Today, in artistic and poetic activities in general, I think it is absolutely necessary to retrace past paths again; from a strictly objective and not a deliberate subjective point of view. Only in this way is it possible to express the complexity of our time. The importance of recovering the concepts of “place” and “continuity”, the necessity of historiographical revision - avoiding any cult of trend and tendency - will produce a vital, synergetic development and a straightening in whatever the artistic expression. Ideologists subdued by the concept of “progress” (material, intellectual, etc.) have partly increased a sense of “uncomfortablness” in the human condition. The results of this progress have contributed to the destabilization of man. He is no longer able to find his own center (both socially or individually) within reality. He is constantly conditioned to achieve accumulation, to acquire wealth, to pursue arid careers etc. - not only for economic safeness but mostly, to affirm his own identity consequently he has lost a certain sense of profound aesthetic pleasure. He wrongly tries to find his own legitimacy exteriorly, but doesn’t find it due to a consumistic system solidly founded on deprivation: a necessary assumption needed for its surviving and affirmation. Perhaps, too pretextly, contemporary art abusing metaphors even if ripe with undoubtful evocative values), has focused its effort on finding the most suitable symbol. But symbols - apart from a few involuntary, sporadic cases - can’t be configured as autonomous objects.

Today, in contemporary art, the tragic sedimentation of signs, words, objects, its addition to something that is totally contrary to what it really is and being less, is due to the fact that art seems to become a perfect surrogate of fiction, an analogical simulation of imitation. Rather than conceiving forms and images, we presumptuously give form to ideas!, we communicate a sense or a meaning, without having previously understood its content, or, worse still, without having previously singled it out. Within this progressive exhalation of the artifice, concepts are deprived from their substantial dynamically, consequently and inevitably producing, an affected effect, rather than the necessary debates and participation. What should evolve will subsequently devolve. Art is changing its own identity: it is becoming a way of a conceptual communication that just produces effect however, requesting and soliciting an effort of acknowledgment that is the exact contrary to the deceitful appearance of its supposed “truths”. This, at the same time, creates difficulties for the artists as well as for the creative management, and definitely creates difficulties for the fruition of shown art works in galleries, museums or alternative spaces.

The public should be totally free to choose “how” to view, in accordance to its real effective needs and desires.

Contemporary art is truly art when viewed and recognized in all its passed meanings. It ought to have qualities such as continuity and openness, though now unfortunately, it only seems to survive because it has been dequalified to an inferior range, as if it were simply one of the many ordinary commodities. The congestion of signs and images that characterize our society and culture is subdued by a constant, progressive impoverishment of the messages’ inner meanings, which the artists wish to profuse in their works. Today, messages only exist as mnemonic stipulations, weakly reactive: they are mere graphic or decorative signs. Nevertheless, if the artists’ desire is to reach an almost absolute ethical beauty, they will have to conceive a highly ‘opener” art, and also maintain a boundless faith in the public’s fruition. In fact, even if the artwork is autonomous and definite, it will still give rise to the inevitable, personal interpretation that renders it existent to one of its possible aspects.

Therefore, it is possible to configure the faculty of interpretative freedom with the creative participation of the viewer, who is capable of establishing a sort of creative dialogue of the artwork he is viewing: sometimes this dialogue is determined by the viewer himself, at other tunes it is determined by the inner intensity of the artwork itself. Consequently, it appears that only “simplicity” (intended as a lack of affectation) is the value to be pursued; but how can this simplicity be possible, if nowadays art is surrounded by scenery of an extremely complex and differentiated reality, where eclecticism of the contemporary thought is dominant? Art cannot avoid observing and referring to its own time, because to evoke other possible or imaginary worlds is a form of mystification. Therefore, at this point, the six memoranda for the third millennium on which Calvino wrote about in his “American Lessons” just few years ago - Luminosity, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, Multiplicity, Consistency - must be duly kept in mind. If we want to improve and develop our culture, perhaps we should pursue this way. However, it is also logical that artists mustn’t deliberately look back on history: they should be conscious that the most important thing to do is to go over once again history’s space-temporal contest. Conflicts, contradictions, dystonias, in one word the continuos failures of contemporary art, follow the fact that today art seems to have the chance of realizing “possible utopias”, while, to the contrary, all it does is put mankind in front of its ordinary condition, continuously covering it with the fictitious veil of fiction.

Today human behaviors are induced, as needs are artificial. This is the historical condition of today’s mankind. This is the new mechanism of its cultural production. If we ask for conditions (and concepts!) of such lost freedoms, we stray from the point (and at that same point we will arrive) of not accepting reality, that reality that man compromises with, and corrupts day by day. Inside this reality, human potentialities are strongly reduced, while values are only dictated by the individualistic, particular deformities of taste, and the unrefined uniformity of fashions. It is a reality that our comprehension has difficulties of holding: a reality often indecipherable, most of all because man obtusely continues to be an accomplice, a slave, a victim of his own greed: he doesn’t research what he should be searching for. If it is true that mankind moves towards a culture of “becoming” and not of “being”, we have to understand that “becoming” doesn’t coincide with “having”.

In the culture of “having” we would look like just temporal dwarves, deprived from each sense of “existing”; if, instead, we were to choose the culture of “being”, we would still have some hope in simply confirming ourselves as Men and Women. To be objective, honest, sincere, it doesn’t cost so much...

However, a part from this personal consideration, I believe that art, nowadays, must look for continuity, progressive shifting, gradual transformation, and active integration, adopting languages capable of sintomatica]ly and semantically re-conducing mankind toward the present experience of “today”. If the artificious and artificial needs of contemporary man will cause artists to be more open and reflect on how serious the problem of the “artificiuos” is, only then can art be considered once again as an “anticipation” of what will be tomorrow, giving us new notable and logical answers to our questions.

Andrea Pagnes


Andrea Pagnes is an artist, writer, curator and senior editor for the global art and magazine World of Art. He lives in Venice and Florence.