Lyrical Logic And Tremulous Forms On A Johannesburg Ground Floor

South Africa Tue 03-11-2009

Lyrical Logic And Tremulous Forms On A Johannesburg Ground Floor
By David Kaiza

A Chance Encounter with Marco Cianfanelli ...

The first time you look at Marco Cianfanelli’s art, you get a shot of revelation like a rush of goose pimples or a sudden, looping drop you get on a swing or in an aircraft – and you think, yes, someone should have thought of that.

After years of reading about his work, walking into the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg one grey evening and finding that of all the artists in the city, it was him setting up his show, was like a chance in a trillion of getting hit by a meteorite.There was not really much going on at the Goodman Gallery, just a couple of workmen fixing things on the floor, bits of metal rigged up for welding. Another workman was drilling holes into the wall to fix some metallic décor.

Artist Marco Cianfanelli with David Kaiza during the interview

That was what we thought was happening until the receptionist handed us a flyer saying Marco Cianfanelli would be showing at the gallery starting October 1. What rotten luck, I thought. We were leaving Johannesburg nearly a week before that.
“He is actually here,” the receptionist said and instinctively, we looked around. Something of the curvy-wavy metal and wood should have warned us. “He’s setting his show.” And there he was in the corner squatting over what looked like enlarged, shaven porcupines in advanced state of rust.

“Can we talk to him?” “He’s rather stressed out now.”
An artist whose work communicates power even from a distance can be a trial to approach. You never know how they will react. But this was too good a chance to talk to one of South Africa’s most illustrious, contemporary artists. Whatever it took – loitering about till closing time - we were going to wait.

We did not have to. If he was stressed out, Cianfanelli did not let it show, and more to the point, he liked to talk about his work.Even for someone who has written about art for quite a while, Cianfanelli’s coming show, Absent Fields, was unexpected. But being a clever gallery hopper is not the point; rather, Cianfanelli’s work extends the boundaries of what it is possible to know and feel that when you see it, you want to kick yourself for not having thought of it first.

It is a show about a big topic – life itself, and the world being what we have turned it into - also about the end of it. Qualifiers to describe the wavy steel cuts and perforated wood laminas do not come easily, perhaps because Cianfanelli’s art, as he himself says it, communicates in non-analytical ways. It would describe the works better to ask the reader to tremble a bit or get a rush of goose bumps and wait for the redemptive after-thaw.

“For me the relationship between things is what is important,” he said. “It is reflective of the way we live. I want to see from an emotion point of view, from a psychological point of view.” That he has managed to wring such deeply emotional and personal reaction out of statistics and data – which is the source of this show, is quite a feat:

The rippling of the earth’s surface in the Vredefort Dome and Sterkfontein in South Africa, when a meteorite of impressive dimension hit the earth in this part of the world have been compressed into 40cm laminated wood sculpture. The tricky bit is that looked at frontal, these sculptures also turn out to be portrait of the artist as well as his parents.

Marco Cianfanelli (right) and assistant installing one of his works

A graph showing the fluctuation of oil prices over the past seven years has been cut out in steel and will stand upon delicate, red (in the fluorescent light they looked scarlet) stilts – a point that the basis for our economic life can be that uncertain; and the pun of its title, oil rig, also meaning the rigging of prices.

But who in this world thinks of making oil prices stand out like dinosaur skeletons in a gallery? Human birth and death rates of the last 18 years have been transformed into a sculptural piece which stands like a tree trunk eaten into grooves by insects and then chopped into a log the artist has named, quite cheekily, Come and Go.

“I love statistics in my own way,” Cianfanelli said. “I am not a scientist or a statistician but when oil prices fall, crime rates go up, people lose their jobs and these are felt emotionally.” The steel cuts we saw on entering the gallery are on closer examination, shapely and moving. The drilling of the wall going on, are for holes to fix into the wall, steel strips that form three portraits of Cianfanelli and his parents:

His father was born in Rome, his mother in Frankfurt, and the artist, in Johannesburg. Here is the riveting part: Cianfanelli took the contours of the three cities and in 3-D, cut them over the steel strips. When assembled and looked at from the front, they form the outlines of human faces, achieving a reflexivity that make themes about man’s place on the planet, or the history of migration and the troubled one of South Africa, come to mind.

The Vredefort and Sterkfontein landscapes are also of the same portraits, but in wood rather than steel. They are smaller, more concentrated and look like what computer-generated topographies would look like if reproduced in solid, tangible form. As it is, that is what Cianfanelli did. He got this date from professional geographers and statisticians, fed them into the computer, generated 3-D images, and using laser, cut these into wood and steel.

They give an eerie feeling, but not because one has come upon something strange – which is sort of what they are; rather, it is the liveliness of the familiar, knowing that here, in wood and steel are real-life scales, which knocks the mind. Accurate sourcing and precision techniques make this art feel like something very important. There is a lumpy wood lamina of a human heart blown up to about half a meter across. I was not so sure about the heart or if it is a good idea. But it sits there like the bi-product of an overactive mind in motion.

An untitled installation by Marco Cianfanelli

The perforated, laminated wood Cianfanelli has named Screens, look like a rendition of the pop art of yesteryears when artists found fun blowing up newsprint so that the individual print dots were as large as polka dots – an alienation effect which for some reason, was once clever. The impact of seeing them in solid wood brings about that looping, dropping feeling inside the head, but in retrospection, like the heart, they also look like what results when an artistic itch becomes too much not to scratch.

The enthralling, matchlessly original sculpture named Come and Go is statistical graphs of birth and death figures of the last 18 years printed off a computer generated, 3-D image. Just for the information, the African death statistics on this piece form the deepest gorge running from top to bottom, while the continent’s birth rates are the highest peaks.

Come and Go standings there looking like a pleated, maxi skirt in the wind.
The word poles (my own name for them because the artist has not yet decided what to call them) were mesmerizing, too original for words. Measuring about two meters, sown smooth and shapely, the artist cut words in steel – in bold and italics – which he struck into the poles, jutting out, so that they resemble a stalk of foxgloves when the petals have fallen off.

The black poles, as he explains, describe the internal, the emotional aspects of man and the words on them, like FORM, CESSATION, ORIGIN, describe these – Buddhist concepts which make the poles ideal for meditation. The white poles, the artist says, are meant to describe the outward – the factual and the statistical – SECURITY, MATHEMATICAL, PROPERTY, and for some strange reason, INDIA.

This is very hardworking art. You can only imagine what it takes to laminate so much wood. For the Screens, Cianfanelli had the lamina burnt, which gives them an eroded surface – “like wood on the beach,” he says.When we went in, Cianfanelli was in the corner working on some earth figures (again my words), rust-coloured ovals which from a distance looked like bloated, shaven porcupines starting to rust. On closer inspection, they turn out to be, not spikes, but tiny, steel human outlines, about an inch high, accurately cut using laser, from real photographs.

Cianfanelli takes real data images and using technology, transforms them into moving abstraction. There is a symphonic quality to his sculptures, by which the logical is given lyric presence and the material transformed into tremulous forms, give the impression of life and movement. The earth figures – so glimpsed because he is here also extending the theme (a word he is weary of) of man and earth – are seven unequal shapes which seen from an angle, look like planets in orbit.

These stripped, laminated works pulsate as if they are being pushed upwards and outwards by tremors or explosions beneath the surface. On their surface, a force-field gathers, as if what the artist has done is give real life to his ideas.

Installation by Marco Cianfanelli

They are fine works. They give assurance and certainty. But there is the constant danger that the artist will imagine too much or that too much will be over-determined which is just held off by the ambitious, capable compressions of scale, as well as impressive expansion of dimension. He is a man who takes hold of a facet and wrings whatever ounce of significance it can yield. You get this apercu into a man’s character sometimes by watching the manner in which they manipulate a lever or talk to people of higher or lower rank.

I got to understand this point about Cianfanelli by asking myself a question loudly: What is the scale of this, I asked, pointing at and finding it hard resisting the urge to touch his wood faces, wondering how big the actual meteorite impact area is. I did not mean for him to hear, but he did and then spread his fingers over the piece. “40cms,” he said and then added. “Scale? I don’t know. How big…” he paused and it was at this point that my apercu came.

A kind of thoroughness that wants to miss nothing, that risks over-determination appears to be an integral part of Cianfanelli’s creativity. Scale? He was not going to be defeated by scale, I could see. “It is 150 kilometers wide; that comes to about …” he said and then wreathed his forehead calculating. I imagined him making figure conversations: 100 centimeters to a meter; 1000 meters to a kilometer – comes to 100,000 centimeters in a kilometer: ah, 15,000,000 centimeters in 150kms; divide that by 40; works out to about 30,000. ah, a scale of 1: 300,000.

It is a rough estimate and Cianfanelli did not calculate that out loud, but the process comes to more or less that. It was one of those silly moments of mathematical triumphs (no one wants to be defeated by figures). I asked the question out of curiosity, but it’s silly really because we are not talking train models. Yet looking at the incisiveness of Cianfanelli’s work, I could see this compelling urge to be precision, to compress and commandeer no matter how big the subject is.

The result of Absent Fields is a feeling of sanctity. The ingraining of human portraits into the landscape creates a depth of relationship. Overall, it is a humanizing, cautionary work of talent, which at the same time, is redeeming to look at.

Installation by Marco Cianfanelli

It is presumptuous after a meeting with an artist to think you know how he picks up his ideas, but the heroism of Cianfanelli’s art, like a lot of good art, lies in his capacity to focus the obvious, to reawaken the soft, poetic, transitive relation we have to that which we are continuously about to experience – a nearness of perception that in daily life is too demanding to consummate and hangs as a permanent possibility until a Cianfanelli comes along with his laminations and lasers.

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