Romantic Minimalism, Livia Signorini

romantic minimalism: livia signorini

On a sun-bleached rooftop a stone’s throw from the Villa Borghese in Rome, artist Livia Signorini unfurls a “quilt” made of Horvath candy wrappers. The brightly-colored papers glued to a muslin backing are an ode to both minimalism in their strict repetition, and Pop Art in their appropriation of text and image from mass culture. The grid is loose and simple, formal and direct, yet the individual pieces belie an informal and indirect story, beginning the moment when each was opened and consumed.

Sweet Dreams (2001)

“Each wrapper – there are 300 of them – represents a visit to my therapist,” says Signorini. “The sweets were to get me to talk…usually starting with a dream.” The finished collage, “Sweet Dreams,” (2001), “was meant to be a kind of security blanket.”

Therapy and art have long gone together, the hands giving form to reason and emotion; the resulting objects and designs though, have often been ascribed to the insane. Just take a look at Lausanne’s Musée de l’art brut. Livia Signorini’s obsessions, however, are highly distilled into a kind of minimalist poetry. Yet the wide range of objects she produces are all edged by a romantic impulse one might associate with Eva Hesse, the German-American painter and sculptor.

1 (1999)

In her rooftop studio a row of highly worked wooden “pillows” sits atop a cabinet. Smoothed by weeks of filing and sanding until they are “like bones,” they are then painted with gesso and some 30 layers of ground pigment. Once the desired color and texture is achieved, Signorini then polishes them until the colors absolutely glow: sun-stroked olive, aqua marine, blood red, golden orange. Another piece in the same group hangs in her home. It is nearly a landscape hanging low on the wall, but the wood grains are abstract enough to whisk the imagination off in many directions. One contemplates this long and beige object as one would a hand, an arm, or a body in an existential moment; its “thingness” is both beautiful and oddly disturbing. These untitled works, like most of Signorini’s pieces, begin their lives as found objects, then take a private path with her towards their true but hidden nature. Two of these works, for example, were discovered in the grass at a park, each laying on a different bed (and shade) of green--the inspiration for their final colors.

For the lithe Italian artist, found materials – wood, cork, bits of ceramic tile, objects obtained from street sellers – imbue her pieces with far reaching meanings, connecting her passage through the “real” world with her interior world. In their final forms, these works appear as concise works that defy adequate classification. Consistent however, is an unhurried and deliberate process that involves meticulous, repetitive tasks, and an enormous amount of time considering the finished piece. One might say these works are almost like falling in love; or falling out of it.

And like love, one is driven and intrigued to know what’s inside, to penetrate the enigma of the Other. We wonder what a lover is thinking, but are aware that words never fully reveal the whole person.

Toi et Moi (2002)

Signorini produces objects, or packages, that speak largely through their wrappings, their messages inside: wordless declarations of mystery. Colorful clementine jackets labelled “Toi et Moi” (2002), find a new poetic function: a puzzle. Indeed, these coverings are metaphors for speech. One can’t help but utter the words “Toi et Moi” (you and I) announcing the succulent fruit. The puzzle, too, plays out the aesthetics of relationships, reconstructing the words into shapes, enacting a language game.

Another piece, “Paesaggio” (2002), is derived from ceramic fragments found on Ischia, an island in the Gulf of Naples, a centuries-old ceramic center. These ancient bits of jars, tiles, plates tossed into the Mediterranean and smoothed over many years by the sea are by definition culture shaped by nature. Gathering up nearly a thousand of these fragments – each a story in themselves – Signorini arranged them on a framed base measuring 1 m long x 2 cm deep x 40 cm wide to create a temporary mosaic landscape. Her ode to the intemporal is reproduced each time she shows it. “Some are just a memory of a pattern,” she explains. “Every time I recreate it, it too, is from memory.”

Other works have much to do with words, if not stories. Signorini’s “Blue Letters,” are love letters never posted. Printed on semi-transparent calc, they are bunched up into papier-mâché balls and painted blue. She says these pieces are both “funny and pathetic,” and in some ways, she adds, she would have liked to keep them in their secondary state, that is, crumpled and thrown away.

Other messages receive a more distinct package: Resin. These, perhaps the most “wrapped” of Signorini’s works to date, are composed of fine shredded paper compacted into spheres or rectangular prisms; they are painted, then placed in the center of a mould. A highly poisonous resin is then poured around it (one must wear a mask to use this resin); after several days the “cakes,” as she calls them, are ready. She clearly sees the “baking” of these objects as a child-like game, but the finished pieces, safe to touch, are eloquent statements about innocence, hiding and willfulness. They are heavy and dense symbols, beautiful in the way that Wolfgang Laib’s wax houses, or his milkstones are: the rareification of experience into a potent object. Six of the smaller series, previously exhibited at Temple University Gallery in Rome, in 1999, were initially titled “Sei.” Sei has a double meaning: “six” and “you are….” While they are all titled “Senza Titolo,” they demand to be touched, handled, looked at, and even listened to.

Senza Titolo (2001)

Language is at the heart of another series, her “Libri,” or books (2000). These water color pads, sealed shut with glue and wax, are covered in graphite (she produced dozens of them and initially showed them – at AOC in Rome, 2000 – all lined up across three meters on a wall). One corner of each pad, however, is upturned and bearing a slightly different impression. They are both filled and empty; both finished and yet, unused in a compelling poem of solitude and finitude.

A recent piece, a solemn but tiny house painted red, is lit with many little bulbs festooned with a mirror, which she added months later. The mirror illuminates both the back of the piece and the viewer. She bought the little house, and another one made of ice cream sticks from a gypsy street vendor in Rome. “It emulates heartbreak,” she says, “offering many reflections.”

Still other small sculptures speak a silent language. Signorini made a series of painted match boxes in 1998, “Lucciole,” (fireflies), usually white gesso painted with fluorescent color, or filled them with red wax, “Fiammiferi.”

“I produced them during a period of terrible insomnia,” she says. “The pieces glow in the dark – signifying the luminous dial on my clock… the hours that ticked by during my sleeplessness.” She adds that reactions to the hand-sized works vary. “How much do people want to open it? Some don’t open them at all.”

One is unsurprised that Livia Signorini neglects to sign her work. When I asked her about it, she claimed she did not know how to sign “these things…. I don’t know where to put it…I don’t like putting my tattoo on these works. They just exist.”

Livia Signorini shows new works in a group show at AOC, Via Faminia 58, Rome, from 6 February through the 28th of February, 2003. AOC: + 39 06 3200 317. Contact: liviasignorini@hotmail.com

Matthew Rose is an artist and a writer based in Paris. He recently completed a novel, Plan B, about Von Spatzl, a wounded and obsessed day trader, and a book of “surrealist” collages, A Perfect Friend. E: mistahrose@yahoo.com