Being without constellation.

Franco Ionda’s Ecce Homo XXI

Gianmaria Nerli

The ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars

Walter Benjamin

The inability of looking at the stars because of the cities is no longer a problem to artists, as the moon has by long ceased to concern the poets. As for the moon, we only expect to extract helium, hydrogen and oxygen when they’ll grow insufficient in Earth, and from the stars we simply don’t expect anything any more. The lights of our metropolis have made us look down or straight ahead, in front of us, so we don’t loose our way or in order to avoid getting lost in the endless streets; those lights have thrown away the darkness to a place where almost no one goes searching for it. However, it was this darkness that allowed us looking up again, or maybe on the contrary, to sink into the abyss of our eyes. It is in this darkness that the stars draw their figures, portray their constellations, and promise us of a path to take. Sheltered from this flare, the indefinite space of thought prevails. And still, this flare does not hide the darkness behind itself, but this darkness becomes unrecognizable because it is absorbed in the light. The intermittent glittering of the stars do not bring along any shapes, any secrets, any expectances. It is a weary flare, which becomes opaque and residual under our sight. «Happy are those ages», wrote György Lukács, «when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths — ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars. […] The world is wide and yet it is like a home, for the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars».[i] Since it is no longer the starry sky to illuminate the nights of humans and since the stars don’t suggest their destinies any longer, so the languages of art and the sensible experience of the world cease to illuminate each other, they cease to mingle to that discourse that feeds and seduces our thought. And Franco Ionda’s beheaded stars allude to this notion. All of those stars try to illuminate this interrupted relationship; the cosmos, in an attempt to articulate a discourse completely full of sense, that is since a long time the specific character of the great art, it is constrained to recreate from time to time its own star system. Ionda’s secret is to impel us into looking towards this cosmos, to force us looking into the air again; even if it is just to discover – and not to forget – that «now the sky is on earth, it has turned upside down and therefore the stars can now be touched».[ii]

However, the artist knows well that touching the stars is an act of faith and melancholy: it is the awareness that Mattia Pascal’s paper-sky is definitively dissolved, together with the awareness of a mutilated and reified destiny, condemned to pure operation. Still, it is also the awareness that life, not art, is mutilated. Tragedy is within things, Ionda tells us, not in their expression. His art doesn’t live the pain, his art recognizes the pain, it thinks the pain, conducing it to the sociability of experience, and hence, this pain is transformed into thought, into an action that has some political sense. The tragedy is recognized and re-placed outside language, and doing so, it is brought to the still lost zoon politikon’s thought and destiny. Art accomplishes its path and comes back to man, it comes back in the attempt of reading, with its own languages (and not because of them), the destiny of what lives bewildered this beginning of the 21st Century. This is the immediate freshness that Ionda’s language awakens, arriving a little earlier or a little later than art, of its protocols, of its rituals: his works of art always explain something of us and our world, even before explaining itself and its obsessive destiny. «La menzogna non è nel discorso, è nelle cose»[iii] (the lie dwells in things, not in words), wrote Italo Calvino. So, this is the primary sense of Ionda’s art: to bring back the discourse to things, the experience to experience, the lies to lies; even though he that things are never things, that they are never as they look, and that in order to seize them we need always to take them by the side, a bit hidden a bit shown. And it is through this architecture of things and ideas, in this assembly of experience and thought where the cosmological force of Ionda’s poetry is expressed.

Still, the beheaded stars were born with Mayakovsky, and his cosmos liberated from antique authorities and from any human ties: «Look – / again they’ve beheaded the stars, / and the sky is bloody with carnage!»[iv] It’s the bewilderment of our bodies which cannot find any longer the dimensions, the horizons, the orientations that interest the poet and the artist; it’s the bewilderment of the thought that cannot elaborate the spaces, the shapes, the times, the dynamics of access and interaction for the human body that enchains Ionda and pushes him to hypothesise a map, to capture a reflection of this upside down sky. And in fact, the answer to the bewilderment is the true intellectual spring that these compositions have in the paintings, sculptures and serial reproductions; and they seem they want to contain and assemble the multiple dimensions of the sensitive world, of its discourses, of its ideologies, of those same idiosyncrasies of the artist that completes it. In fact, even in the composite equilibrium, it is the friction between the state of possibilities and the lies that regulates the universe of these works; because even now, as for Mayakovsky «Not a sound. / The universe sleeps, / its huge paw curled / upon an enormous ear swarmed with starry fleas».[v] Only that in Ionda’s works the allegory reaches further, it becomes infinitely more complex; besides the starry fleas there are other recurrent images that go along: the dense nailed crowns, the nails spread out as a cascade, the traces of a writing that crumbles, the heads reduced into bi-dimensionality. But this is an universe that has got no time to sleep over its melancholies: the starry fleas, the nails, the crowns, the remainders of the writing, the crushed heads are not in the threshold of comprehension anymore, they don’t stop any longer on the doubt of intention. They already have gone beyond the ear and they fuse without scandal with the interior universe. It’s our darkness consumed by the brightness and the sediments of a civilization that dwells with broken stars, pointed nails, and calcified languages. The core that his art seizes is that we now find the upside down sky outside ourselves, although we also find it inside ourselves. His art knows that the universe of things is now a reversible condition: the threshold disappears, the starry fleas don’t bleed anymore because they are blended in the blood that irradiates and corrodes the veins. And then, the challenge is to take out, as long as it can be done, the images of a condition that imprisons us even from the inside. It is like shredding from the ideological enchantment that encloses the discourses of an entire world of things and words; it is like giving the plastic and intellectual concreteness to whatever remains from the lie. Yes, because even the lie seems to disappear from our universe, enclosed in our blood in the false glitter of the remainders of the stars. And if lies disappear, then truth disappears too. And with truth man disappears, taken in a granulose reality, aroused by a heteronomy that lives it, surrounds it and consumes it.

This erosion, this act of being devoured from the inside and from the outside captures Ionda’s attention; it is the attempt of giving back man to the human sphere, even just with the languages of art. Or maybe it is even the attempt of reconfiguring through art the complex affective, psychological and intellectual tension that generates the spaces where a human condition stuck in its muddy history articulates a civilization where life (even lacking of sense and transcendentalism) conquers its dignity ahead of barbarity. In a word, it’s the attempt to recreate a sacred tension around man, around his life, around his figure. An attempt to find once more those rituals, those interactions, that culture of sharing and conflict, which our civilization dominated by the market is silently erasing. As it is also ruining the power of words, absorbed by the growing blabbering and by the unbearable background noise, as it is exhausting the power of the agglutinated images in an almost indistinct web of colours, shapes and patterns. Ionda tries to tear those images from that indistinctness, which is not only cultural, but also affective, it is an intellectual forgetfulness, it is the human annihilation. Those images fight against the indistinct in search of reconstructing, at any cost, a daily sacredness, stealing the images, which were cancelled by the serial reproductions, dispersed in the explosion of grids, from the quotidian. Images that he widen even more, although in the explosion taken to the limit they find a definition, in some way, to give back the shape (which ceils the image) to the dimension of human time, to our current history. And yet, Ionda uses the silkscreen image of the typographic reproduction, increasing it, photocopying it, repositioning it. However, he doesn’t follow the path of pop art, on the contrary, his art is anti-pop. Although it is not because he’s pushed by any retaliation of aristocratic aesthetics, or even because the principle that guides the pop experiences (in other words, the market as the true owner of every way of communication; and so being, even art cannot escape the condition of any other product) escapes from his comprehension. No, what’s different is the path taken; it is the awareness that art is not the solution, either in a positive or negative way. The solution dwells in the re-conquering, by art’s means too, of a space of conscience or subjectivity. Art becomes un-replaceable as an expressive instrument because it doesn’t substitute itself to thought and life with its aesthetical simulacra, on the contrary, it feeds and contests them.

But the contestation in this occasion is not abstract; it concretizes in that same language which is built work by work, when he over-sizes the image’s grid, he sticks it to the wood, he leaves the photocopy in linen oil, waits until the board, damp and sticky, retains the toner (the photocopy’s ink, which is the track of what the image was, a material document of a world and of its chemical metamorphosis). Through this extracting process the image regains its essence as an image; it isolates itself, it acquires a character of its own, it creates a discourse that defies our noisy wall of aphony. And it grows richer with the allegoric interventions of the artist, who places his aluminium stars, the flatted starry fleas, disseminates the nails that roll as stones, and their crowns that interweave like metal roses. And this is the point when the image breaks through form its reality of reproduced object; and from the grounds of thought it enters the world of allegory. Every image on its own can be at the same time the document of itself (as an object that has participated in the world), and a thought that transcends (in other words, the thought on the world that contains it and has contained it). But, even this time the process cannot be abstract; it cannot be left apart from the material nature of the work, of the crafty and manipulative dynamics of creation: it is the wood damped in oil, or even, the wood immersed in the oil, that makes it possible, that gives away the material subjectivity to all the operation of the image’s re-semantization. Without the solidity of the things, thought divagates; without an aesthetical matter, art limits itself to abstract ideas, it condemns itself to its infinite repetition or to the infinite repetition of the ideology that maintains it. «Senza pietre non c’è arco»[vi] (without stones there is no arch), says laconically Calvino’s Marco Polo. Ionda’s art brings back together the stones and the arch; it connects subjectivity to thought. Moreover, it distinguishes the subjectivity of things from the so-called subjectivity of thought, which risks quite often to be absorbed into the law that legitimates it and finally even annuls it. And at this point, when one learns how to read these works, one finds two conflicting yet agreeing forces: the struggle to emerge from the thought of subjectivity, and the need of a singularity that radiates from things, the need of a subjectivity which records the recovered images. This is Ionda’s challenge, to tear away every singularity from the indistinct; to remove from the lie and the flattery the identity of our languages, the radical alterity of every experience, of every object, of every thought caught in the instant of being.

This search for singularity is structured as a formal Leitmotiv; it is expressed on the wooden boards smudged by the toner, on the painted canvases, on the serigraphic strata, on the scraped aluminium. The answer to this deep erosion is what’s searched in the series of portraits named Libertà provvisoria, which tries bringing back the figure to painting, or whatever is left of it. And so, the techniques multiply but they all seek that same core; sometimes, those same ordinary images instead of being layered on the wood they are placed on canvas or paper through a kind of re-writing, a kind of calligraphic explosion that reconfigures the fluctuating and elusive body. It’s the invention of a new image syntax; a different declination to give back to the image what it provides, not to art, but to the sociality of experience and thought. And at the end, it isn’t but the re-writing of the image, an invention of syntax when the ink’s material trace is deposited on the board. It’s the materiality of the trace; it’s the interference with the substance of the support that creates writing, as happens with the chemical miracle of the film, and with the tactile force of photographic impression, maybe the most powerful writing invented by the modern man.

This renewed syntax allows the images to ambition even what they cannot be: to materialize into metaphors, to allude to conditions. And it is from here that the shapes of powerful metaphoric evocation can appear without creating any suspicion (without playing on the facility of allusion); from here the depositions, the screams, the processes of the emarginated (indicating our actual fourth state) can come out, all of the deep expressions of the concrete conditions of uneasiness, pain and violence of an entire civilization.

And however, the thoughts on the figure in his last works (which give the exposition their name), are complex and difficult to grasp: the figure is sediment, trace of a world that has transformed man into line, into an image reduced to the minimum dimensions. The figure tries to recover the human proportions towards the world, though mostly, it recovers the world’s proportions to man (it is not per chance that he arrives to the figure with the stylized shapes of beheaded stars, that are gradually revealed as human trunk, and though the extrapolation of compact shapes from the photographic image, and not from the typographical silkscreen). So, the Ecce homo XXI isn’t targeting only man, but also the world of things, the shapes of man’s thoughts. The world thinks us more often every day: in a world freed from truths and lies, writes Jean Baudrillard, things «have lost every illusion and have become immediately and entirely real, shadowless, without commentary».[vii] And yet, the Ionda’s shapes move inside a world resolved in its operative opacity, lost in their unrelated walk through stars. Nonetheless, what remains are only the wandering figures of shadowless and wordless people, irremediably modelled and lived by what they are not; abandoned in space, but surrounded by the allegoric signals of stars, nails, dead writings; yet they are figures that seek to live, they are immobile but start, nevertheless, a kind of journey. The artist himself is a wandering figure. He wanders with his works, which sometimes are serigraphic paintings, where strata over strata (colour over colour, thickness over thickness) a self-suspended universe. With this non-painting, with this addition of craftsmanship, gesture and mechanical reproduction the artist seizes the core and he finds the lack of volume in the thickness of his art, and the lack of thickness in the volume of our human condition. He re-invents the possibility of situating himself, of recognising in a material way (not in a ideological one) the muted condition of the present man. These silhouettes, squashed from their material and conceptual non-dimensionality (both dimension, compacted from the colour, belong only to the ineluctable fiction of painting), are necessary to tell the story of a subjectivity that cannot find any thickness or movement; it doesn’t find a dimension of existence even in the becoming of itself or things. It seems to infinitely live the final of En attandant Godot, where the characters say that they’ll leave, but never do («Vladimir Alors, on y va ?/ Estragon Allons y. Ils ne bougent pas»): the dimensionless silhouettes speak of a motionless movement, they speak of situating themselves without really occupying space. Ionda’s promenades have the explosive power of grasping a truth of our common living, the deep unavailability of the other: whoever we find in front of ourselves and whoever disappears inside of us; that same other that seems denied by the multiplicity of strata and perspectives that overlap without touching; that same other we ourselves deny in our daily criss-cross without encounter.

And this criss-cross without encounter between the figures pushed by the beaming of pure operation illuminate the subject’s new horizon: it is in the incapacity of encountering, in the relational and affective atrophy, in the disappearance of desire (if not as co-action) that a true death of every content of symbolic exchange manifests, where it develops a total need of simulation. The subject, today, tends to go towards a life-without-life-and-without-death; a life lived only through pure operation. And maybe Antonin Artaud’s utopia of a body without organs, an inorganic intelligence has become true in a negative way only if it is true that we live without existing: «– Ils vivent et n’existent pas./ Pourquoi?/ – Pourquoi? Il faut faire tomber la porte/ Qui sépare l’Être d’Obéir»;[viii] this is the point, the core that goes around the possibility of “braking down the door that separates the being from the obeying”, to recognize the limit between what we really are and what we are in the world. So, Ionda’s philosophical challenge is to reconstruct, as long as art can reach, an idea of threshold, a possibility of distinction. And this is why these dimensionless figures live upon the attempting to face reality, or what remains of it: it’s from a pack of photographs which’s horizon is like suspended on the deserted sea that Ionda compacts the depthless silhouettes; confirming that it is not an abstract operation or a stylization, but a manipulation of the real information, a sort of condensation, a sort of substance precipitation; in making that information real, as melancholic as it can be, the signal of a possible threshold, the concentration of a possibility. A possibility that now resides within the matrix itself, where the figures wander over the photographic trail of a dimmed reality, which is also the tale of tragedy, of mutilation; a possibility that abandons itself metaphysically to the silhouettes into the lost space between blunted stars and falling nails, the space marked by interrupted discourses. So, these figures can now reach the real information of experience (as it is for the series of Bagnasciuga) and the projection of thought towards the unknown (the several promenades among the stars). They are projectiles thrown into the vacuum, looking for a trail of the interrupted relationship between stars and constellations, between things and ideas. A relationship which becomes evident when the dimensionless figures acquire the three-dimensionality of aluminium, and the blunted trunks assume a paradoxical thickness: now – when the spaces that our bodies concretely inhabit become mute in a vault of fallen stars between figures which proceed without looking at each other – does the miracle of these dimensionless volumes occur, where things and ideas seem to render themselves into the illusion of the encountering.

And by giving space to this illusion Ionda makes us look upwards, he offers to us an opportunity of meeting further than the flare. Yet our cities are always there, with their illuminated streets, with the lives projected unto their horizontal perspectives. And this is our being, this is what we are, and as the titles of his last works tells us: lost without constellations, muted by a light that we cannot even see, squashed between the anvil of nails and the starry fleas that dwell in us and that overwhelm us. This is how we are. We are Smarriti nello spazio (Lost in space). Lost. Yet, getting lost would be the first step in order to find something. If getting lost means to lose the deep orientation that bonds us to our protocols, if it is the light of identity and its savagery, if it is the violence that thought hides and legitimates; if it all of this that we lose, then our spaces will stop being, but a emptiness will exist in order to re-think them. And in this unknown emptiness the cosmos will expand as an opportunity; and in emptiness, the space will regain its shape. It will be in a space that needs to be remodelled and a time that needs to be interweaved again that we, who now where and in what ways, will start again to look at the stars. (Traslation Corinne Meléndez)