Anish Kapoor

Entering the main hall of the Galleria Continua in San Gimignano is hugely emotional. An immense whirlpool, a vortex of water five metres in diameter, lies in the centre of what was the stalls area of this former 1950s’ cinema. Descension is Anish Kapoor’s latest work.

Gazing into the vortex is like staring into the abyss and its incessant movement is hypnotising as you are swallowed up by its dark swell.  The sound produced by the turbine seems to come from the bowels of the earth. Rising from the floor, it penetrates your legs and on up to the stomach, a low resonating sound that might come out of a huge pipe organ.

What is all the more striking in the work of this great Anglo-Indian artist born in Mumbai in 1954 is his ability to contemporaneously evoke dual images and sensations: the noise is both frightening and dynamic. An array of contrasting images enters the mind, such as the imminent arrival of a cataclysm but, at the same time, the call of a whale anxious to draw its young close. It is a deep and ancestral sound that conjures up the end and the birth of all things.

“We live in a world dominated by opponent forms” – explains Kapoor – “day and night, male and female, right and wrong, all in an inevitable and continuous process. I am fascinated by the way a simple object can bring all these obscure opposites to mind. The vortex is a form but it is not; it is a hole but it is water. Many people even wonder whether it really is an artwork. I believe in the importance of all these interrogatives because they become a metaphor of the complexity of our present, which is never univocal.”

Beatrice Zamponi: You have always explored a profound inner world that seems inspired by the female body. The theme of the cave and that of concave and imploded forms are constantly present in your work. The streaked surface of the red alabaster sculptures in the exhibition is reminiscent of the veins on the lining of the womb and the cavities in them are circular and inviting forms, like swimming pools of amniotic liquid.

Anish Kapoor: After Freud discovered psychoanalysis, woman and her universe took on a key role in the search for identity of modern man, who turned towards obscurity, becoming problematical and insecure, conscious of moving on a terrain where nothing was certain anymore. This is my dimension. The places of our modernity are increasingly confused. The Internet, for instance, is a reversed space that confuses light and darkness and, very often, also good and evil. The contemporary world has many faces and angles from which to be observed, it is multiform and then there are the total negations, the one-way visions, ghosts for example. As an artist, I believe I have an obligation to interact with the complexity of real life in its entirety.

Beatrice Zamponi: Studying the void is one of the main epicentres of your poetic and you have described it as the moment that precedes creation. Yet again, I am struck by the dual significance: positive because everything is possible at that moment and negative because the plurality of choice can become paralysing.

Anish Kapoor: Long ago, I reached the conclusion that the void does not really exist because we are constantly filling it with our expectations and fears. My sculptures that are called empty objects therefore contain a possibility. They stimulate a philosophical thought but are not the answer to anything. They simply present a condition, you have to do the rest; you must fill it and this defines your true space, even if it is full of fear. It is Kant’s idea by which the sublime necessarily contains the terrible.

Beatrice Zamponi: Your work prompts observers to examine the inner dimension rather than look outwards. Paradoxically, the more monumental, abstract and mysterious the work, the more the gaze is naturally turned to an intimate dialogue with ourselves.

Anish Kapoor: As human beings, we have an idea of what the cosmos might be like but I don’t think it’s very interesting. The best way to know it is not dreaming as we look up at the skies but to simply cast our gaze inwards. If we think of obscurity, there is no obscurity more intense than the one each one of us carries inside. My work is the opposite of the classical hero’s exploration. I am the reverse of Ulysses who seeks outside himself, chasing the light and sun. What interests me is the darkness.

Beatrice Zamponi: The theme of obscurity is also key to your views on colour; can you tell us about this?

Anish Kapoor: Historically, colour has been linked to light. Just think of the works by Turner and Monet but there are artists such as Rothko for whom colour is linked to the obscure and I belong to this tradition. I’m interested in two aspects. The first is that colour generates space, can make it seem smaller or larger and, generally, is not neutral. The other aspect is that I do not see it as a covering but as a condition. If I make something red, the fact that it is red becomes substance. The colour changes the conditions and can alter our perception of time, so it has abstract properties. Colour is primarily in our minds and rarely in our eyes. Take red, for instance. We perceive our inner space as red and red is the colour of the earth, the same earth that is traditionally said to have formed the body of Adam, the first man.

Beatrice Zamponi: Red is also the colour of the great column of pigment in the gallery’s smallest room, the oldest work in the exhibition, dated 1992.  It is an expanding form penetrating both ceiling and floor.

Anish Kapoor: It is an uninterrupted flow of energy going in both directions although we can only see a portion of it. The 1980s is when I began producing sculptures consisting solely in pure pigment. I went on a trip home to India after living in England for a long time and was struck by the piles of pigment sold in the streets. It was fascinating to think that colours are a physical material but they are also an illusion because they are dust. So I decided to make an object that was very present but that equally had the strange quality of being absent. The first one I made was on the floor and it looked as if half of the work was below ground level; it was like an iceberg. Then I started toying with the idea that every object in the universe has an invisible equivalent, a missing object or non-object as I call them.”

Beatrice Zamponi: Your work has a strongly abstract and philosophical basis but how can and must art impact on our everyday lives?

Anish Kapoor: Migrations are one of the major problems of our times and the environment is the other key focus. We always hear that the politicians and scientists will find solutions. Personally, I believe the solution will come from art, from a creative project, from design, from something that is not really rational. What the artist needs to have is intuition, a sense of poetry. We must learn to relate to what is uncertain, what is illogical and to not knowing. We must learn to interact with opposites. This is our task as modern men and with women there is a far greater chance of finding solutions. They are the real future in my view.

Beatrice Zamponi: In a few days’ time you are also opening your large exhibition at the Palace of Versailles. How did you intervene on that sumptuous space?

Anish Kapoor: Versailles is an almost perfect mathematical object, built with truly extraordinary precision and refined thought. It is an extremely difficult place for an artist to address. Yet again, I have tried to work on opposites, reversing the space and inverting the canons.

Beatrice Zamponi: A very sore point links you to Italy: the Monte Sant’Angelo underground station in Naples, the construction of which has been halted for years now. Any news?

Anish Kapoor: I’ve just had splendid news from Rome although I don’t know whether to believe it... The city has apparently paid for the transport of my two sculptures for the station that have long been blocked in a Dutch depot. They ought to arrive in a few weeks’ time. We shall see.

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until 5 September 2015
Anish Kapoor
Galleria Continua, San Gimignano