Matilde Guidelli-Guidi: Let’s begin from the beginning. When did you first realize you wanted to be an artist and how did you navigate that desire? I often joke that as a child growing up in Bologna I didn’t even know that there were living artists, surrounded as I was by a landscape bracketed between the Medieval and Morandi.
Luca Monterastelli: I always find it fascinating to play around with this “archaeology of intention”. I was born in Forlimpopoli, a little town in a province near your Bologna. There, imagining that art had survived into the present day demanded even more of a creative push than it would have done in Bologna, and yet to this day I would not know where to find the real reasons that led me first to art school and then on to the Brera Academy of Fine Arts.
MGG: Did you have models, and what was your relationship to art and architecture growing up?
LM: I remember a constant interest in the stratification of architectural epochs—something that’s evident throughout Italy—and I would daydream about this sequence of styles even though I didn’t have the resources to get a handle on it. I despised Rationalist architecture, and I was no fan of the contemporary, but my interpretative tools were, to say the least, too immature to understand that what makes it out to the provinces are just the side effects of the great movements. I still get a lot from the confused style that forms the Italian provinces and peripheries, from those violent and unpleasant landscapes that emerge when you force things together that do not belong together.
MGG: Where is your studio? What is your typical studio routine if you have one?
LM: Milan. I try as much as possible to have a daily routine, even if it’s not easy to keep it going.
MGG: Has your relationship to the studio and how you make a work changed over the years?
LM: After art school, in that limbo that one enters after graduating, I was lucky enough to be picked for various residency programs in Europe. This turned me into something of a nomad, giving me an understanding of spaces and allowing me to transform just about anywhere into my studio. Only in recent years did I start to feel the need for places that were my own.
MGG: Your work is often presented in clusters. Do you work on individual pieces or rather think of how each piece exists once displayed alongside other works?
LM: often change my way of working: at times I need to develop all of the aspects of an intuition in order to get to the underlying structure, and then the work becomes an installation of sculptures. Other times, by contrast, my research comes to fruition in a single work.
MGG: You often mention research. What is the role of research in your practice?
LM: “Research” is a word that is often abused but it accurately describes a set of practices that would otherwise be difficult to define. For me, it’s something that is as much a feature of my day-to-day practice in my studio—that engagement which enables you to become properly familiar with the materials—as it is a feature of the theoretical work with which I approach the material in terms of its historical aspects. The objective is to create a set of gestures that, by resolving one thought, evoke others. What I mean by “research” is a process similar to writing, to that phase of composition in which the word that you’re looking for only becomes possible once the word that comes before it makes its appearance.
MGG: Concrete and iron are your primary materials today. Looking at your work from the early 2010s, you were experimenting with a wider array of materials and combinations, including coarsely carved wood, bamboo, strings, and what I read as readymade objects—colorful vases and belts variously studded and decorated that call to mind global marketplaces. Those works had a different relationship to the wall and to gravity, as if updating the Process Art of the turn of the 1970s for the Global Contemporary moment of the 2000s. Could you talk about what was going on in that work and with you at the time?
LM: Starting in 2015, I concentrated on iron and concrete out of an immediate research need, but what I imagined would be an interlude ended up lasting longer than I had thought it would. This self-imposed constriction led me to reconsider in some depth what I had been taking for granted. Let’s take the assemblage, for example: conceived by the avant-gardes as an anti-establishment act, it has now been transformed into an academic mode, a combinatory stylistic element recycled without affording the proper value to the original implications of the gesture. For this reason, I wanted to return to the individual material, to explore all of the evocative potential already implicit in its physical characteristics: wood, for instance, allows for relatively unhindered spatial development, whereas with the increase in the specific weight of a material like concrete, the possibilities of the form in space are reduced. As you suggest, the introduction of industrial materials into the field of art put artists in the position of having to actualize their mode of conceiving and installing works. The choice of material imposes a limitation on the horizon of possibility: a very heavy material, for example, can only exist in direct contact with the ground. As such, choosing such a material already implies its final installation. One example, which I would cite only because it comes to mind easily, is the Monument to Roberto Franceschi, in which Enzo Mari helped to resolve a collective desire into a sign associated with the struggle to shift the means of production into the hands of the workers. The symbolic function is here reinforced by the sudden perception of the immense weight of this monolith. If you think about it, we could almost summarize the entire history of sculpture by concentrating solely on the perception of the weight of the sculptures themselves.
MGG: On the other hand, one can see in those years an incipient interest in scaffolding casted or poured sculptural fragments, as in Graceland from 2012, or in Of Dead Bodies’ Weight and the lovely The Lovers’ Suite (both 2013). Those works have a delicacy to them that is redolent of pastry or lace, but also of a millennial tradition of anonymous elegiac sculpture that comes to us via modernism—Cy Twombly more than Constantin Brancusi, perhaps. Their posturing and affect is quite different from your more recent, hieratic figures. Could you talk about those works and references?
LM: In that period, I was obsessed by the image of the plaster-cast gallery that, to this day, is a rather contorted concept to explain: the plaster-cast gallery is an archive filled with casts of statues and original molds from which the marble copies—the ones we consider to be the originals—are derived. As you can see, “contorted” is the right word. But the thing that has always struck me is its status as a shameless archive of celebrations. I wanted to understand what was evoked by that mistaken celebratory force and how much of it would be required to exhaust an individual’s patience: to identify the breaking point of a political overloading. There were various questions that interested me: the management of the overload, of the decoration and of the white. I have always associated plaster and stucco with a pornographic veneration of power—in my opinion, an offshoot of the propagandistic power of the Counter-Reformation Baroque—of which the effects on the contemporary are not often considered.
My first approach was to take a bourgeois decoration, such as the classic cornices that are used to decorate the ceilings of domestic interiors, and tie them together as I did in La Camera degli Sposi [The Bridal Chamber] (2011), or to mock a confectionary decoration, a poorly finished embellishment that has collapsed under its own weight. So, out of the reference points that you quite rightly cite, it is natural that I would choose Twombly.
MGG: I wonder, is that a closed chapter?
LM: Not at all. In terms of research into materials and their ideological implications, even if I have lingered on the hardness of concrete, I feel a pressing need to get back to expanding my vocabulary.
MGG: Let’s go back to materials. In the past decade you not only restricted the materials that you use to primarily concrete and iron, but also, the way you use those materials has grown increasingly metonymical. I am not so much thinking about the analogy of sculpture with the body but rather how materials retain cultural meanings in your work. How did you develop an interest in materials that exceeds their formal qualities to include their cultural connotation?
LM: The cultural value of a material is important, but the perception that we have of it—whether it’s precious, rare, sacred or predictable and banal—also takes in experience: when in the winter we touch a metal and the rapid dispersion of our heat makes it feel cold to us, or when the memory of a trauma reminds us of the possibilities that a material or a form has to wound us. It all becomes part of a previous experience, in which sight can anticipate, or avoid, our tactile experience. This instinct, the necessity of transforming the material into language so as to have something that resembles a world, is one of the first points that I try to exploit when I think of the final installation, where the choice of every single material and the details of its form contain all of the information required to unleash that spark that is essential in generating a narrative.
MGG: You recently made this concern explicit when you stated, “Concrete and iron are for me the symbols of the body of authority in the modern world. They are the very flesh of propaganda hence my interest …”.1 Could you untangle a bit that quote to speak more about your relation to history? It seems that your work starting around 2015 becomes more self-consciously invested in and referential to history. Do you feel that you are working your way out of it? And which futures, if any, does your work foreshadow?
LM: Those who know me know how passionate I am about politics and history and how I have always avoided reducing the work to a political comment on the everyday. Often, for reasons that are more or less valid, those working within the culture system—and I’m referring in particular to the visual arts—tend to overestimate the political influence of art on the real world, often ending up “preaching to the converted”. For my part, I prefer to tackle the political discourse in the context of my theoretical interests and in the research phase that accompanies my artistic practice, rather than making it explicitly evident in my work. Glory Hole (2011–13), for example, features many of the themes that I feel are still urgent: the body as territory of authoritarian coercion and the ideological deformation of the sacred. In Graceland (2012), I call into question the staging devices and the forcing of the gaze, putting at the center of the entire installation a work that is nothing but a hollow set, a backdrop without a subject. In Only Hair and Bones (2012)—the title referring to what remains of a mammal after its decomposition— you can discern the seeds of my meditation on the aestheticization of violence, of conquest, of the narrative of the passage between life and death required by any authority. All of the great movements of the 20th century had to first colonize this space, transform cadavers into heroes. I think I can say that, at the end of the day, my obsessions have not changed over the years.
MGG: 2015 marks a shift in your work where you reduce your palette and think more about staging. Some funny short-circuit happens in my mind as the word “staging” echoes “Fascism”—like in the book by the U.S. scholar Jeffrey Schnapp, Staging Fascism (1996).
LM: I have recently been reading Albert Speer’s diaries, in search of confirmation of how the celebratory apparatus, like those to which I referred before when talking about the Roman Baroque, require the sacred in order to function, and when I say “sacred” I don’t mean just the religious dimension but, in a wider, deeper sense, how much darkness there is in the world, intangible to logical thought. This necessity for magic—unchanged from the time when we would sit around a fire, yearning for the daytime world, away from the horrors of the night— is fuel for the engine of authority. Every work has a little of this fuel. Staging is a solution whereby authority shoehorns the single work into the overall narrative that it wants to apply at any given time, a way for it to fill its own tank of sacred images, subjugating works and styles to its own celebration. Staging becomes the visual narrative of a larger, ungraspable story, despite the single signs that are diluted in the body of that authority.
MGG: In your A Melancholy of the Flesh (2015), the elegance of the black and white, the way you organized your figures in line, and literally plastered the wall with texture reminiscent of the organic, all bring back memories of the modernist art produced under the Fascist regime. It must have been weird, in 2015, to “represent your nation” at a site and in a context that was always already predetermined by politics. Could you talk about the experience of making work for the Italian Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale?
LM: It seems that organizing artists by nationality remains a custom practicable by the Realpolitik of the contemporary and, given that for a large part of the political class the purpose of culture remains the celebration of the power that commissions it, I don’t expect much to change any time soon.
In 2015, the Pavilion had been subdivided into numerous small rooms that gave a certain autonomy to the individual works, but at the same time I wanted to attack my space, smearing the whole room with plaster, until I could have a single material horizon. To reproduce that forcing of the sacred vision I was talking about before, I thought of four bodies that could occupy a central line sited so as to divide the space into two symmetrical halves. The search for a formal solution for those bodies had caused me all manner of problems, but then I realized that all that was needed was the simple presence of an organic form: so I poured some plaster into a number of paper bags and I left it to set into whichever shape it would take. What came out were these four bodies that seem to want to anchor onto themselves while being swallowed by the plinths and by the space: I wanted to believe that the celebratory material could tire of celebrating and could be nostalgic for the material of life—for flesh. As I said, the narrative of the passage from life to death remains a territory that every power must control if it wants to dominate a world, so here we have these four bodies trying to escape their fate.
MGG: How to Make a Hero (from your 2017 exhibition in Belgium) is an ambivalent title. It is good for a dark comedy, where a delusional inventor fiddles in his lab trying to fabricate a hero. But could also describe a dystopian society (ours perhaps?), where the inventor is actually the absolute leader, or where pressure is placed upon men to become heroes—and who is a hero today, anyway? The question of fabricating heroism rhymes with masculinity in crisis and a crisis of the social, and the works you presented in that exhibition, all in reinforced concrete, keep us focused on surface, posture, and positionality. What was going on in that exhibition?
LM: You will be familiar with the images that accompany the collapse of a regime, that moment in which the immediate symbols of power are disfigured to assuage the shame of having believed whatever those in power told us? So, I wanted to talk about the venting of that grotesque rage that follows a failure, about that air full of excitement at witnessing a catastrophe. Many myths are born in that precise moment—myths that, surprise surprise, reinforce and perpetuate a contorted idea of masculinity, where in terrible situations the hope is “cometh the hour, cometh the man”. Authority needs characters to force through its vision, but they have to be created by a community to be credible. Just think of the difference in intensity you can sense by comparing a number of collective narratives about the web—the fruit of a horizontal collaboration between users and one that, in the cumulative process, may recall the genesis of myths—with the mass-production of storytelling enacted by marketing, a narrative generated on the basis of a hierarchical method. With How to Make a Hero, I wanted to show the extent to which the epic remains influential in the contemporary world and, above all, I wanted to emphasize the fact that while the creation of a hero takes place in an active, shared way, the consequences are not controllable. I started out from a classic theme, whereby a person becomes the necessity on which to build a new world. The myth of the chosen one, of the elect, is a myth that is always coded as male, and which, unfortunately, still works perfectly well. Incel, QAnon and the meme-based fake news of Russian propaganda perfectly fit the aesthetic co-ordinates of this myth bordering on Nazi ideology, such as the veneration of the strongman and a warped vision of the Middle Ages, caught between romance and fantasy. In that exhibition, I wanted to create works that would already be “scarred”, to show how the aestheticization of violence, of which the exhibition itself was formed, is the sine qua non in the creation of heroes.
MGG: In this sense, would you say that comedy and irony have a role to play in your work?
LM: That part that you perceive, and which I would probably define as more grotesque than comic, is a component that I need in my work, almost like a form of protection. Sometimes I get it out of my system through the titles, in other cases it becomes a sign that grounds the work in visual terms. In Oh Gold, Oh Gold, They Are Trying to Make Your Mould! (2020), for example, I wanted to recreate imagined fragments of Modernist statuary, but I also wanted to weigh them down with an exaggerated, useless appendage, which would become a hindrance.
MGG: Let’s talk about process. The way you use concrete is becoming more and more sophisticated, and one can observe a shift towards representation and narrative. Works like Oh I See You’re Trying… or Oh Mammal Instinct… (both 2020), for instance, weave figures, landscapes, and atmospheric effects out of ridges or efflorescence imprinted in the material through process. Rather than assembly, moreover, concrete and metal are stacked, juxtaposed, or layered. And metal in turn is expanding into color through oxidation or other chemical reaction. Could you talk about how you made these works and more generally about this new direction?
LM: A lot of it comes via the bas-relief. The center of Milan still betrays many signs, fragments of a painful past, with which the Fascist regime forced Italian cities to become perfect stages for its grotesque parades. The bas-relief thus became one of the main focuses of my research. I always see the bodies in these wall decorations as resistant beings, who fight to emerge from the material like indistinct figures between two worlds: they take shelter from the gaze in their secret world in the attempt to stop being symbolic and to get back to being material things. The two works that you refer to were part of Weightless, my 2021 solo show at Lia Rumma’s gallery in Naples, where I wanted to create ectoplasms, will-othe- wisps half-way between two worlds, in order to then index the terror in a nursery rhyme with the title of every work supplying a line. Just like we would have done as children.
MGG: I would like to move away from sculpture and the visual and ask you about the role of sound and the sonic in your work. Calling to mind organ pipes variously disassembled, bent, or splayed open, the metal sculptures you presented at Lia Rumma in Milan in 2017 and more recently in Naples in 2021 retain their sonic potential despite the hollowness on display. With its rhythmic anaphora, moreover, the song-poem of your own writing lends its verses as titles of your works in the 2021 show. How do these sculptures and titles “sound” to you, and in which sonic tradition would you situate yourself, if you had to choose one?
LM: You make a very prescient observation, and it is something that almost no one has ever noted in my work, a part from a few friends who are musicians. The first decision that I take when I start a new work is whether it will be a hollow body or a solid body. I’ve noticed that hollow bodies leave viewers with a sweeter narrative possibility. In some way, allowing themselves to be penetrated by the gaze, these works establish with the viewer a more reassuring, more sensual tone. In True Love (2017), for example, I used hollow bodies as if they were the conduits that people use to weave together words and form a world. Whereas, if I deploy solid bodies, the feeling is always more tragic, one of imminence, almost: probably a vague spiritist memory, of when the artistic gesture was limited to the shifting of stones, so as not to alter the sacred nature of the material. This memory remained deposited at the back of our eyes, and as such the surface of the material remains a limit, the content of which refuses to deal with our certainties.