Alchemical relics

Marzia Corteggiani is very familiar with poets and often likes to look through their pupils; there are many of her favorite poets, but it is the poetry of her own blood, the poetry of Lucia her twin sister, that accompanies her step by step.  The desire that is at the origin of this work is thus deeply rooted in her history, in her body. 

Fifty-one poets' eyes are the protagonists of the exhibition, which, on a first reading, looks like a work about looking, but they are not voyeur eyes on the contrary the eyes of poets are pure clairvoyance and open wide the doors to mystery.

 The images that show them by synecdoche evoke the ex votos with which one addresses the saints, almost all of whom are martyrs. The title of the exhibition, “An ecstasy that looks too much like weeping,” is like the incipit of a story. Ecstasy is the prerogative of the Blessed, it opens the horizons of the Spirit toward mystical experiences, it puts one in touch with that which though invisible preludes a close encounter with the divine. In this case, however, ecstasy does not coincide with paradisiacal contemplation; a tear comes out of the orbit, but it does not have time to drip because it becomes mother-of-pearl. Either a miracle, magic or tangible proof of the metamorphic potential inherent in the poet's eyes. In the weeping of poets Marzia finds her own weeping. This work was perhaps born as a practice of healing, processing of a grief, transformation of a pain: the pain of absence and loss. Perhaps. Impossible to encapsulate an artist's work in a single interpretation. One can only note that the mother-of-pearl tears, daughters of a mysterious metamorphosis, induce cathartic disorientation.

Marzia took the eyes from reproductions of the protagonists, photographed them, printed them on Plexiglas and retouched them with a mother-of-pearl tear, and then enclosed them in a 10x10 cm. transparent case. 

The object appears as an alchemical relic. The eye seems not only alive, but capable of actions and reactions. The setting increases its suggestive power; the plexiglass shelves on which the vitrines rest are transparent and detached from the wall, so that the eyes appear suspended in the void in a dialogue between present and absent. The uterine space of the Lavatoio Contumaciale is charged with energy, the exhibition becomes the sacred space for the celebration of a rite. 

Spectators wandering among the display cases look into the eyes of the poets whose eyes are fixed on an object placed in front of them. It looks like a means of measuring time, space, order and disorder.  Easy to call it sculpture, construction belongs to another order of making and thinking, it is a tool for self-criticism and refounding, a machine for reviewing and rethinking the world or oneself and one's way of making art or being an artist. The poets are looking at it with fixity, as if to point to that object almost as a philosopher's stone.

The structure is a work created by Marzia Corteggiani in 2001 and is titled “A Weight to the Heart.” The 2.40-meter work is composed of two overlapping parallelepipeds, the lower one is made of glass and supports the upper one drawn only by steel edges, in the center a plumb line of blown glass filled with water is suspended in the void.  The water, the glass, the steel, the geometries, every detail, are loaded with meanings, evident are the allusions to life in its becoming, to the perpetual oscillation between motion and stasis, fullness and emptiness. But why did Marzia want to show a work of hers from 23 years earlier? What did that work represent in her research path? I turned the question over to the artist, who responded as follows: 

“The co-presence of opposites. Perhaps. Perhaps the search for a unity realized through the conciliation of opposites, a coincidence of opposites whose essence can only be grasped symbolically as “coniunctio solis et lunae.” Masculine and feminine. Thought and eros. Conscious and unconscious. Irreconcilable psychic processes co-present in a dynamic equilibrium, composed in this structure, a metaphor for overcoming contrast precisely by the synthesis of symbolic operation. That is, a transcendent unity: Human and divine... that void in the center of the upper parallelepiped occupied by an extraordinary plumb line, with the blown glass cone filled with water that, suspended by the free end of the thin steel cable supporting it, is arranged along the vertical under the effect of gravity. By eyeballing the wire with the object to be placed “plumb,” one can check its verticality and, if necessary, correct its inclination. A life project, then. Perhaps.”

 Marzia Corteggiani in the 1970s began her artistic research in the conceptual sphere and continued it in the following decades with her photographs of the random space created by light and that constructed by modular composable structures.  

But, returning to “A Weight to the Heart,” the thing that is disturbing is how the poets look at the object. What do they discern in it?  The ritual has just begun, the exhibition is only in its first stage, the journey is all yet to be accomplished, the creative fertilization of the participants is in its embryonic state. 

For as long as the exhibition is on display some answers can be given by the poets themselves with their spoken and written words, so that their voices may be heard again and again, so that they may again become teachers of life and agents of metamorphosis. Throughout the exhibition, their words will be the subject of collective readings to look at the world through their eyes and come to their senses by learning to dream and desire. 

Anna D’Elia