Grace in a Disordered World.
David Thorp

Maria Novella Del Signore progressively explores an imaginary interpretation of the phenomenal world. Her large scale installations draw the spectator into a sensual realm in which sound and light converge into an association that contextualises the sculpture she places in the gallery. Del Signore’s sculpture rarely exists alone in a state that emphasises its ‘objecthood’. In the past she has concentrated on exploring the possibilities of using glass, in one instance, or ceramics, for example, in another alongside technology. Her larger installations function almost as theatrical sets in which the viewer becomes a player, walking through an all-embracing multifaceted combination of form and sound 1. The contact that the spectator has with the totality of the work and the specificity of its materials, enlivens the theatrical context of each piece. In these works Del Signore references the richness of a period in which artists were deeply concerned with the effect a ‘total’ environment would have on their audience and which was stimulated by the possibility of merging form and idea into an enveloping experience. An overriding aspect of each of Del Signore’s large environments (a label which suits her medium better that installation) is based upon an appreciation of the beauty of form and the possibility that a combination of elements can create a transcendent experience that is both uplifting and intriguing.

Throughout a long career as an artist, Del Signore has been associated with the major developments in experimental art, particularly in her native Italy, and her thinking as an artist has inevitably been influenced by them. However, as one who has always been open to the positive influences of culture throughout the latter years of the twentieth century, she has also understood and indeed experienced first hand, the power and redemptive nature of those hugely influential forces that moulded alternative European culture throughout the nineteen sixties and seventies. Her life has been one in which a search for the possible has drawn her into not only an experimental attitude towards art but into a totality of experience that has included making very specific choices about life style that embraced the radical practices that changed the face of contemporary culture in the those years. The tragedy of the existential American experience informed the post war American expression of the total art form as one in which the autonomy of US art asserted itself over the influence of Europe. It became the subject matter for the environmental artist. Kienholz, Oldenburg and to a lesser extent, Rauschenberg provide an account in their environments and performance of an experience that is quintessentially modern American and which had shed the antecedents of Europe. In Europe, however, the open-ended experimentation of Arte Povera created a laboratory situation in which artists delighted in the exploration of new materials and process. No boundaries were fixed as far as the appropriateness of materials was concerned and notions such as the modernist ‘truth to materials’ were abandoned along with the hierarchies associated with bronze and stone; turned on their heads as artists sought to unlock hidden energies and release elemental forces in their work.

As a young woman Del Signore was a friend of the Arte Povera artists. She describes how she danced with Mario Merz and how, with her sister, got to know the key figures in this loosely gathered movement. The powerful mental image of Del Signore dancing with Mario Merz acts as an interesting allegory for the development of her art. Mario Merz stands as a towering figure over the progress of contemporary Italian art. His ability to formally transpose the hidden undercurrents of nature as they govern the making of art and his poetic interpretation of scientific order, have a bearing upon the manner in which Del Signore eventually shifted away from alternative culture into a more mainstream position. But, indeed, as Laura Vecere suggests in her recent essay about Del Signore, there exists a powerful line of descent that links Del Signore to a fundamental characteristic of contemporary art made by women.

There is a hint of a remote matrilineal origin that runs from the chthonic cults of antiquity through a subterranean vein that no form of patriarchy,,, has ever been able to block permanently… Its underground ramifications nourish the universe of a female awareness (and here it is worth briefly referring to the variations on a similar underlying tone that surface in various ways in the work of women artists who, while very remote from one another in time and approach, are linked by this thread, Ana Mendieta, Louise Bourgeois, Marina Abramovic, Kiki Smith, Mona Hatoum and Ghada Amer)…2

It is immediately apparent that by associating Del Signore with such a list places her practice within an oeuvre that is essentially female and which challenges the values of a male dominated art world. Del Signore believes that any kind of fundamentalism – coherence – in art, like in nature, is a false postulate. For her the processes of the phenomenal world constantly generate change in a vital incohesive way. She regards her purpose as an artist to operate within this phenomenological chaos, as part of an endeavour to uncover an intrinsic beauty that manifests as a poetic statement about the organic nature of the world. Whether or nor her investigation reveals an experience that might be described as objectively real is subsumed by her work coinciding with the poetic dimension of science.

Del Signore creates a link between science and art through poetry. There have been long established attempts by artists to unite these two apparently disparate disciplines that has underpinned much art of the twentieth century, an endeavour that has acted as the artist’s motivating source. The Arte Povera artists eschewed theory in favour of an exploratory approach to materials and processes and, although Del Signore has described her practice as linked to theories of physics, in a similar way she has employed a vocabulary of matter in a sentient association of art and science that incorporates a response to physics that is intuitive and spontaneous. Del Signore thinks that such process could contain a sort of ‘grace’ a quality open to various interpretations, the elegance of a sudden correct solution to a problem, the fortuitous happening that results in a coherent outcome, might all be included in Del Signore’s practice. In an early
stage of her life she had said “I look for the beautiful” holding in this extreme postulate a sort of “ultimate” issue of the experience.

Intuition and awareness form the two poles that support Del Signore’s practice, acts that encapsulate a value system that exemplifies her art. Both go back to her phenomenological position whereby the conscious apprehension of subject matter does not have to be constrained by the necessities of objective reality. Thereby raising an interesting contradiction between the factual basis for scientific development and the imaginative leaps that progress art. Del Signore always likes to refer to a continuous progression and movement in the elements and forms in her work. In her newest series she continues her exploration into the unlocking of hidden energy in materials. The galleries in the Museo di San Gimignano run in progression and each of the rooms, that vary in size and scale, is dedicated by Del Signore to a different work and each work to a distinct combination of materials. At the heart of the exhibition is the installation Animal Earth. This complex piece unites several of the conceptual elements that underpin Del Signore’s work. It is based upon the poetic notion that the earth itself is a sentient being and that the ground beneath our feet lives and breathes. Del Signore’s long standing concern with ecological and green issues clearly lends itself to the idea that, as human beings, we share something vital with the earth that supports us. Not only do our actions impinge upon the health of the earth but, in the creative space that Del Signore has established, we actually live in such a symbiotic relationship with it that we experience the same sense of existence. The material substance, in this case calcium carbonate, appears to breath steadily as, in Del Signore’s world of poetic responses, mineral and organic become one. Coral reefs are composed of calcium carbonate deposited by animals and plants and Del Signore tells how she finds involving Charles Darwin’s explanation of the patterns of coral reef development raising a fascinating coincidence with the actual proceeding of her research, particularly her perception that beautiful form equates with scientific truth. In Del Signore’s view, objective phenomenological truth manifests itself in a primary aesthetic condition. Each of the twelve pieces that make up the complete work lies flat on the gallery floor, twelve giant trays of moving matter. Into each tray of calcium carbonate run many capillary tubes, like a patient prone in a hospital bed, the earth is fed, nurtured, aided in its recovery as this input creates its breath and feeds life into it. The earth moves and as it does so its smooth white surface pulses. This pulsation slowly alters the surface of each tray as, gradually, they begin to resemble undulating terrain, microcosmic hills and valleys that represent a symbolic vastness that anyone who has flown over the snow covered wastes of Siberia and looked down across unending stretches of uninhabited land will recognise.

Referring to Eva Hesse in his 1997 publication ‘American Visions’ Robert Hughes suggested that:

Spurred by the examples of Joseph Beuys, Claes Oldenburg, and Jean Dubuffet, Hesse grew more and more interested in what usually didn't pertain to sculpture. Backing away from its 'male' rigidity, which included the high-style rhetoric of Minimalism, she allowed her fascination with the 'female' and the inward, including what was grotesque and pathetic, to enlarge.3

Hughes’ account of the rhetoric of Minimalism and Hesse’s interest with the inward as a particularly female concern, offers some interesting comparisons with Del Signore’s practice. Hesse too had a specific interest in the inner identity of materials and pioneered the use of many that had hitherto not been regarded as appropriate for the fashioning of art objects. Although simple in its form Hesse’ sculpture stood in opposition to the austerity of high minimalism while learning the formal lessons that a reductive aesthetic allows, the release of meaning in art because it is unfettered by decoration. And, while acknowledging and learning from the unavoidable influence of the hugely successful male artists of the age, her art makes a statement that is essentially and clearly female. Del Signore has spoken of the anti-decorative tendency and in her work and of its ‘minimalism’ and it is from the same minimalism of Hesse, in the event the precursor of a new post minimalism, that Del Signore’s work is eventually proceeding. In Untitled 1,2 and… eight malleable pieces of wax sit on two aluminium sheets, four on each, on one sheet the wax forms are a light fleshy pink tone, on the other they are a very pale blue. Wax is material that has attracted and fascinated Del Signore, apart from its malleability, it has a very distinct smell and these hand sculpted pieces retain the immediacy of the artist’s touch. To grip and hold the warm wax as it is shaped only to finally let it go compares playfully with the idea of something being released. As the sculptures are freed from the artists hold they are able to release their inner presence. Elsewhere in the exhibition, a block of wax is placed upon a soft fibrous ceramic slab, the wax is slowly heated from beneath and gradually melts to form a liquid pool around the ceramic that supported it.

Although in Del Signore’s work can not be observed a formal “coherence”, there is an aesthetic consistency that runs through her work but, arguably, that is where cohesion ends. Spontaneity remains the modus operandi of Del Signore’s practice. It is from the unexpected and the intuitive that her work arises. As coral reefs continue to rise towards the sunlight even as their bedrock is sinking, so Maria Novella Del Signore’s art flows toward fragmented and complex meanings,
gracefully expressive responses to an incoherent world.

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1. Soundtrack composed by Tommaso Del Signore. ↑
2. Laura Vecere, Florence, June 17, 2006, And Living is So Very Close to Dying, published on the Catalogue “Some Bodies Memories”, S. Croce sull’Arno (Pisa), 2006.↑
3. Robert Hughes, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, 1999.↑