Time is suspended.
When? This is a meaningless question for each of Silvia Celeste Calcagno’s works, presented in this essay. Hers is the time of existence, of memory, in which it is not important to limit one’s attention to the banality of individual moments. This is particularly true of the works made over the last two years, more or less. Her approach is based on a distant history to which she is without doubt connected, and also on an aspect of the feminine. From the technical point of view, her work is not of simple interpretation, particularly today in which the “consumers” of art are more accustomed to the illusion of spontaneity. But in this instance, there is no need to reveal the secrets behind her production, which required years of empirical study, resembling the type of apprenticeship that took place in painters’ studios in times past; she conducted her own experiments on fireclay, to which she transfers her photographic images. The resulting pieces, the subject of this essay, have nothing in common with photo-ceramics. But her choice of material is of fundamental importance, because it makes each piece unique. Even though the works are presented in extensive serial sequences, every one is different. There are no numbered editions. No single image is identical to another.
I think that the fact that Calcagno lives in Albisola has a certain significance. Some of the most intense and intelligent artists of the second half of the 20th century, such as Fontana, Jorn, Leoncillo and Capogrossi, worked in this town in western Liguria. Calcagno herself exhibited her Hilaria cycle (2012) in Fontana’s studio, with its fine natural lighting. For many years, above all in the 1950s, Albisola was an important location for contemporary art. In one of his writings, Enrico Baj described how he waited for Asger Jorn, arriving from Denmark, at Milan’s Central Station, from where he travelled with him to Albisola, where they would work at Tullio Mazzotti’s kiln. Those were the legendary, heroic years of art, a period that has now become part of history, but one that is not always adequately remembered.
But I would like to return to Silvia Calcagno and her work on materials, and her desire to surpass the specific characteristics of individual languages, to quote Rosalind Krauss.
Photography and fireclay become a uniform whole. Each of the materials benefits from the features of the other. During firing, a sort of fusion occurs, creating an uninterrupted communication. Calcagno organizes the complex preparation of the entire process. But it should be remembered that, in comparison with today’s totally predictable processes – such as digital photography – in this case, the final result cannot be reliably foreseen from the outset.
Calcagno did not attain her present state of technique by chance. It took a lot of research. This also reflects her decision to work with very different forms of expression, including ceramics, fireclay, photography and video. Silvia Calcagno works in a serial process. Her photographs are not presented individually, and acquire extra significance from their vicinity to others. The installation, consisting of many works, enhances the fundamental concept of difference by means of repetition, to quote Gilles Deleuze.
Amongst the recent installations, as well as photographs on fireclay, there are videos projected in reduced dimensions, moving images that create a sort of surprise for the observer, with a soundtrack that plays an important part.
I think that these works include some clear references to experiences dating back to the 1960s and ’70s, such as Gina Pane, for example, a much-loved artist whose gory performances had a significance transcending the pain, and Ana Mendieta. Other references include the concept of disappearance in the evocative images by Francesca Woodman. Calcagno has filtered, chewed, digested and processed the climate of that period of history, with no intention of direct quotation.
Thursday (2012) is a work, consisting of 711 small slabs, which borrows something from the mosaic technique. The images are relatively simple in composition, depicting a woman sitting on a stool. In front of her, there is another empty chair. Is the woman Silvia Celeste? It could be that she is opposite someone, in a sort of confession that takes place on Thursday. But who could say? It is the moment of opening up, liberation, or of the attempt to achieve it. The power of this work lies in the repetition of the same situation, with minimal variations. The starting point, here as in other works, is a photograph that depicts a real occurrence.
The figure depicted in Hilaria, which consists of over 400 images and is made using the same technique, is a woman reclining in emptiness. One immediately thinks of an iconographical reference to the famous sculpture of Ilaria del Carretto by Jacopo Della Quercia, in the cathedral of San Martino, Lucca. The young women depicted is on her death bed. Here, just as in Lucca, one senses the dull sound of silence. The viewer’s attention is focused on the stillness of that body from which life has departed for ever. But who knows?
Within the installation comprising the images of Hilaria is a small-sized projection, Wait (2012). This is a cone of light on a stage. The link with the reclining woman is obvious. Waiting for everything, for nothing, in the performance of life that each of us plays, day after day.
References to physical condition, illness and death are amongst the fundamental themes in Calcagno’s work. From the earliest works of her artistic maturity, Silvia Calcagno has used radiographic materials. In Only flowers no good deeds (2009), the interior of a human body is described using a video-capsule. An intimate journey in which the body becomes a sort of cave or cavern, a space to be explored, with all the fascination of discovery and the unknown. It represents the video section of Portraits (2011) in which the portrait of the artist consists of a series of CAT and magnetic resonance scans. The soundtrack consists of a re-processed, elaborate melody performed by a Russian singer, dedicated to the themes of existence.
In Myoclonus (2012), there is an obvious reference to this area of science, and the title itself is part of medical terminology. A woman is reclining, asleep. A myoclonus is a slight, involuntary twitch of a muscle or a group of muscles. It often occurs while falling asleep. Again, an innocuous pathology becomes the starting point for the work and its examination of a reclining body. The insoluble obsession for receptivity.

The images describe a situation, but without going into detail. There is a basic ambiguity that invites the observer to go further and cross the threshold into the unknown.

One of the works in which the revelation of a situation is most obvious is Being. This unsettling piece, disturbing in many ways, has two specific temporal dimensions. In the first (2012), Silvia is on a dentist’s chair, and you can see just the lower part of her face, her mouth open, and the hands of a dentist working inside the oral cavity. It is evident that he is working on an orthodontic brace.
The installation is accompanied by the video Lips (2012). As if in a sort of rebirth, the reflection is on the meaning of beauty. The quest is to attain aesthetic perfection by working on the mouth. The video is accompanied by a soundtrack taken from a song talking about beauty and the “most beautiful.” The sensations generated are dual, beauty and its refusal: the woman applies eyeliner and lipstick, and at the same time removes her make-up with a paper tissue. Generating an impossible tension.
The second part of the work is titled My July (2012), and it describes the same situation, except that this time the focus is on Silvia’s eyes. It refers to a car crash in which the artist was involved on the day when she went to have her brace removed. In the heat of the early afternoon, on the motorway, the artist, tired and stressed, lost control of the car. The last thing that she had time to do was to glance at her own face in the rear-view mirror: she saw a trail of blood coming out of her mouth, wounded by the orthodontic brace. Immediately after, she was able to escape from the car and reach safety at the side of the motorway, before fainting, probably due to adrenalinic reaction.
The images comprising this work include one with a car mirror reflecting Silvia’s eyes. On this single slab, three different moments are projected and sustained, at regular 11-second intervals. In the first, you see just the image as described above, suggested by the subtraction of light from the projector, giving you the impression that something is about to happen, as in a dream; in the second, a colour image of Silvia’s mouth wounded by the accident is projected onto the first; in the third, the ceramic base is transformed into a miniature cinema screen and given an illusory appearance by the white light projected onto it, which leads the viewer into an atmosphere outside the real world. The soundtrack consists of a narrative of infantile sensations, as if it were a flashback within an apparition. A reference to light, warmth, and people she has loved. Layered sensations that sometimes re-emerge like Proust’s madeleine cake, becoming an icon. The atmosphere is suspended. The observer is captured and involved. Questions come to mind, but there are no answers. Nor can there be: they are not part of the game.

This brings us to her most recent work, Celeste (2013). There is an obvious autobiographical reference. In the photographs – the artist takes a large number of shots to create her works – a woman is coming to terms with the specific feature of her sex, her monthly cycle, her blood. For each of us, there is a unique, complex relationship with this part of our lives: acceptance, joy, refusal. In the images, nothing is completely revealed. We are presented with details that, as in the artist’s intentions, are not sufficient to tell the whole story. It is a reflection on being female, and more specifically on the artist’s femininity. Celeste, who is not really so happy, is frightened when faced with her own menstrual blood, her identity as a woman. Both starting and finishing points are autobiographical. A video, titled Celeste, so happy (2013) accompanies the installation. The sensation is that of seeing a black-and-white film, a sort of 1970s television archaeology. A woman, seen from behind, places a glass, which she has washed repeatedly, onto a draining board, in a house that could be anyone’s home. The action is repeated, increasingly nervously, while her heartbeat also speeds up, and likewise her anxiety and the speed at which she places the glass onto the draining board. The soundtrack consists of the obsessive repetition of a series of existential statements, as if in a mantra, becoming an echo. These sentences were written by the artist, inspired by the book The Lovers by Elfriede Jelinek, Nobel-prize-winning author, whose novels are the perfect expression of a diseased form of everyday life. Once again, time is suspended, and the atmosphere is one of alienation. The images and the materials used are in perfect harmony with an interpretation whose clarity has purposely been blurred.
Lightness and apparent weight are constantly compared in a dense interchange, placing us in a very unusual dimension in which everyday life, memory, past and present are capable of merging to form a whole in which the stories, all the same and all different, succeed in introducing us into a different dimension, which in some respects could be autobiographical for each of us. Public and private microcosms that open towards the universality of sensations and sentiments.
Angela Madesani