhood to the fixity of fetish and residue typical of the experience latent in recollection and memory. But whether we are talking of cold qualities or of hot ones, they are in any case feminine qualities. The material and the series of formal experiences to which it is subjected, and which instead of concealing or masking or disguising this material, transformed into something that wants and is able to resemble something else but principally intends to be a form in itself or of itself, brings them all out again. This material, so characterized and metamorphosed in the process, is based on the feminine and related to the feminine. In this connection we could cite a few but incisive sentences of Rosalind Krauss in which she speaks of female artistic expression. This is what the American writer has to say: “At the very moment, then, when the veil is lifted, when the fetish is stripped away, the mythic content of a packaged signified – ‘the monstrous-feminine’ – nonetheless rises into place to occupy the vertical field of the image/form. The truth of the wound is thus revealed.” A female art that to Krauss appears to be realized not as a function of Narcissus but of the Minotaur. By saying this the writer shifts the discourse from the plane of mimetic visibility and reflection or classical mirroring between self and world, to that of the troubling knowability of the truth in the labyrinth of the self and of language. In this way she explains the reason for a downgrading and an overturning of values, for a new repositioning of the perspective and the categories, and in this connection cites many examples of women artists who, through a series of gestures at one and the same time sacred and scatological, have altered the relationship between high and low, between sacred and profane, between forms and formless, or the relationship between the aura of beauty and fascination with the disturbing. Among these, obviously, Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Cindy Sherman and Francesca Woodman.

The work on the reflective base and on the formlessness of the subject and of the significant allude in one case to the sculpture of Brancusi and in the other to nonrepresentational artists (from some of Giacometti’s things to the pictures of Dubuffet and Wolfs) as well as to creators of the formless (in the sense in which it was described by Krauss andYves-Alain Bois on the occasion of the exhibition Formless: A User’s Guide, i.e. of those universal forms or forms of the universe, including that of art, which do not resemble anything, or that are equivalent to “something akin to a spider or a gob of spittle,” as Bataille wrote on the notion of the formless). Between the folds in the marble liquefied by the ardent passion of Bernini’s mysticism and the interest in the formless chaos of water and land shown by Leonardo in some of his drawings there is a sort of karstic relationship that traverses the psyche, the world of reverie, to come back to us in the form of art. We have to imagine the artist (in this case daughter of a futurist artist and living in Florence) permeated by impulses, sensations, imaginations, concepts. Then the distance in time and in space is reduced. We are always confronted by the same array of vital forces, by the formless language of life. Science and art help one another reciprocally in the formal reorganization of the data that emerge from the flow of oneiric sensations and imaginations.

The artistic research of Maria Novella Del Signore, in my view, has always been oriented in this dual direction. From the viewpoint of the episteme she has accepted, starting out from a creative and philosophical position, as discreet proclamation of a female positivity, the new scientific theories of the second half of the 20th century, in particular the ones that have proposed a vision of an open world and the special notions of indeterminacy and entropy. Right from the start Maria Novella Del Signore has laid claim for herself, as a woman of the 20th century and beyond, and for her own artistic discipline, a capacity to decipher the real that is antagonistic and critical with respect to classical thought: to that thought which has always corresponded to a wholly masculine logos, ideologically and symbolically strong, monarchic and autocratic. An utterly rational and deterministic, omniscient and omnipresent kind of thinking, that from the height of its Panopticon (like Narcissus) and at the center of its labyrinth (like the Minotaur) has characterized the forms of representation and the structures of power for centuries, always defining them in the masculine. To this classical and age-old knowledge the Florentine artist has opposed a new scientific and philosophical tradition, the one that on the plane of art has served to give a scientific underpinning to avant-garde artistic revolutions stemming from the desire to criticize idealistic and academic models and canons of aesthetics and poetics. In other words Maria Novella Del Signore has taken on board all the new theories on open space and indeterminacy, on chaos and uncertainty, chance and entropy: all theories that emerged in the scientific and philosophical field from the 1950s onward. Rereading the writings of Popper and Prigogine, two of the many fathers of this new epistemological and logical epoche, we can get an idea of how and on what the artist works when she takes on the “indeterminate” or “chaotic” nature of matter and energy, of light and movement. That is when she works on complexity, or on the openness of living systems and on the laws that govern their evolution and their transformation at the microscopic and macroscopic level. I think that all this work on indeterminacy is also a way of trying out a different experience or gnosis of space and time. Space and time that are also affected and modeled by movements and plays of light and sound which are themselves “spontaneous,” random, unpredictable events, or rather dimensions that can be disturbed and altered by this chaotic raison d’être or by this internal law written by a nature that does not correspond and does not respond to any higher deus ex machina.

On a phenomenological and perhaps psychological plane it is clear that the discourse concerns the life of the ego and the es, of the un-conscious and the pre-conscious. It is a question of relating these principles of indeterminacy, alteration, chaos, etc., to the mental event and to experience, and then to the function of the language of the body, of the sexes, to desire and to pleasure, or on the contrary to pain and the death instinct. In short on all the dimensions of existence that in the time and space between life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness, libido and speculation are structured around a void, form and language are created inside a solid, gesture and expression through a principle or a generative and degenerative movement that is in fact indeterminate and chaotic. A whole way of proceeding by invention of forms and conquest of materials and sources of energy and movement that do not even try very hard to conceal a female criticism of male logocentricity. Countering this (prehensile, cannibalistic, tyrannical) rationalism of thought with a feeling that is fluid and incomplete, unfinished and not definitively formed, a flow of sensations and perceptions and memories that never ends up being the one and the other, the full and the empty, the inside and the outside, immobility and movement, light and dark. Exemplary in this sense are some of her constructions or organizations of installations where, along with plastic forms corresponding to things, organic materials, in wax or glass, or ceramics, which fix the movement of water or that of silks and sheets without extinguishing or flattening it, a series of technological elements cast discrete and non-uniform beams of light and sound that stand out above or below the sculptures like small satellite towns suspended in the void or hanging in the night. Sounds and lights and a whole universe of reverberations and blurs, glimmers and flickers, and thus a symphony of noises and resonant materials, rustles and echoes that are fluid, altered, formless (in the terms described above) and once again operate on the plane of knowledge and sensation, of the world of facts and the facts of the psyche. In particular, it should be noted that these sculptures in the form of sheets or deserts of sand dunes are like flowing water and slide over a plane, over the body. They resemble bodies and planes dissolved in water and in fluid like thoughts and desires; in the same way as bodies and the planes that structure a body are dissolved along with the self in time and space. Or we find them resurfacing and rippling the visible and formless surface of the world, the margin between the time of life and that of death, the anamorphic space of desire and of its denial.

It resembles a sleeping person. It resembles the mother earth or an earth that lives in a body and a body that is sand and pneumatic flow. Her most recent installation, a monumental horizontal installation, stretched out completely on the ground, not just because it can be like the earth, or a beach, but also because it recalls a supine body that in the ground or already under the ground breathes in and out, i.e. breathes like the sea or a stretch of sand pervaded by a subcutaneous energy. Here it seems that the sand may be alluding, as always, to time that passes, to entropy, to the action of the wind that transforms the space of the desert. It seems that the sand, a white, chalky powder, is intended to allude to or to be the material out of which sculpture has historically been made. A material preserved and maintained here in a fluid, semi-gaseous state. And once again everything proceeds in such a way as to be or seem unpredictable and uncertain, even though this chaos of ebbs and flows, of risings and sinkings, is the product of precisely calculated mechanical engineering. Here ethereal and fluid are not to be read as adjectives but as formal substance and principle of form. What we find here is something more and less than a staging. Almost an identification between two or more beings or, as Deleuze puts it, a rhizome, a folding into a single being of the orchid and the butterfly, of the ship and the wave, of the nomad and the sand dune.

In the end what induces us to pause for a moment in our wandering, thoughtfully concentrated in front of this machine-monument, is not the fascination of the machinery (that seductive, rather animal beauty of the celibate machine or the desiring machine, the one constructed first by Duchamp and then by Deleuze-Guattari), as the identification between life and dying, between energy and entropy, between awakening and loss that here finds a form in which to reproduce and to be put into practice. In any case we are faced with the horizontal plane of the experienced and the knowable, on the edge of two dimensions, between the shroud and the cast, between the bundle and the winding sheet, between the cradle and the deathbed. While art perturbs and disturbs us, science wakes us up and explains us. Who we are, where we come from, where we are going. It is up to us to venture a little farther than here and there, but always beyond the line of control of the dominant way of thinking.