If the issue is approached critically from the specific perspective of contemporary art, it must be acknowledged that the “quality” of glass as a material, like any other material, does not transcend its materiality. Glass is the product of a refined, exquisitely artisanal technique, and therefore has never been intended, out of necessity, as a means of achieving (as is the case, on the other hand, with the usual materials used in sculpture) the invention of non-utilitarian forms (even abstract ornaments are utilitarian, not vases, lamps, plates, cups or glasses, however intricate and sublime they may be).
The material quality of glass is, however, fascinating in itself. What is more, the glass paste, treacherous, terrible and fearsome, often becomes ambiguous and bewildering, perfidious even when it submits with captivating and luxurious availability or with elegiac elegance (due to the quality of its reflections and play of light) to the hand of the creator of beautiful objects. The “thousand years” of Venetian glass art bear witness to this. None of those “thousand years”, however, had anything to do with sculpture, even if at times it came close to its inventive independence, expressive freedom and formal completeness.
We hinted at this concept in the closing words of a text we wrote seven years ago, a presentation of the exhibition by sculptor Luciano Vistosi at the Prigioni Vecchie, the first or almost the first in a series of exhibitions that then tore the Venetian artist from the cocoon in which he seemed to be enclosed and from the splendid isolation he loved so dearly, transforming him, despite himself, into a sculptor admired from Florida to Japan, from northern Europe to his own shores, and not exclusively because he uses glass in his works.
Even then, we stated without fear of contradiction that he was the only one in the history of art – including modern design, which embraces so much utilitarian and decorative creativity in the field of glass – to have added the formal quality of the sculptor to the incomparable effective quality of the material.
The recent works he has reserved for this exhibition in the august home of Giorgione and Bellini, Titian and Palladio, Veronese and Guardi, reveal him, if possible, as an even more ascetic and solitary artist: they confirm how stark and severe his search for absolute form is (in this respect, he is more the heir of Alberto Viani than of Arp), how elevated his linguistic rigour is and how immeasurable (in the special perspective of contemporary art mentioned above) the distance that separates him from the most prudent and knowledgeable masters of glass is. It is clear that he too is a master of glass. The difference lies in the fact that technical expertise does not prevent him from deviating from his formal vision as a sculptor.
Pietro Consagra, to give a recent example, had a brief experience in a Venetian glassworks. His approach to glass (with the intention of subjecting it to his formal vision) ended in disaster.
“Is it possible,” he later wrote, “that all the wonder of glass and all the skill of the master glassmakers goes into candlesticks and paperweights? Murano glass is Angelica and Medoro.” * It is worth remembering that Consagra had mastered ivory and semi-precious stones using the ’a levare” technique, which is the heritage of every sculptor, even the most modern and industrial ones who use diamonds or carborundum to bend unruly materials to their will. The fact is that glass is not unruly; it is liquid, fiery and elusive, risky and ungrateful, and requires a different kind of mastery all its own. If you possess this mastery, it becomes submissive, playing along with the most daring creator, until the furnace completes the rest of the work and the cooler does the rest shortly afterwards. These are horizons that the sculptor had never explored, either because he was inexperienced and timid, or because he was fearful and sceptical. ‘The sculptors of the world,“ Consagra wrote, ‘should land in Murano and take possession of a glassworks”. And then? Rodin had the most advanced foundries at his disposal. But the glassworks of Murano should have sculptors accustomed to glass, such as Vistosi. The combination is, as we can see, far from possible.
As Vistosi’s recent works demonstrate, the material is a technical stage that must be overcome a priori.
The material qualities of the work must be subjugated by style. Is transparency a fundamental characteristic of glass? It must be destroyed with deep opacity, giving the work a thick, translucent skin. Can light pass through glass? It must be brought to the edge of night, given the mysterious and inexpressible tension of compact matter, like a thick cloud through which the ray can barely pass. And what about the marbling of the surfaces? It is a fabric that extinguishes the glassy liquidity: sometimes it is milky, sometimes it is funereal like the wing of a nocturnal bird, earthy and focal. The form now sways like a feminine curve, now bends like a powerful back. Are these sculptures made of glass, fragile and resistant, which a beam of light can engrave and a hammer strike, so that the sound wave spreads through the air?
Luciano Vistosi, a sculptor as simple as he is inscrutable, places his arcane forms in enigma, establishing a relationship between fantasy and rigour, between mathematics and poetry. Mathematics and poetry go well together – this is an ancient notion – but they rarely combine. Logos rhymes with nomos when metaphysics, nocturnal metamorphosis, resonates like an “aeolian harp” in a privileged condition. Just as that sound comes true by virtue of the night wind, so these forms hover by virtue of their material metamorphosis: what was originally air and incandescent fire and then transparent liquidity becomes tangible matter, a matchmaker for its destiny of form, the only one that Luciano Vistosi recognises and intercepts.
* G. Appella, Colloquio con Consagra, Roma, ed. della Cometa, 1981, pp. 17-19.
Giovanni Carandente
Spoleto, August 1982