MNDS BEDS.
Laura Vecere, April 28, 2007

Disseminated throughout, from the single element to the aggregates from which an exhibition project springs, the traces of a constant movement delineate, in the work of Maria Novella Del Signore, the profile of repeated rejection of the principle of uniqueness of things. Allowed to persist by the boundary of its outlines, the thing opens up and its outlines break down, crumbling under the impetus of a renewed thrust that takes it out of its ontological isolation and thrusts it unceasingly beyond itself, toward new fulfillment.

In fact the artist favors the use of media that are often incoherent and lack a structure of their own, such as tulle, glass (in various forms), wax, paraffin, salt and powdered marble, and even when she makes use of photography, the image that results does not emerge in its singularity, but conceals itself by sinking into the ambiguity of superimposed profiles. And the titles of her works and exhibitions are subject to the same law of mutation as the work itself. They often include terms that suggest a provisional character, in order to underline, in words as well, that no “figure” is ever portrayed “at rest,” but changes its state in a never-ending process.

And yet, over the whole span of the artist’s development, movement describes a trajectory that proceeds from the exterior to the interior. An interior, however, that does not lead into the psycho-subjective inner life of the human being but indicates a continual and ever closer approach to terra incognita, stripped of the subjective character of the thing itself. All this implies a radical shift in the cognitive perspective, whose points of inflection can be identified in two works: Orizzonte (1972) and Annaliviaplurabella (1980). There is a transition, that is to say, from a work that implies verticality of vision to a second where the rotation of the work, turned upside down and laid horizontally, changes in meaning as well as in sign: the horizon becomes horizontality. In its lowering, the sense of vision is reunited with the sense of touch and smell, and then disperses into the material of which the thing is made.

These transitions had already been identified by the author of this essay referring to earlier works of Maria Novella Del Signore’s career, which led to a subdivision of the work into gaseous, fluid and precipitated states.1 This means that the heavier weight of the material was followed by a lowering in the direction of gravity, and this descent was correlated with the construction of horizontal structures such as the bed-river of Annaliviaplurabella, the chests of Two Fields and More... (2000), the boards of the paraffins ( 2003) and the floor-like character of Homes (2002) and Some Fields, and Strings (2003). The process has reached its culmination in the twelve breathing “beds” of Animal Earth (2007), from which the exhibition in San Gimignano takes its title, where the inert marble powder rises and falls, bradyseismically animated by a concealed mechanism, generating unknown morainal landscapes, devoid of human echoes.

In the Exhibition.
Laid out on laboratory tables are two square “trays” of reflecting aluminium; in one are four rolled-up bundles of rose-tinged wax: lumps of almost breathing skin, while deposited in the other are the same clumps, coloured light blue: Untitled 1,2, and... (2007).
In one room, a sort of introibo, are collected a number of “documentary” works showing the technical network that form the motor web hidden under the marble powder of Animal Earth. Here, in a sort of dialogue face to face, there are two large photographs printed on aluminium: The Hidden Part of Animal Earth by Tommaso Del Signore. And six photo elaborations printed on acetate by Maria Novella Del Signore showing their soft profiles and mobile surfaces, Inside Animal Earth.

The changing visions are followed by still more accords, dissonances and mutations, both visual and olfactive. Thus from the fragrance of wax emanating from the aluminum "crucible" of A Bed of Time, we move on to the sweet scent of fresh cut grass diffused by a standing atop device in which is enclosed the saturated liquid of the World-Earth. These processes are open and interwoven – and here the "natural" and peculiar intersection of Del Signore is that of encapsulating, in various circumstances, the contributions of her son Tommaso within the sphere of her own work – which opens breaches of processes squared within the process of the work itself. The wave of vibration of a single movement refracted in several places has its concerted celebration in the set of twelve geological-floor structures of Animal Earth, where the rhythmical movement is accompanied by the mechanical breathing of electrically powered pumps.
In these works it is the material and its state of transformation that are the absolute protagonists and the “form” is no longer current in terms of ideality, of resemblance, of verticality. Nothing resembles anything else. There is, If anything, a consonance with the endless diversity of the material, made up of simmering, slippage and liquefaction, micro-catastrophes that disrupt and modify its internal spaces.

Through this path the artist arrives at a proximity that decrees the end of the distinction between subject/object, with no more residue; and with it, of all the opposing and rival polarities that define our field of knowledge. A zone of “intimacy” is delineated where every oppositional-antagonistic pairing is blurred in conforming to the movement of the thing’s life. In this intimacy the paradox of simultaneous presence and communication of opposites emerges. In this intimacy, life and death reach a maximum intensity in their mutual exaltation. It is here that a still life can be transformed into something that is Still Living (2004). In it, the “form” can only emerge in a way that is vague, always open and continuously germinating.

Everything around seethed, grew, rose, with the magic leaven of existence.
The fervor of life, like a silent wind, advanced in great waves, without knowing where, on the land and on the city, through walls and fences, through wood and bodies, encompassing with its quiver everything it met on its way.” (B.L. Pasternak)

Yet this place without abode has a model, an erratic, psychic, symbolic perimeter that sustains and pervades the work of Maria Novella Del Signore: the bed. The figure of the “bed,” which has appeared recurrently and in different circumstances throughout this essay, regains all its symbolic depth, a sense of complexity that characterised every object before it was put to a pure and simple use. Bed, river, table, flowerbed, cradle, life, eros, death, sleep, dream, rêverie... these are all connotations that suggest a “philosophy of repose,” indicating an intimate contact with things since “the being of the dreamer invades all that it touches, is diffused through the world.” Repose creates the mental state that is open to a dispersive ontology, brought to bear on details and fragments.2
And it is starting from the stronghold of this topical but changing figure, impossible to locate through fixed coordinates, that the artist plunges deep or emerges to the surface, which is really the same thing, to explore the hidden realms of the other dimensions of reality: in search of the inhuman, as Jean-François Lyotard had said of her.3

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1. Cf. L. Vecere, Passaggi, in Maria Novella Del Signore. Some Fields and Strings, Museo Marino Marini, Florence 2003. ↑
2. G. Bachelard, La poétique de la rêverie, 1960. English ed. The Poetics of Reverie, trans. by D. Russell, 1971.↑
3. Jean-François Lyotard, unpublished text, 1979.↑