Stefano Graziani

Stefano Graziani, Fictions and excerpts, Galleria Mazzoli Editore, Modena 2016.

  Stefano Graziani’s latest book, Nature morte (words by Nanni Cagnone and Pier Paolo Tamburelli, Galleria Mazzoli Editore, Modena 2016), is eclectic and his fourth published with Modena gallery owner Emilio Mazzoli, accompanying an exhibition of the same title, on until 8 October. The book contains photographs from several lines of the Trieste photographer’s research; some are older (architecture) and others more recent (fireworks) but all are presented as part of the same genre – still life. The subjects of Graziani’s latest pictures have no allegorical or metaphorical meaning, they are “things for their own sake” and have also been exhibited this year at Fotografia Europea in Reggio Emilia and published in another recently printed book, Fruits and Fireworks (A&Mbookstore, Milan 2016).

Nature morte features the striking presences of a minor Roman baroque church, Santa Maria in Portico in Campitelli by Carlo Rainaldi – a favourite of Peter Eisenman because of the syntactic relations shared with Palladio; the façade of San Carlino by Borromini; a couple of Viennese buildings by Adolf Loos; and fireworks. More predictable, however, is the presence of fruit, vegetables and stones.

Generally speaking, Graziani prepares his models and still lifes as does a painter and we must turn to painting comparisons to try and solve the enigma posed by these photographs. The enigmatic mood is peculiar to more than one early-20th century Italian painting current: from the modern classicism of the Novecento group to the Appolinean air  of Valori plastici (for which Roberto Longhi published his rediscovery of Piero della Francesca, always a key compositional reference of Guido Guidi) and the isolation of familiar objects, thus become alienated and alienating, of metaphysical painting – see Giorgio De Chirico’s pictures L’enigma dell’ora, L’enigma dell’oracolo, L’enigma di un pomeriggio d’autunno and more.

On closer inspection, however, Graziani tends towards another train of thought, the more detached and minority one of magic realism, often confused with others to which it is equated by a general sense of rappel a l’ordre which has similarly recently also invested international architecture, Northern European in particular – at least since it was hit by the longest recession in living memory, ending dreams of a glorious and unstoppable growth. I refer, in particular, to the Flemish, Belgian and Swiss German architects with whom Graziani has worked recently, see work he presented at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale with Freek Persyn [1] but also the numerous partnerships with Kersten Geers, such as Office’s “Everything Architecture” retrospective at Bozar in Brussels this year and the photographs taken for the Christ & Gantenbein’s Kunstmuseum extension in Basel [2].

Indeed, Graziani is one of the founders of the San Rocco magazine, published since 2010 in English. It has embraced a “classically modern” koinè, at least in its intentions, and rediscovered axonometric projection as a preferred form of representation (the most alienating, in fact) with a vague, and certainly involuntary, affinity with the magazine 900 edited by Massimo Bontempelli (not to be confused with the “Novecento” in letters of Venice’s Margherita Sarfatti), published only in French. Although this is not the place to discuss it, the shared desire to be alienated from all phenomena of custom and fashion that distinguished San Rocco eventually itself constituted a new fashion or, at least, a certain current taste, opposed to the iconic and hedonistic excesses of the blobs and renderings of the previous two decades – yet another return to order, basically.

There are strong overtones of magic realism or real maravilloso – given his great knowledge of South American literature – also in the brief but significant written piece by Nanni Cagnone, refined poet and publisher who has worked for years with the Mazzoli gallery (“I can’t believe there are inanimate objects.”). Bizarre, to say the very least given the Dadaist finale, is the testimony of Pier Paolo Tamburelli, another San Rocco founder, almost as stirring trouble.

Nevertheless, the magic realism in Graziani’s recent work is a reality that counters apparently objective rendering with a simplified image, seeking the alienating effect that generates the contrast between apparent reality and artificial rendering: similarly to the Venetian and Trieste painters analysed by Fabio Benzi, who rightly looked to the primeval source of magische Realismus coined by the German critic Franz Roh in 1925, the Nature morte photographs establish “a mute contradiction of the terms of representation and perception” [3]. After all, Graziani was born, educated, lives and works in Trieste and Venice, where last year he created the IUAV Master in Photography, coordinated with Andrea Pertoldeo (another Guidi pupil), the first public Master course in Italy where a longstanding lack of educational offer in this discipline has driven all the leading photographers to attend architecture courses, as if it were the only free zone that could take them (and, indeed, Guidi, Gabriele Basilico, Mimmo Jodice, Paolo Rosselli are all architects; it was also at IUAV that, for years, Italo Zannier held the first course on the History of Photography).

Returning to the “mute contradiction of the terms of representation and perception”, this is only one root of the problem that torments every photographer today, starting from that Jeff Wall studied by Graziani for so long. In still life, Wall found first a field of study and later a space of experimentation that was key to his photographic career: “the so-called ‘lesser genres’, such as still life, could be reinterpreted by Cézanne, Picasso and Mondrian because they were the freest spaces for experimentation within the traditional painting institutions […] if, as has been said, the revolutionising of painting was conducted in the sphere of the lesser painting genres, we must reasonably believe that these represented ‘painting as such’, painting historically intended as art or as the object of an aesthetic.” [4]

That is why we should not underestimate this parallel work by Stefano Graziani. I mean parallel to the traditional circuits of architecture, in which he trained and with which he continues to entertain an ongoing dialogue (such as his two works for MAXXI in Rome and CCA in Montreal on the Superstudio and Ábalos & Herreros archives, respectively [5]). His more personal and imaginative side, however, is that of the still lifes, such as the series devoted to the ancient Carnac stones and to the lemons, so similar to those in the paintings by Cagnaccio di San Pietro. These are the most distinctive images that, to use the words of Franz Roh, radiate “an intrinsic magic, a spirituality and mystery, despite their quiet, resignation and apparent sobriety.” [6]

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Notes
1. 51n4e, Stefano Graziani, Falma Fshazi, How Things Meet, Art Paper Editions, Gent 2016.
2. AA.VV., Kunstmuseum Basel, New Building, Hatje Kantz, Stuttgart 2016.
3. Fabio Benzi, Art in Italy between the Two World Wars, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin 2013, p. 65
4. Jeff Wall, Monochrome and Photojournalism in On Kawara’s Today Paintings, in Id., Gestus. Scritti sull’arte e la fotografia, edited by Stefano Graziani, Quodlibet, Macerata 2013, p. 172.
5. Giovanna Borasi (ed.), AP 164 Ábalos & Herreros, with an interpretation in photography by Stefano Graziani, Park Books, Zurich 2016.
6. Roh detested photographers who imitated painting too slavishly. His time as a photographer and scholar of photography was abruptly interrupted by the Nazis, who imprisoned him in the Dachau camp. Cf. Emily Braun, Franz Roh: tra postespressionismo e realismo magico, in Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco (edited by), Realismo magico: pittura e scultura in Italia 1919-1925, Galleria dello Scudo, Verona 1988, pp. 57-64.