Roberta Bertozzi interno 38

The auto da fé of the matter
Notes on the sculpture of Mattia Vernocchi
in PAT DE DURMI, edizioni IL VICOLO, Cesena 2007

abstract

It is not accidental that the works of Mattia Vernocchi are moulded upon beds and bed frames, inside the alter-ground or above-ground, from which our night deviations and concretions stand out and, eventually, start disappearing again. The frame contains orifices, it has extremely narrow capillaries for the release and the absorption – it’s a facilitator, it perspires: all night-time matters go up and down, and pass through it.
It is not accidental that the beds are rusted and twisted, dislocated and tumid; in fact, our dreams train themselves in the same discipline. Sometimes, these bedheads remind us of the cots that were once used inside old manors and ancient family rooms: their tall structures and heavy blankets touch the floor – inside the hollow space upon the ground, one can collect the dust of the visions we have bred at night, as we were sleeping. Some invisible weight loads upon the bedsprings, it bends them: on the surface, one can see the marks left by some incorporeal guest’s chest and stomach, while we can read the carved signs of his oesophagus along the lay-out of the ceramics’ thin layers, counting each one of his vertebras; the sheets are crumpled, someone has come by, someone has abandoned his chrysalis here – in the baby’s bed, there is a cooked toy left.

As the earth blends with both frames and bedsprings, it reveals its new organic activity, by opening to new and deep thicknesses. Each thickness is coated with an appearance of dormancy, is beaten by pulsations, by germinative and generative coordinates. This results in layers of a magmatic matter which, once it has been reused and stimulated, can show its swellings, protrusions and tumefaction – as if a life that has been buried in the matter, between the nocturn of its folds, now desires to resurface and to take a new anthropomorphic look, a life that longs to win back its features and to take on some appearance. It is the sediments of history that here push and ask for a form of their own, it is the epochs of these earths and these metals; they have been absorbing and preserving the strong-willed sequence of whole generations, as well as their passing – a ghost’s fossil now lies on the pillow: the form has returned to its minimal resistance, it has reconciled with its geological fault.

One needs to observe this specific weight and fibre, to look closely at the specific intensity of earth and metal – tilled earth and riddled metal. One needs to look at the value of these elements, by going beyond ceramic works or sculpting disciplines, because it is through them that the language of these works is able to settle itself. One also has to move beyond the mere idea of the ceramic process as an art, as a function, or as a decorative and figurative system, as well as beyond the sculpting practice itself: here, shapes and volumes undergo a kind of manipulation, which also takes causality into consideration, by bringing to life those depths that are already contained and coagulated inside the matter’s webs.
Consequently, no tension affects the act of composition, nor it influences the operational efficiency. Rather, it is the elements – earth and metal – that indeed bear witness to the tension: the work of Mattia Vernocchi is completely channelled into the treatment of matters, lured as it is by the act of approaching and the consequent friction between incompatible physics. It is totally dedicated to the creation of a new, unpredicted, potential balance between them. His work’s expression coincides with the expulsion and the energy of traction and contraction: a true auto da fé of the matter. His work is enthralled by the responses provided by different matters, and by their being constituted by mass. Whereas volumes engender relations as they develop, thus entering in a relationship with the surrounding space, masses correspond to pure strength, to emission power, to agglomeration. The masses can thus establish a field, which has to do with spatiality only to a certain extent – and such minimal part solely concerns the masses’ capacity of imposing themselves. A new calibre is here being practiced, something whose dimension includes both the pressure of the demiurge, as well as a resistance to creation; it is a strategy that aims at both combining and demonstrating its malleability and its fixing capabilities. As if we were inside a large industrial brazier or a big wartime construction site, the artist’s or artificer or sapper’s wisdom, lies in the point of fusion: the creation corresponds to the corpse of the sacrifice previously carried out in the furnace. [...]