1

Most evenings I go running for an hour in the park. Out of the darkness other joggers approach, equipped with halogen lamps strapped to their foreheads. In the glare, the light robs me of my sight, while opening up a nervous, flickering illuminated space for them. This light does not serve to protect, nor does it signal presence. It serves rather to attack—much like the xenon headlights of cars today, whose potent glare seems to cause the street to freeze over instead of promoting cooperation. Between inward self-improvement and outward networking, something like a sense of loss creeps in, which we accept despite any attendant cognitive dissonance. We lose resonance with the physical world, the dissolution of the world that encloses us together with its limitless shading between brightness and darkness: Modernism with its principles of “legibility” and “transparency” has penetrated every pore and leads, as it were, to a rejection of materiality in the world—a sense of shadows, and their opaque qualities, seems to have been lost.

Thus, we arrive at the difference between a modern, illuminated world (such as the German author Wolfgang Schivelbusch describes in his study of light)1 and the premodern versions in which what reigns is fire, an element that is present in Luca Monterastelli’s artistic output in many forms: as an ornament on his bas-reliefs, as soot or cooled steel droplets on the welding joints of his sculptures, but above all as pressure exuded by wall pieces and freestanding sculptures—works that only find their form under a great expenditure of energy—“Fire, then, can strike without having to burn,”2 wrote Gaston Bachelard. Still more, fire can also be an integral part of his exhibition titles (To Build a Fire, 2017) as well as in the texts themselves. Recently, Luca wrote to me and described a specific experience: “Meanwhile, I have lit two candles. They’re burning just behind the monitor that I’m staring at. I notice a difference between the two lights: the still white from the laptop screen, and the warm wavy orange of the candles. I observe that the amount of light coming from the candles is stronger than that coming from the monitor, which surprises me. I was expecting the opposite.”3

2

Luca’s work leaves an ambiguous impression: it assaults in its force, appearing severe as well as masculine. It communicates an anachronistic expression of unrestrained emotion, which, in order to be curbed, must be solidified in steel or concrete—fixed in the solidified gesture, as an echo of the general phraseology of Italian modernism from the early twentieth century, together with its political and aesthetic excesses, up through Fascism and beyond. Its traces have left their mark on the urban architecture of Northern Italy, down to its very marrow, just as much as failed post-war real estate speculation, whose concrete ruins rise everywhere above the urban and rural landscapes like rotten teeth. Thus charged, his work conveys a force that only intensifies the fire within. And yet, still other tones resonate. The forms collapse in their drive upward, they crumble, melt, or dissolve— material, physical impotence becomes visible, a failure of matter due to something other than just the effects of gravity. This is underscored by the texts with which Monterastelli has long accompanied his work. They are sober and precise words and sentences, balancing on the razor’s edge of irony, which to a certain degree frame his works, almost cushioning them. In their mirroring, the objects read as a painstaking, subtle reflection on the relationship between the individual and the surrounding architecture in the present moment.

Beginning with Rodin and following its academic history, sculpture has moved—in step with modernism over the past one hundred and fifty or so years— from the pedestal into space, from representation into unadorned life, wherein most recently it seems to have unraveled fully, intensified by the fantasies of a fully connected world. An exhibition that opened in 2007 at New York’s New Museum, entitled “Unmonumental,” gave this process its slogan: sculpture seemed to have broken down into ever smaller units, not unlike the gradual fragmentation of people by medicine, science, and economics into readable values more capable of being part of transactions. Recently, the Western history of sculpture has been accompanied by the activist removal or relativization of monuments as part of the effort to explore alternatives to hegemonic ideas of the sublime as the center of Western art, and thus the patriarchal amplifier of power.

But at the same time, these attempts to make ethnic, racial and any other differences readable have a flipside. Is it not the case that the more emancipated, open, and liberalized something becomes, the more difference is simultaneously created? And is difference not the elemental fuel for the all-controlling neoliberalism that since the 1990s appears to have become the only remaining narrative? Or, to put another way: Has the world really become so “unmonumental” as had been supposed back in 2007? Perhaps, and this is just an assumption, monumentality has only adopted different forms. The binary dogma of ones and zeros as a characteristic of the digital has crept its way into the very soul of the architectures of the information society, along with its innumerable and perpetually reproducing echo chambers of uniform “opinions” that only serve to reinforce political polarization as a characteristic of our present age. Perhaps, these immaterial architectures radiate an even more generic monumentality than the totalistic architectures of the twentieth century— petrified fossils that seem like stalagmites when compared to the expansionist will of a globally networked capitalism—and yet, these modernist shapes are what Monterastelli revisits again and again. Monterastelli keeps on exploring a history of which he as a person and his artistic practice are intrinsically part, which turn his way of looking back into a both literal and sculptural archeology, revealing traces of where and why turns, perhaps wrong turns, could have been taken in the past. He blends his very personal idiom in with local knowledge, in the expanded Western history of sculpture, which acts as the burrow that he carefully and slowly hollows out.

3

When I first met Luca in the fall of 2021, I experienced him as an empathetic and politically engaged person. His work springs from a sympathy for the social history of his native land. He often returns to his hometown of Forlimpopoli, where he still has a studio, following with a masochistic pleasure the gradual decline of his soccer club, F.C. Cesena. One defining quality of Luca’s work is an opposition to the silver-tongued whisper of the present with the melancholy of an individual, perhaps in the face of a complete loss of the soul in the age of the second industrial revolution, as Günther Anders, the (much-less-quoted) husband of Hannah Arendt, once described it4. A direction is often already laid out in an artist’s earliest works. This is the case with Luca, as evinced by the sculpture of a rocket (2007) that was made not of wood, sheet metal, steel or even concrete; instead, the material used was beeswax. The verticality of the object, the Promethean drive to dominate nature, and the organicness of life itself find a marriage of convenience that is both laconic and intelligently staged. The artistic desire to give form to contradictions (instead of merely illustrating facts, the production of discursive props) has unfolded and been develop right up to the present, when steel and concrete—as the incunabula of the present—have become Monterastelli’s lone mediums, materials through which interior and exterior, skeleton and ornament, infrastructure and skin become one. Through the objects, the solitary nakedness of human beings is conveyed in the midst of the built and material world, a world which is also at the same time rapidly becoming virtual.

Gaston Bachelard devotes the second chapter of his Psychoanalysis of Fire to the reverie of staring into the flame5—an activity from which culture might have arisen and with it, perhaps, language itself. The reverie of dreaming by the fire makes it possible (unlike the dream) to experience its ambiguity: of being aware of the burning and of an intense feeling. At the same time, for Bachelard, all fixations related to fire are also painful: If we were to give ourselves to fire completely, we would follow Prometheus. Only slow, languid, writhing reveries can destroy these painful ambiguities, for imaginative power is the power of psychic creation, of a fertile, ultimately positive freedom. In his text on fire, Luca wrote to me, “I am thinking of the structure of the flame, in which each branch of fire develops in a possible direction; it continues second after second, but is never the same; it reminds me of the variables that exist in an artistic process.” What might be read as nostalgia in this work—which repeatedly revisits forms and ideas from the past—has its roots elsewhere: Monterastelli is a social archaeologist in the ruins of a world caught in the rat race of technical innovation, which— and this term is meant in opposition to innovation—appears to have lost a sense for the social and for actual social progress. What do we have, and what do we need? It is possible that answers may be found more readily in the past than the future—in this sense, the work seeks out resonance, connection, and continuity. From this starting point, Monterastelli works in the belief of the artist as the last social figure, whose work lies outside concrete, immediate, measurable use; a figure that at the same time represents a “memory of other ways of being human.” Yet the independent artist is a product of modernism, and bridging this contradiction lies at the beating heart of his artistic practice, which is in a state of constant metamorphosis.

notes: 1 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 2 Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 11. 3 Email from Luca Monterastelli, “The Shape of the Flame,” February 2, 2022. 4 Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen. I: Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution [“The Antiquity of Man. I: About the soul in the age of the second industrial revolution”] (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1956). Editor's translation.