Claudio Parmiggiani

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Claudio Parmiggiani (b. 1943, Lazurra, Italy; lives and works in Parma, Italy) is an important post-war Italian artist. Over the past five decades, Parmiggiani has explored themes of memory, absence and presence, and humanism through a wide array of mediums. He is associated with the Arte Povera movement, in his use of unexpected and scarcity of materials.

“Parmiggiani’s overarching thesis is his search for an image, object or assemblage that transcends time and individual experience to evoke a universally existential and perceptual truth. It is a search that is at the heart of his practice, an excavation of history and mythology that is rendered still, silent and impervious to time.”

Early Life

Claudio Parmiggiani was born in Lazurra, Italy, in 1943. In the 1950s, Parmiggiani’s childhood home caught fire and was burned to the ground. The destruction of his home impacted the rest of his life and career, having a lasting effect on his life and work. Eventually, he would use fire as a means of creation, rather than be reminded of the destruction it caused in his formative years. From 1958–1960, Parmiggiani studied at the Istituto di Belle Arti di Modena, Italy. During this time, he worked as a studio assistant to Giorgio Morandi in Bologna. He says of Morandi: “His house reminds me a lot of my Aunt Onorina’s in Suzzara. Windows closed to keep out the heat and the world, only the tick-tock of the pendulum; everything was still. I understood the metaphysical meaning of dust in his studio.”

In the 1960s, Claudio began to work within the Arte Povera movement, with artists such as Mario Merz. Arte povera, which translates to “Poor Art,” was a movement exploring the use of a broad spectrum of materials outside of traditional artist mediums for painting and sculpture. Experimenting with items such as soil, rags, and sticks, artists aimed to disrupt the commercialized contemporary gallery model. Claudio Parmiggiani entered the Collezione Maramotti in 1964 with his sculpture, La Notte. This was his first sculpture to feature a plaster head, a motif that continued for decades. The next year, he had his first major solo-exhibition at Libreria Feltrinelli in Bologna. In 1965, Parmiggiani met the members of Gruppo 63, a group of Italian avant-garde writers and intellectuals, who shared the desire for a radical break from the conformity present in traditional Italian society. The creatives gathered around the magazine, II Verri, which fostered an environment of energetic collaboration between artists and poets of the time. His longest lasting partnership would be with the intellectual Emilio Villa.

Signature Technique, Delocazione

In 1970, Claudio participated in the group exhibition “Arte e Critica ‘70” at the Galleria Civica di Modena. Parmiggiani chose to install his work in a room that served as a storage closet, where objects were leaning against the walls. When he removed the objects, the artist discovered their traces in dust and decided to immortalize their silhouettes using smoke. In the sealed storage room, Parmiggiani burned tires, creating heavy smoke. When the combustion completed, the objects were removed, revealing their negative imprints, which Parmiggiani exhibited as his work, thus creating his signature technique, Delocazione.

The Delocazione, Italian for de-location or displacement, is Claudio Parmiggiani’s most iconic and iconoclastic motif. It consists of the negative imprint of objects as defined by the smoke and soot surrounding them. The artist arranges objects on the face of two-dimensional surfaces, subjecting them to a controlled blaze. Once the fire is extinguished, a gray soot settles and outlines Parmiggiani’s scenes, fixing what was once present by their hollowed absence. Notions of the passage of time, of presence and absence, of destruction and creation, of haunted memory permeate the Delocazione. Visually they resemble early, negative image photography while symbolically and technically they recall the shadows on the walls of victims evaporated in such cataclysmic disasters as Pompeii and Hiroshima. Since 1970 Parmiggiani’s recurring Delocazione motifs include most notably libraries, picture frames, windows, butterflies, veils, human silhouettes, clocks and vessels, all of which question the validity of image making. Of the motifs, Parmiggiani has said “To some they are symbols. I call them presences; things that the eyes observe and which belong to life.”

One of the recurring motifs within the Delocazione series is the library, where this technique has been utilized to create a large ‘absent’ library across the walls of art spaces. Similarly, the use of rows of bottles has appeared within this series since the 1990s. Parmiggiani’s motif with bottles, referred to as his Still Lifes, was inspired by his time as Giorgio Morandi’s assistant, who used the same subject and stark palette in his celebrated paintings. Butterflies are another prominent theme in his Delocazione work. A symbol that appeared in his work in the 1960s, butterflies culturally allude to human vulnerability, inevitable loss, and the fleeting passage of time.

Claudio Parmiggiani has made site-specific Delocazione mainly in settings like museums, libraries and deconsecrated churches. Several were temporary and therefore no longer exist, but five remain permanently: one in Montpellier, one in Bologna, one in Parma, one in Pistoia and one in Rome, at the Villa Medici’s Chamber of Jupiter’s Loves. He has also been doing Delocazione on panels, therefore not site specific, since the late 1970s.

The official inauguration of Parmiggiani’s permanent installation in the Villa Medici in Rome, within the Chamber of Jupiter’s Loves, was June 20, 2015. The previously vacant ceiling was adorned with Delocazione frescos of butterflies. It was a poetic allegory to Cosimo’s fire, an alleged arson planned by Cosimo III de’ Medici, the drama within the Medici dynasty, and to the villa’s past. Parmiggiani’s ceiling installation formed a cosmos of butterflies consisting of seven panels, with one deserted panel, showing the vanishing moment of the butterfly flock, as if a fire was chasing them through and away from the panels, the room and the villa.

The Lighthouse

In a volcanic landscape on the outskirts of the city in Sandskeid, Iceland, Il Faro d’Islanda, The Icelandic Lighthouse, was commissioned by the Reykjavik Art Museum in 2000. Claudio Parmiggiani chose the location for the lighthouse, far from the ocean, because of the juxtaposition between the icy landscape and the fire that burns at the top of the structure. A 14-meter tower of rust-red iron stacked in cylinders of several diameters, the topmost made of luminescent glass with a constant and unwavering light illuminates the expanse. This bold work is neither an imitation of nature nor a picture of a lighthouse but a thing in and of itself, made of iron and light, a thing that is the equivalent of an idea. However, the piece is meaningless without the environment enveloping the lighthouse and receiving its light. The lighthouse has become part of its surroundings, as its surroundings are part of it.

In his writing about The Lighthouse, Parmiggiani stated, “My task was never to locate a traditional sculpture in this landscape or anywhere else. On the contrary, my wish was to give life to a certain idea, in Iceland. A tower of iron and light, the one substance being material in the fullest sense and the other metaphysical in the fullest sense, metal born of fire, producing light… Iceland epitomizes light struggling against night, epitomizes the character of resistance. That’s a lighthouse. That’s why my only work in this country had to be a symbol, a lighthouse.” In his interview with Amic, Parmiggiani cites the Lighthouse as the work his readership is least likely to have seen. He states that this is a work made for the world, not the art world. This piece intends to emphasize its remoteness from that world. Not a thing but an idea, a work that lives more in the mind than in the viewing, more in the distance than in plain view. A symbol of his thoughts. The lighthouse was restored and re-lit in 2019 and can be viewed by driving on Route 1 by Sandskeið.

Sculpture

“La Notte,” which entered the Collezione Maramotti in 1964, is the first sculpture of his to feature a plaster head. Parmiggiani’s plaster heads are inspired by the legacy of classical Italian art. The heads are arranged and affected with soot, tempura, soil, wood, tools, and butterflies. In Il Sogno di Marcellino (The Dream of Marcellinus), 1977, a pile of books placed on the floor supports a horizontal plaster cast of a classical visage; it’s topped by a model sailing ship.

References

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