Claudio Parmiggiani

Untitled, 2024
Smoke and soot on board
4 pieces, each 115 x 205 cm

Untitled, 2024
Smoke and soot on board
6 pieces, each 200 x 150 cm

Untitled, 2024
Smoke and soot on board
40 x 40 cm

Untitled, 2024
Smoke and soot on board
40 x 40 cm

Courtesy Studio Claudio Parmiggiani

Untitled, 2023
Smoke and soot on board
100 x 150 cm

Untitled, 2023
Smoke and soot on board
100 x 150 cm

Loans: Private collection, Paris
Courtesy Tornabuoni Art

A central exhibition room is dedicated to the work of the Italian artist Claudio Parmiggiani. His soot paintings, of objects and figures that are no longer present, emphasise what is absent through contours and are pictorial metaphors of transience and the power of memory.

In the 1970s, Parmiggiani began the series Delocazioni (Displacements): works that explore the concept of absence and negative form through the use of fire and smoke. The artist does not paint his works. His pictures show white shadows of objects such as bottles, books, and human figures, whose outlines are created by smoke deposits in a fire chamber. The soot covers the surface of the panel. Where once there was an object, the surface remains white. Parmiggiani’s unique technique is reminiscent of the photographic process of the photogram, in which objects are placed on light-sensitive paper and exposed to light so that their outlines appear as a negative print.

Claudio Parmiggiani belongs to the generation of people and artists who were born during the Second World War and who were confronted with the experiences and images of this devastating chapter in human history. When Parmiggiani was young, the house in which he grew up burned down. These personal and social traumas have undoubtedly left their mark on his soul and have perhaps been incorporated into his work as an overarching endeavour that is characterised by emergence and disappearance, creation and destruction.

Yet Parmiggiani’s art is timeless. His quest revolves around the ability of art to give form to life as an experience of temporal existence—in all its beauty, horror, ephemerality and mystery. Parmiggiani is deeply rooted in the history of Western painting, whose visual languages he has mastered. For him, the essence of a picture and of painting is not to make the invisible visible (as for Paul Klee or Wassily Kandinsky, see: Massimo Recalcati, La spiritualità nell’arte contemporanea: Claudio Parmiggiani, 2019). His struggle revolves around the impossibility of translating the invisible into an image and thus creating an image that points beyond its visible outlines and forms.

For Parmiggiani, art becomes a form of spiritual search. The motif of the shadow plays a central role. Throughout the history of Western and Eastern art, it has served as a metaphorical image and symbol. A myth about the origin of art goes back to the idea of the shadow, which Pliny the Elder described before he died in the ash rain of Pompeii. In his Natural History, he describes the myth of Butades of Sicyon, a Corinthian potter and his daughter. The young girl was madly in love with a young man who was about to embark on a long and dangerous journey. In order to preserve something of him as a memento, she traced the profile of his face, which the light of the lamp cast on a wall. When her father saw this, he filled in the outline by pressing clay onto the surface, creating a face in relief, which he then hardened in the fire. Love, loss, memory, melancholy and beauty are thus named as the origins of art.

The Frankfurter Kunstverein is celebrating the return of the artist Claudio Parmiggiani to its venue with the exhibition The Presence of Absence. In 1981 and 1988, Peter Weiermair, director from 1980 to 1998, dedicated two solo exhibitions to Parmiggiani. For the current show, the artist has created new, large-format works that belong to his Delocazioni series.

Rows of books on shelves can be seen on six monumental panels. Their titles, authors and contents remain hidden from us. Books are repositories of human knowledge. They carry people’s histories and are witnesses to our culture, our imagination and our intellectual heritage. Another work consists of four panels: they depict the shadows of empty bottles. Their shapes are omitted in the layer of soot. The glass of the vessels outlines the emptiness inside as if with a line, symbolically doubling the absence. And then two human figures: they stand alone on their board. Their outlines distorted, they come from stone statues that the artist left to the fire. “Like an extinguished light that lights a soul in the dark… because statues are like souls”, the artist once said in an interview with Arturo Schwarz.

The two smallest pictures in the room are dedicated to the most symbolic of things: a human skull, the epitome of the memento mori, and the cross section of a nautilus shell. Nautilidae (pearl boats) are living fossils and prehistoric creatures that inhabit the depths of the oceans and testify to the origins of life on our planet. They are traces of the past in the present. The spiral-shaped shell refers to the rules of nature, which Fibonacci tried to summarise with his mathematical sequences and which reflect the golden ratio. The proportions symbolise the perfect order of nature and are often interpreted as a reference to the divine. The shell also refers to a musical dimension. If you bring it to your ear, you can hear a rushing sound that people have always interpreted as the absent sound of the sea. We are never silent in our brains, however; we hear words and see images. The musician John Cage and the visual artist Yves Klein have devoted their work to this perception of reality.

Parmiggiani poses humanity’s eternal question of what remains. Absence is like a footprint on a snow-covered path: the foot is no longer there, but the imprint shows its former presence (Massimo Recalcati, La spiritualità nell’arte contemporanea: Claudio Parmiggiani, 2019). The trace is something that remains, even though it threatens to dissolve. The empty silhouettes of the objects appear to Parmiggiani as portraits of absences. What are traditionally regarded as symbols of the end—soot, ash and emptiness—become metaphors for persistence in Parmiggiani’s work, for the eternal presence of life in the form of memories, traces and impressions. The fire does not leave behind nothingness, but the indelible presence of the past and the openness of the future.

“… I showed completely empty, bare rooms in which the only presence was absence, the imprint on the walls of everything that had once been there, the shadows of the things that had animated these places. For these rooms I used only dust, soot and smoke. They helped to create the atmosphere of a place abandoned by people, like after a fire, like in a destroyed city. Only the shadows of things remained, like ectoplasms of almost vanished forms, vanished like the shadows of dissolved human bodies on the walls of Hiroshima. The first displacement (Delocazione), which I made in 1970, was a place […] where the only presence was the imprints of the things I had removed. An environment of shadows, shadows of canvases that I had removed from the walls, shadows of shadows, as if behind a veil I saw another veiled reality and behind this other veiled reality yet another and other veils, and so on ad infinitum. […] A place of absence like a place of the soul.”

From: Claudio Parmiggiani, Stella Sangue Spirito, 1995

 

Claudio Parmiggiani (b. 1943, Luzzara, IT) lives and works in Parma, IT. He is one of the central figures in post-war art in Italy and Europe. Although Parmiggiani chose an independent path within the Italian art scene and never aligned himself with a specific artistic movement, his work can be situated between Arte Povera and Conceptual Art. His works have been exhibited internationally in museums and collections. Solo exhibitions have taken place at the following institutions: Frist Museum, Nashville, TN (US), Accademia di Francia Villa Medici, Rome (IT), Palais des Beaux-Arts – BOZAR, Brussels (BE), Palazzo del Governatore, Parma (IT), Palazzo Fabroni Arti Visive Contemporanee, Pistoia (IT), Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes (FR), Grand Palais, Paris (FR), Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (IT), Museum of Art, Tel Aviv (IL), Musée Fabre, Montpellier (FR), and the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt am Main (DE). Parmiggiani also participated in the Venice Biennale (IT) six times. His works are part of prominent collections, including those of the Centre Pompidou, Paris (FR), Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (NL), Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana (CU), National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavík (IS), Mamco – Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva (CH), Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris (FR), Francois Pinault Foundation, Venice (IT), and Museo del Novecento, Milan (IT). In his literary work, the following publications stand out: Poesie dipinte (1981), Il sangue del colore (1988), Stella Sangue Spirito (published in 1995, 2003, and 2007), Incipit (2008), Una fede in niente ma totale (2010), and Lettere a Luisa (2016).