TIME, MATERIALS AND ARCHETYPES IN THE WORK OF MASSIMO POLDELMENGO

To me art and life are both a matter of lenght. I don’t want to let art die as much as I don’t want to let life die. The biggest art would be the one of making life living forever.

Michelangelo Pistoletto

The heart of the exhibition is the main room which has to be seen as one organic work. In the expository space which is delimited by white walls, are placed four curved ladders. The first ladder is made out of wood and it leans against the wall that stands almost in front of the entrance. The other three ladders are made with a stainless-steel frame that holds in its interior, according to circumstances, burnished wood, bricks or glass. These ladders lean against the long wall on the right according to a very well calibrated scansion. In several critical spots of the room’s floor the Artist has subsequently placed three low metal parallelepipeds that he meaningfully wanted to call Material Containers. Two of them hold the elements which are incorporated in the frames of the corresponding steel-ladders, the other one contains some coal. However, through the median line of the three of them runs a neon light on which a film adheres. At last, on the left wall of the gallery are placed the projects of the whole installation.  

The ladder shape itself that has been used by Massimo Poldelmengo since his early works, inevitably reminds of many symbolic meanings which are bound to the idea of moving  upwards such as the progression from a lower to an higher  knowledge condition or the departure from the dimension of inert matter towards the one of spiritual life. These two symbolic references can be taken either in a generally contemplative meaning or in an alchemic one and this last interpretative way is surely the most interesting. Nevertheless, we should keep in mind that for many centuries the artistic process has been identifying itself with the knowledge process pursued by alchemy, at least because, as Jung said, the symbols of the so-called “Grande Opera” correspond to recurring imagination moments, the archetypes of the collective imagery and a great part of today’s art still uses them.

From such an interpretative point of view we can better contemplate that the ladders made by Massimo Poldelmengo have seven rungs. It is known that seven is a number which is supposed to be magical; it also corresponds to the seven operations of which is composed the first part of the alchemical opus, the one represented by the famous Albrecht Dürer’s Melanconia I, that is one of the greatest allegories of the artistic process. However, Poldelmengo who uses the traditional symbology bound to number seven, enlarges its meaning into eminently contemporary terms. This is the reason why his ladders are not graphic representations nor emblems but they are artistic objects that are collocated in an expository space and lean against the white walls of the gallery. The ladders lean on the surfaces of the artistic space, on the beliefs that enhance the value of the work and on the interrogatives which they arise. And on these ladders (with their seven prophetic rungs) must ascend Art while seeking for white, for a new liberation and for a much more intense beauty.

However, it is not a case that the ladders placed in the room by Poldelmengo are curved. The wooden ladder was built by a carpenter from Sitran, a town in the Belluno area. Following a precise instruction of the artist, the carpenter used a tree which grew curved as, standing on a slope, it had directed its foliage towards the sun. Already from this initial Poldelmengo’s choice clearly appear punctual references to solar light and its various symbologies (directly or indirectly alchemy bound) and consequently to the growth and development process (with its metaphorical meanings of course). But there is more than that. The curvature of this wooden ladder also represents the shape taken by time, the time of the natural growth of the tree. A curved, parabolic or even cyclic time appears much more meaningful and closer to our contemporary sensitivity than the straight time of modernity, of absolute faith in progress and of “magnifiche sorti e progressive”.

Beside the wooden one, Poldelmengo has then put three other ladders made with a stainless-steel frame which is an almost unalterable material. Number three, the perfect number “par excellence”, allegorically corresponds to divinity and invisibility. However it is even more interesting to see that these ladders hold in their structure some elements that are highly symbolic as they have been transformed or originated by fire: the wood which started to turn into coal, the soil which became brick and the silica which gave birth to glass.

We can find two of these symbolic elements also in the Material Containers placed on the floor which are soil-brick and silica-glass. The third element, burnished wood, is here replaced by fossil coal; a material that evokes even better fire and its both destructive and generative power. It is then clear that the Material Containers are the crucibles where the metaphoric transformation process of matter typical of artistic creativity must take place. Through human work (that is the fire of art which has been here metonymically evoked by coal and neon light) soil and silica have been turned into two cultural elements (bricks and glass) the first one constructive and the second one evocative “par excellence”. However this sublimation process is dialectically contradicted inside the work itself as it can not but be precarious. This is what smashed bricks and glass mean. All of this lets us understand that in reality the Material Containers refer on a metaphorical level to the eternal cycle of construction, destruction, birth and death which both nature and culture must undergo. We can understand that the development of the opus and the procedure of art itself define in this way their cycle going back to their origin. Indeed the ladders, while relating themselves to the crucibles, represent as a complete object the temporarily conclusive state  of a process that tends to white, to the albedo, to the meaning that could liberate us from the opaque dimension of matter. However the peculiar curvature of those objects itself (as much as the original interpretation of the musical scale elaborated on the occasion by Massimo De Mattia and Theo Teardo) tells us  that this process can only lead to temporarily and contingent results which must constantly be revised, reconsidered, refounded. After all this is true as much for art as for life.

   Angelo Bertani