– An artist of international fame, Antonio Michelangelo Faggiano (1946 – 2001), was enrolled in the Faculty of Architecture in Milan where he did not graduate due to dissent and in 1975, after his divorce from Marisa Negri, with whom he had a child, whom they named after his paternal grandfather, Raffaele, he began his artistic career with a floor installation dedicated to “Proustian desperation” in the Deambrogi gallery: it marks the demarcation of the unitary sign, which will accompany all his production. He draws from Joyce, Kafka, Lautréamont, Defoe, Carroll; texts read and translated on the walls, in the invention of an “expanded space”. A research that culminates in 1978 with “The impossible cities” which will be followed by the impressive installation “The tower of Babel”: faint and faded images, photocopied or drawn, collages of ideas, in which color makes its appearance, through a pastel retouching on an emulsion canvas base. It is in this period that Renato Barilli includes him in the group of Nuovi Nuovi.
At the end of the 1980s he self-produces the first volume of an encyclopedia inspired by the fantasy world of Ukbar, taken from the writings of Borges and begins to accompany the canvases with three-dimensional elements to then also translate into real sculptures. The series “Where the dreams of an extinct race end” dates back to 1991, of which the bronze of the dinosaur on wheels represents the pinnacle of quality and poetry; alongside globes, pyramids, sticks. There will be no lack of recourse to satire, to the use of sophisticated Duchampian-style quotations or to redesign a neopop imagery inspired by Leonardo’s female universe or more simply connected to American cinema.
His visual cut-ups – in recent years magnified by the digital plotter – are made homogeneous by a veil of tarlatan, a texture that appears to be a conceptual choice rather than a technical find: it seems to mark that thin border line that separates the “invisibility of the sample” from the “visibility of the fragment”. –
ANTONIO MICHELANGELO FAGGIANO,
LIVING WITH THE IMAGE
by Antonio d’Avossa.
(from the publication of Edizione Nuovi Strumenti – edited by Piero Cavellini)
Antonio Michelangelo Faggiano places at the center of his work only one condition, that of the image and its articulation. It is from this articulation that the image nourishes a new meaning, recodes it and rewrites it, inserts it into a time that pronounces art and its history as a history of images as well as a history of ideas.
Starting from the first half of the seventies, Faggiano reworks the universe of images to reach the place of photography. These are the years where in art the photographic image is often the recording or documentation of an event, of an action, however they are also the years in which the image is reduced to a pure sign or typographic writing by conceptual art. On the other side, just a few years before, pop art had brought the image and its sampling back to the unique icon of an American art that was forever (from that moment) popular. The young Faggiano of those years is charged with this visual condition of the pictorial image and aware that the lesson of these two matrices can be overcome in the conjugation of the levels of sampling. He adopts a method that recalls photography but betrays the aspect of the completed image that this medium returns. He begins to fragment the image and make it visible but not recognizable, thus touching its level of invisibility. He combines in this phase, which continues until the end of the Seventies, an invisibility of the sampling and a visibility of the fragment. The images are cut or trimmed from a context and are offered to the gaze as real visual cut-ups, according to a procedure started in literature by the American writer William Burroughs. This is, in essence, the new graft that Faggiano carries out with respect to the two matrices indicated above. The organization of his work is ready to welcome a third and powerful matrix, that of literature and consequently that of writing. From this graft branch out his references, his passions, his readings, his writings and finally (but they come first) his images. Here they are, scrolling through the titles and images that are scattered in the space almost to merge with it. They refer to Jorge Luis Borges, James Joyce, Italo Calvino, Marcel Proust, Lautreamont, Franz Kafka, Lewis Carrol, Daniel De Foe and many others, supported by a continuous visitation of the historical avant-gardes that places in the foreground the figure of Marcel Duchamp and that of Man Ray, artists to whom he dedicates entire work cycles and where the image is taken and reworked according to the intentions of a process of decontextualization and subsequent recontextualization. Antonio Michelangelo Faggiano soon becomes a singular and present interpreter and reader of the reality and destiny of the image in Italian art (and not only) of that generation of artists that overcomes the impasse of the dissection of the materials of Arte Povera and the sterile typography of Conceptual Art. Proceeding on the trajectory of a continuous risk Antonio Michelangelo Faggiano announces before the others and differently from the others that great season that has seen Italian art renew itself along the thread of a recovery of the image, where figuration and visionariness, imagination and quotation, introspection and fragmentation are, for reasons of critical strategies differently named as Postmodern Citation, Neo-expressionism, New Image, Transavanguardia, Citationism, Anachronism, etc. according to a taxonomy of trends that attempts to homologate under the great cloak of the Post-Modern every type of personal production. Faggiano participates, but in my opinion also escapes any type of critical formulation, as a protagonist in this renewal. In particular, he is reported and included by the critic Renato Barilli in one of the most interesting groups (but it would be better to speak of groupings) of the renewed Italian situation: I Nuovi Nuovi, together with Salvo, Ontani, Mainolfi, Spoldi and others. It is therefore in this passage that takes place between the late seventies and the early eighties that Faggiano reaches fixed points that structure his artistic practice and deliver it to the history of recent art as a true investigation into the reality of the image of our era. But it is not an investigation in terms of the analytic nature of the sign, rather Faggiano confronts the fairytale and fantastic universe of a highly cultured literature that seeks and finds images and through these finds an image for his words. It is no coincidence that Antonio Michelangelo Faggiano has always accompanied, sometimes publicly and sometimes privately, his practice as an artist with a writing that does not develop and does not explain the image but multiplies it in an infinite conjugation of different and distant times and places. It is a single body between visibility (the image) and invisibility (the word) that presents itself and plans itself in those years.
There is, moreover, a European occasion that confirms the attention that the work of Antonio Michelangelo Faggiano receives. It is Europa 79 in Stuttgart where the comparison is tight between the European artists who in those same years try through different formulas (painting, installation, drawing) to distance themselves from the conceptual matrix that characterized them all. Faggiano is one of the very few, and the only Italian, to present a work where photography is the basis of mediation between the image and the word and where the fragmentation of the image is recomposed through the traditional form of the frame. It is a Tower of Babel of images that determines this relationship between the visible and the invisible. They are images of a collection of images that come from separate and distant universes, technically they are underexposed photographs, often watercolours, where the image only returns the relationship to the other images present together and distances their identification. One of those invisible cities that had been exhibited in different galleries along a path of places and a flow of times. It is precisely here that the project that accompanies all of Faggiano’s work can be read, that new sense of the image that winds between the relationships, between the interstices and the voids that bring one image closer to another, the definitive idea of cancelling or returning on the same level painting and photography, drawing and illustration, production and reproduction, cinema and comics, where the genres blend together in a kaleidoscope of imaginary images that do not return themselves but rather the new sense of contiguity with other selves.
Even the photographic images that Faggiano arranges in symmetrical or asymmetrical dissemination on walls and spaces are offered as simulations of drawings where the temporal sequences are upset by the recovery or the sampling from distant and faraway universes and where low culture is combined with high culture as in an exercise of specular wisdom. Everything is recognizable and at the same time nothing is referable, almost as if to trace an invisible border between the history of art and the history of images. Everything is like in a paradise of the image. It is enough to move the gaze and the exercise is formulated along a geography of the consumption of reproducibility. Thus his work is more than a collection of images, found and sought, because it configures a true atlas on which our gaze can carry out the new exercise of imagination. It is in this place that Antonio Michelangelo Faggiano declares not to create the image, aware of its historical and epochal reproducibility he adopts photography or photocopy or even in recent years the digital plotter, but to take it in infinite relation to other images and to restore flesh to the bones, or a new life, after the consumption suffered by the gaze of history. From this point of view his work overcomes that post-modern condition exercised by the citation because, in my opinion, Faggiano does not show the facade of the image but the word of its visibility, the very body of an atlas where geography is a continuous shifting of borders and where genres are fragmented to reunite in the territory of the imaginary. It is certainly the frequentation of labyrinthine authors, where the shifting of dilated and reduced times and spaces is happily constructed, Borges, Joyce, Proust, to suggest the idea of a labyrinth of the image that all his work configures. Just think of that cycle of works entitled The Hand of the Lady, or The Hands of Ginevra, to find a labyrinthine engine of writing and image. Here the research around that risky and very frequented topos of art history “La Gioconda” by Leonardo is toned by the all-round fiction of the iconological analysis offered by the text. It is therefore a “Fiction” that, in perfect Borgesian style, reveals all the disciplinary mechanisms of the history of images: Leonardo and his painting are the object and pretext for a cycle of images that become a true iconographic atlas, where the boundaries between real and represented, between writing and image, between history and narration lose their reason for being and push the gaze and reading towards a map that gives us back a past as distinct as the present and what we see as certain as what we read. As in the Thousand and Three Nights where the carpets of carpets taken from photographic papers compose and decompose at the same time the original image of all carpets of all times and all places.
It is for this reason that I would recognize within his work cycles the attitude pursued and educated to a journey towards the center of the image, a kind of Aleph where all the images of history are concentrated to make themselves invisible. It is in this deadening that, in my opinion, Antonio Michelangelo Faggiano challenges the consumption of the image, from the darkroom to the lightroom, and reveals to us its essence which is first of all concealment. Moreover, the very frequent use of tarlatan, or of a gauze that covers the images until it filters them for a look in time, if on the one hand recalls the weaving of the canvas and therefore drags with it the whole history of painting, on the other brings back to the hiding and the appearance of the image, two sides of the same condition of the philosophy of the image. This evocation, finally, of Veronica’s veil confirms the great capacity of Faggiano’s project to give the image a new life precisely by declaring its death. It is ultimately its temporal condition, that of the image, that is the object of configuration, where by time Faggiano means all times in a single instant. This concentration or reunification of images in a single time is evident in one of his latest works, extremely articulated from the point of view of visual combinatorics: Where the dreams of an extinct race end. It is a work that declares time as the central place of his urgency as an artist. The twelve dedicated canvases are to the twelve pyramids in terms of evocation, while the twelve globes rotate around the image of a whole that is present together. The skeleton of the dinosaur repeated and almost transplanted onto mechanical forms relocates the images along a zeroed, immobile and distant time, where the images play the role of extras in a film that we can barely see. Here Antonio Michelangelo Faggiano reaches the place of the after-image, a place where the visible is not legible, where the word is silent and where the image, according to a strong aesthetic, refuses to communicate, but with this not-wanting-to-say becomes an image, surpassing the times of art and acting as a total image of time and space, not evoked but declared.