Massimo Donà

Luciana Cicogna - otherwise known as ‘the embodiment of total nimbleness and levity’. Nimbleness and light are the hallmark of the fantastic art forms she creates by leaving ordinary empirical objectiveness aside. These are forms removed from any support or foothold, and deprived of any context; forms which are absolute, as they are neither determined nor determinable. In the works of Cicogna, form truly becomes ‘pure’ by standing out against the background of an abyss, rather than a “world”.
Yet objects, if taken “alone”, are not truly what they are, in a kind of loneliness which renders them extraordinarily “in-signficant”, i.e. useless for our taste as miserable and unappeasable subjects. In such insubstantial settings there is nothing – even if appearance should fool us into believing that there is – which might suggest one familiar form rather than another. Is this a heart? Or rather a shield, or a continent, or a face? Is this an everyday object? Well, no: these are forms which appear confident in themselves; they appear safe from any claim the spectator might want to make in order to trace them back to his own sense of order and personal expectation. And so these forms show themselves to a viewer, who, as a subject, cannot avoid some form of exegesis; yet such an exegesis is itself suspended in the uncertainty of an unsolvable “maybe”. Is this a heart? “Maybe”. And what about that form: is it a face? “Maybe”. “Maybe” alone is what is allowed.
The viewer, so to speak, can only recognise these forms as possibilities of an objective world still to be defined, as relational states which we ourselves observe with uncertainty. These forms, then, are “things” which are never limited to either the acceptance or rejection of possible interpretations or emotive responses; “things” which give rise to active hermeneutics as the only way to turn into concrete objects (a process by which they also lose the quidditas which defines them as genuine artistic creations).
Yet hermeneutics are not inevitably required here, unless one still believes in the possibility of an ultimately objective meaning for that which exists, and which solely exists by virtue of its meaning. Hermeneutics is best left aside: what is necessary is rather the very “interval” which the work itself defines, as well as our faculty for conceiving “pure negativity”, the kind of negativity through which both subject and object become the world.
The purpose of Luciana Cicogna’s works is not that of developing fresh objectivity – objectivity more paradoxical than that of empirical existence. A similar operation is that which gives rise to “abstractionism”, which (like all “-isms”) is a dangerous thing, not least because of its faith in the possibility of defining some kind of immutable truth about the world (i.e. a kind of objectiveness more objective than the empirical one). “Abstractionism” conveys the false idea that the fantastic and irregular geometric patterns embodied in its works might really allow us to discover the true face of everyday objective reality. Cicogna’s abstractive work is of a very different kind, although it no doubt conceals the influence of what was called “abstract Spatialism”. In the case of Cicogna, the artist does not view his objects in order to define them better than any ordinary man could; rather, the artist here construes his object through what might be described as a de-situational action.
Firstly, Cicogna’s action is a liberating act, which frees the form from the mundane context which unavoidably renders it an object; by suspending the form, it makes it a thing-in-itself (and not a “thing-for-itself”, which would determine the very meaning which the subject is to grasp or desire). The expression “thing-in-itself” describes the capacity of the things assembled by the artist to become “absolute”, i.e. free from any determination which would make them “relative” or dependent on the world through which they exist. The colours blue, red and orange which surround these forms are all modes of complete indeterminateness, of the abyss from which these forms are magically suspended, beyond any physical law and any intentional expectation on the part of the subject.
But the artist also creates spaces which are free from perspective; and he does so – again, paradoxically – through the concrete superimposition of layers of matter, which gives birth to a real, if imperceptible, three-dimensionality. This perspective “depth” affirms itself by its most radical negation; and only by affirming itself, by finding an embodiment in the art-work, can this depth disappear in the spires of a colouristic and formative texture. The final but most critical effect which is achieved is that of a firm destitution of the one-sidedness of the subject himself, which discovers the senselessness of his own unavoidable objectiveness – an objectiveness which has meaning only in respect to the empathic yearning which no subject can truly renounce in the course of his existence). This newly-discovered senselessness is what can become the most perfect and unique condition of meaning, and hence the most meaningful meaningfulness: the perfect alone. (For what is more meaningful than the thing whose meaning always lies in its simple appearance, i.e. the manifestation of an actual relation which always takes places as an actual occurrence, given the existence of a subject and of its corresponding object?).
Hence the possibility, which Luciana Cicogna proves capable of exploiting, of rendering visible the distance which makes all space possible: the relation between light and impalpable pre-actuality which life alone can return to a recognisable and predictable worldliness (i.e. to their attribution to a conscious subjectivity). These are gratuitous amusements unfolding on the canvas like the signs of a childhood remote from human childhood. It is possible to detect only a faint reference to the childhood games reinterpreted by Klee and Mirò: this is not a world seen through the eyes of a child – that is to say: with the kind of stainless grace which makes everything “innocent”. What is at stake here is rather the possibility of “envisaging” the invisible relational nature which the world itself – indeed, which all worlds – and any view of the world assumes.

Here is a heart – which is not a heart.
There is a face – which is not a face.

Here again is a continent – which is not a continent.


One might go on like this for ever, through unlikely assonances and analogies which have nothing to do with “symbolic” vagueness. The world we meet in the works of Cicogna is defined by virtue of its complete “non-being”. Hence, it is the expression of an absolute levity. Yet from this very structure come the joy one feels at each stroke, at each formal invention – a joy stemming from the complete absence of obstacles, of opacity, of all that is constantly presented in everyday reality as a challenge to overcome: joy as object, objectified body, hurled against our own empty and fragile subjectivity.

1996

Translated by Patrick Knipe