Elena Ferrante y su trilogía napolitana

Elena Ferrante y su trilogía napolitana

 No recuerdo en qué publicación leí sobre las novelas de Elena Ferrante hace algún tiempo. Si recuerdo que la nota era en inglés. Acabo de terminar: My brilliant friend, y de empezar: The story of a new name, el primero y el segundo libro de una trilogía sobre la historia de la compleja amistad entre dos mujeres a través del tiempo. Ambas horiundas de un barrio paupérrimamente sórdido de Napoles. Ambas inteligentes y reflexivas por encima del nivel de sus familias y sus vecinos. Me costaron las primeras páginas de My brilliant friend. El tema no me atraía. Lo retomé tiempo después y si bien el comienzo seguía sin atraerme, a medida que seguí leyendo me sedujeron la escritura tensa y el trasfondo social y su inevitable influencia sobre los personajes, hasta llegar a la conclusión que son de las mejores novelas que he leído. Imposible interrumpir la lectura, sin llegar al tercer libro

.http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/15/who-italian-novelist-elena-ferrante

On roses

                             On roses                                          In memoriam

                                                                                     to Benigno Sola

                                                                                     who loved roses

                              They first came upon me

                              unawares in Ayat

those vicious overgrown

roses that climbed

the stone wall

of the old farm

they suggested beauty

beauty in extremis

and passion carried away

into abandon

but planting roses

in my garden

my own roses

to care and to love

was not a notion

I had grasped

I thought and said

roses are old-fashioned

too stiff and dainty

for me

my garden is rustic

and ought to blend

into the rolling stony

land that stretches

to the hills in the distance

rose gardens I thought and said

are things of the past

little did I know

how they grow on you

once you plant the first rose bush

that roses unlike other flowers

have a life all of their own

different every day

from every other day

different every season

from every other season

Tomas' gift

Tomas’ gift

The thick lines of paint

cross the black canvas

in colourful splendor

projecting energy.

One can write without being able to write

One can write

without being able to write

in silent dispersion

untimely thoughts

meaningful

in their evasive sense

while seeming to escape 
fingers and support

they do not quite

escape their nature

their literary roots

they may eventually

be held on paper

or screen.

Before dawn

Before dawn

I inhabit the landscape and the light

in its myriad subtle shades

I am spellbound by their beauty

irrevocably caught

enmeshed

in their ancient charm.  

Buenos Aires Herald                                                       Published Sunday, April 1, 2001

 Meat pieces as art work

With raw meat to represent historic characters Cristina Piffer has traced the genealogy of violence among us

By Alina Tortosa

For the Herald                                                                    

A quiet, soft-spoken artist, Cristina Piffer  (Buenos Aires, 1953) graduated as an architect to comply with the expectations of her immigrant parents.  But this profession did not provide for her the creative space she needed.  Ill at ease, she realized she had to withdraw from work that made her unhappy.  For one year she attended La Carcova art school in Buenos Aires.   Finding this institution restrained in its approach to creativity, she left after one year, but continued to meet regularly with Alejandro Puente, one of the teachers, who engaged his pupils in discussions on art that helped to open their minds.   Meeting with him and with fellow students was the sort of feedback she needed.  She also took lessons with Jorge Lopez Anaya on art history and on contemporary art appreciation.

 Her first pieces, figurative paintings in strong colours on canvas, developed throughout this learning process into dull thick textured grey objects in oblong format she calls tombstones.

A visit in 1989 to the San Paulo Biennial was a mind-boggling experience.  The sight of so much work by different artists, at a creative level far beyond what she had seen before moved and disturbed her.   She had to work out in her mind the meaning of so many different proposals that were as many possible approaches to working in the visual arts.

Her sense of identity and integrity were conditioned by what had happened during the last military government.  For ten years, as she worked on architectural projects, she was unable to translate this knowledge into artwork.  The streak of violence revealed by the methods the authorities had used permeated her thoughts and feelings; they modified her perception of life and caused her to take a deeper interest in Argentine literature and in Argentine history.  Piffer’s research did not cover only the recent past, but went further back to trace the traits of violence and exclusion that seemed to be part of national identity.    This knowledge, released from its original context, became the conceptual structure of her work.

A story by Borges, Hombre de la esquina rosada, struck a deep note in her.  To avoid the questioning of the police the villagers throw the body of the foreigner, who had died stabbed by one of them, out of a tall window into the river, Un envión y el agua torrentosa y sufrida se lo llevó.  Para que no sobrenadara, no sé si le arrancaron las vísceras, porque preferí  no mirar.[1]    This water, a source of energy and an inherent component of the ritual of cleanliness, defiled by the violence of the deed, reminded her of the bodies thrown into the River Plate by the armed forced during that time in Argentine history called  El Proceso, a title chosen by the main actors and doers in the military government themselves, implying that they were working on a regenerating process.   The name would become synonymous to cynical brutality.    This use of water as a natural hiding place for a corpse inspired a series of her pieces.

To find the material means that adapted to her preoccupations she tried different elements and different media.  She found raw meat the material that expressed better her concern with native idiosyncrasies that relate to sadistic practices.   The following step was to find the right cut and the means to keep meat fresh.  After trying several processes, Piffer discovered that if meat is kept in the refrigerator long enough, it loses its humidity slowly and does not go bad; keeping the fresh look she wanted.  Matambre, a thin, long layer of meat proved to be the perfect cut.   Once it is as dry as cardboard, the artist puts it between two squares of transparent resin.  The combination of the red meat and the fat through the resin gives it a glossy look, a sort of marble-like surface that is very elegant.  Piffer has named these pieces after different men beheaded either by the followers of Juan Manuel de Rosas or by his opponents the Unitarios in the nineteenth century.  She has also worked with tripe to knit tresses that she displays gracefully, as one would jewels. 

In her lonely spiritual voyage to find out what had shaped our character into this willingness to run amok into sadistic practices under cover of law and order, she learnt that cruelty and violence had not been distinctive of one particular party.  The impulse to do away with one’s enemies had been shared by the “good” and by the “bad”.  Some parties had appeared more civilized than others, but this so called civilization did not run deep.  It had been mostly isolated individuals who had stood up to violent practices rather than political groups.  

The need to prevail by force, to show superiority of purpose through retaliation, was rooted in the relationship of men to old Argentine slaughtering practices.  The ritual of killing cattle in a blunt, clumsy and bloody way was translated into the manner men, and sometimes women, dealt with their enemies.  There was this symbiosis of meat and flesh that prevailed in the unconscious mind of the rustic native warrior, who did not have the psychological and intellectual structure to relate emotionally to others in more sensitive ways.  In reading stories in which the “culprit” was put to death by knife by the executioner, Piffer came across descriptions of the physical relationship between the two of them, which are eminently erotic.  We know today that there are erotic elements in passionate hatred, in wounding, in the act of death.   One can trace the lack of articulate sensuality in love making at the time in most people and the incapacity to acknowledge deep rooted erotic needs to this brutal ceremonial killing of the “offender” with a purposefully blunt knife, so as to cause him more pain, that made the cutting of his head a delayed process in which the blood oozing from the wounds squirted on to the killer.  The warm gushing blood takes on a seminal function of sexual release and shared redemption. 

By following this line of work in which she deals with raw meat to represent historic characters that were beheaded in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, Piffer has traced the genealogy of violence among us, drawing attention to the need to detect and prevent discriminating criminal practices from people in authority. This gives her work, again drawing from religious ritual, a sacramental value.

---

[1] A push and the suffering, torrential water carried him away.  I do not know whether they had pulled out his entrails, I preferred not to look on.

Poetic alchemia

Buenos Aires Herald                                                                                              Sunday, July 4, 2004

Poetic alchimia

By Alina Tortosa

For the Herald

Energy as the key to life and creativeness, energy as the means to material and intellectual survival, is the backbone and the key to the work by Victor Grippo.  Grippo / Una retrospectiva. Obras 1971 – 2001, a partial retrospective of the work by this artist, that opened last week at the Malba – the Buenos Aires  Latin American Art Museum- illustrates for the visitor this criteria.

His work was exhibited and admired world wide as one of the valuable contributions to XX c. thinking and aesthetics.  A quiet, modest man, who was sure of himself, not to be deviated or deterred from what he thought best and from what he wanted to do, and who, at the same time, was surprised to draw to himself the attention and admiration he drew.  This combination of unworldliness and strength, nurtured by knowledge and erudition, places him among one of the most interesting minds we have come across in the art world

He studied painting and sculpture in Junín, province of Buenos Aires, where he was born in 1936 of Italian immigrant parents.  The atmosphere in his own home and of his native provincial town provided the feedback and support he needed to develop his intellectual and creative capacities. His father, a builder, introduced him as a child to moulding through plaster, an element he would use often in his work, and his mother and his sisters, who drew for pleasure, introduced him to drawing. 

 At the age of 17 he  moved to La Plata to study Chemistry and Design at the La Plata National University.  A deep understanding of the essential values of these two disciplines laid the foundations for his work as an artist:  a sense of purpose and a sense of economy, a feeling for the spare, run through the body of his work.

After an exhibition of his paintings at the Lirolay gallery in 1966, Grippo realized he wanted to go beyond paint on canvas to refer to basic human needs, such as work and survival. This took him to look for other materials and to a different way of showing his work.  His scientific experience led him to explore the link between science and art.  He thought of potatoes when looking for a medium easily found in daily life in large quantities  that would represent energy and the transmission of energy. He also found in simple, well used domestic tables, or in tables used for the different crafts, a medium and support for his aesthetic essays on labour. 

Potatoes and tables, the modest media that have become the clue to his work as we know it, again and again rightly described as conceptual, are also emotional choices that refer to his early home life.

Through his Analogies of the 1970s, beautifully installed in the current exhibition at the Malba,  Grippo proved that potatoes, if wired with zinc and copper electrodes, transmit electric energy.  

The tables in the show are the support and context for the tools and elements used in manual professions, they are sensual and poetic installation that suggest rather than illustrate a way of life.  Tables are also the surfaces on which words are written, words as the sustaining substance that burrows into our consciousness and irrigates our gestures  and our beliefs.

Life-Death-Resurrection  (1980) has been impeccably reproduced as the sense of this piece relates to a biological development that must take place during the show.  Beautiful geometric metal figures were again filled with wet beans.  The beans ferment and grow eventually into plants that will break through the neat metal structure. A wonderful metaphor: art, design, craftsmanship are means to an end, but life itself is the mediator. This work is an article of faith on the inevitability of evolution, on the beauty and the joy of creation through a process that goes from the whole to the decadent to growth.

Because of his knowledge of chemistry and because of his strong metaphysical and poetical leanings, Grippo chose to address the composition of his work and to address the equilibrium between basic needs and aesthetics, between the material and the spiritual, the ordinary and the extraordinary through  alchemy to transform the nature of matter.  Alchemy is the non scientific predecessor of chemistry.  It was held in great respect in the Middle Ages as one of the means to transform base metals into gold, to discover a life-prolonging elixir, a universal  cure for disease and a universal solvent.

This conception of alchemy implies that the material elements that go into the making of a work of art are transformed, through the mediation of the artist, into a presence imbued with sacramental value beyond its components.  This criteria of his gives us an inkling of the deep respect in which he held his own work.

A comprehensive catalogue has been published for the occasion with introductions by Eduardo F. Costantini, president of the Costantini Foundation and by Marcelo Pacheco, curator in chief, with texts by Ana Longoni and Adriana Lauría,  Argentine art historians, by Lilian Llanes, Cuban curator, who showed Grippo’s work in the Fifth La Havana Biennial in 1994, by Guy Brett, English art historian, on the artist’s visit to England in 1996, when he went with his wife, Nidia Olmos, to prepare for the show the following year at the St Ives Tate,by Angeline Scherf, French curator, Director of the Musée de Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and by Justo Pastor Mellado, Chilean curator.  There is an extensive and well documented reproduction of works by the artist and photographs. The bibliography includes texts by the artist, texts by third parties and press articles.  The texts and information on the work are translated into English.

(Grippo / Una retrospectiva. Obras 1971 – 2001, Malba / Colección Constantini, Figueroa Alcorta Avenue 3415. Until September 6).

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