Rather than lamenting the end of civilization and projecting
my attention towards a utopian future or a nostalgic past,
my response to the fragmentation and discontinuity of my
culture is to be in the present moment as much as I can.
This implies an understanding of myself and of the
circumstances around me. Art has become for me a good way to
do this because I feel it as an activity without specific
goals. In my practice, art happens in a sequence of now and
now and now. It does not happen in the fulfilling of any
program. The field of visuality fascinates me most. In it I
put together ideas, materials and processes that let my mind
generate results I can not foresee.
So as to be in the present, I wish to re-visualize the
visual arts and to separate them from the word. This is not
to say that the word is ineffective in the realm of
visuality. On the contrary, not only can the spoken or
written word be a material for visual art but if visuality
becomes re-instituted in its own the word also becomes more
itself. They share the culture and do not depend on one
another in forming it.
The invention of art, in my bias, does not presuppose
explanations, while, on the other hand, interpretations of
it dialogue with the art as creative acts in their own
right. I hope that interpretations of art are always to a
degree besides the point, i.e., so intensely within
themselves that they correspond with the art more than they
respond to it.
Lucio Pozzi Wife Handi Man, 1996.
Oil on canvas, 48 x 36 inches
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I deal a lot with words, especially in my Word Works
(to be distinguished from my Paint Works, Photo Works,
Action Works, Installation Works and others). The Word Works
are works of art in which I concern myself with the great
shifting power of words. In them, I imitate the structures
of my paintings and enjoy games of translation and
substitution.
An example of my early experience in words took place
when I translated the twin panels of the Level Group
paintings into the book Five Stories, originally
published by John Weber, New York, in 1974. (It is going to
be written in all the languages of the world and has already
been published in German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, French,
Japanese.) The Level Group consisted of small canvases
mounted on wood, painted in dark gray paint and coupled next
to each other, like open pages of a book, on a wall. Five
Stories contains ten stories. The five on the left are
horrible; the five on the right are wonderful.
Other Word Works are, for instance, the speeches I
deliver in the imaginary gibberish my little brother named
Patchameena when we were kids. Like the chromemes of
painting, the recognizability of phonemes varies
infinitely.
I see my art as a weaving web of interconnected but
independent specific universes. The web's end is unknown.
Words are in some of these universes and in some others they
are not.
Lucio Pozzi is a painter living in New York.
