In 1999 Loris Cecchini exhibited Assembling Kit Box, made the pre- vious year, at Claudia Gian Ferrari’s gallery in Milan. Its production was unique and moreover it is a work that was destroyed, but it tells us something – possibly in a too explicit and schematic way – about his way of thinking about the reality that surrounds us, or about the world: a model kit, on a one to one scale, with bits of uniform coloured pla- stic, waiting to be separated from their support to become part of a con- struction and of an action (in this case two office chairs, attached to outboard motors and, wearing the supplied helmets, you can set off on a bizarre adventure: Godardian reminiscences perhaps, but not even the artist remembers it any more, and anyway it’s no longer important...). Construction, scale, action, narration, process, modelling, structure, form, pattern, are still – and have always been – the key words of Cec- chini’s work, applied according to the different quantities and various mixes depending on the year and the typologies that he conceived and developed, but which, in that work, are set out as if we found ourselves in front of the contents of a book: as with all contents pages, they are not the book itself but indicate its divisions, it is the same for that work, which is not Cecchini’s most successful (he has never replicated it or taken it up again, and when it was destroyed, he was not overly despe- rate), but that perhaps for that, it reveals what we need to look for in the book of his, by now, twenty years of activity. Thus, in the following paragraphs, these variously arranged words, now concentrated, now di- spersed, perhaps even just suggested or veiled, make up Ariadne’s thin thread that leads to the Minotaur at the centre of the problem, reco- gnising in the Labyrinth of his work shapes that are apparently different and deviant from each other, but were all created according to a plan that only afterwards was revealed to be cohesive.
Cecchini’s sculptural work started with photography and this is not a paradox. We have long been used to the plastic value of photography, of some photography, and not even awarding the Venice Biennale Sculpture prize to the “photographer” couple Bernd and Hilla Becher in 1990 attracted unfavourable comments.
Cecchini’s photos, however, brought with them a strong narrative component; they are not the ca- talogue of nothing, and stage situations that resemble more film stills than a repertoire of shapes.
No casting – this is the title that bring them together, from their start in around 1994-1995, until, at least, 2000 – effectively indicates the presence of characters “taken off the street” and without their knowledge (without being casted, in fact), and the situa- tion that they are placed in assumes a chain of events “before” the scene in which the photograph freezes them, and we expect an “after” deve- loped by the conditions they find themselves in: in other words, the scene that appears before us presumes a story. However this is the first of the sensations and suggestions that are placed before us, Because there is always something striking in the proposed scene: a road accident, characters dressed out of place with the setting; strange helicopters, the presence of rubble, or, going further back, towards his first creations in that sense – from the title of Pause in background – an “out of scale” which clearly places the character in a strange yet familiar scene, that of the domestic universe – a radiator, the edge of the bath, a drainer – that has become gigantic and unrecognisable thanks to the electronic editing work on the photo, that transforms these objects into landscapes, dra- matically shrinking the human figure. In the subsequent works, on the other hand, the objects in the scene are revealed for what they are by vir- tue of something they “lack”: normal colour, the wealth of detail that characterizes every complex object, the strong three dimensionality of the products, their shadows... Here the “normality” of the human beings in the scene is juxtaposed by the abnormality of the landscape and the situations where they find themselves, according to a script that is not theirs, but that the artist builds in a deliberately sketchy way. The evident “falsity” of their story is clearly highlighted and accentuated by the use of photography that in those years, in the mind of someone who had seen a lot of photos, was still (but not for long) the “place of reality”, and that just for this complaint the non-truthfulness of what is before us in an even clearer way. At this point any narrative interest loses its importance, whilst the semantic shift emerges ever more, that linguistic décalage that makes up the real strength of the image and in fact which is the conceptually relevant nucleus – and durable in the be - holder’s imagination – of all this cycle of work. It is the dystonic scale between the figure and object that creates the short circuit that triggers the spark of attention and that also distinguishes it from those artists that in that moment act on the concept of “falseness” of the image – like Thomas Demand – reproducing situations with “particularities in less” or of those characters, like George Segal, where the truthfulness of the objects and the chalky whiteness of the figures, in the same scene, even suggest moral considerations on the deterioration of the human before the object. In Cecchini’s photos there is none of this, if not the evi- dence of a state of fact, that leaves –and arrives – from an objective ob- servation, made up of the elements in the scene, that in this way maintain the degree of conceptualization and of elaboration of the ima- gination more at an elementary than complex level, despite the wealth of elements in view and the narrative possibility of the constructed si- tuation. If, from the narrative point of view, the work is an isolated frag- ment of history (that we do not know and can only imagine) from a perceptual and emotional point of view, it is complete in itself, and al- ways provides the same degree of dimensional displacement, i.e. struc- tural.
Almost in tandem – since 1998 – and with at least a significant ad- mixture and hybridization in the series of No casting – in furniture for stage evidence, of 1998, the minute office furniture served as models for the new cycle – Cecchini was elaborating all those “soft objects” in grey urethane rubber, which are still one of his most successful cycles, and certainly one that has been known internationally since the beginning of the new millennium. Despite the very short memory that plagues Postmodernism, it is impossible not to consider that this typology had- n’t been used in the recent past, and without even resorting to Salvador Dalì – who however had painted his soft watches –, all of a series of works by Claes Oldenburg, created in 1966. featured “softness” applied to the out of scale of a typewriter, of a switch, of a WC... to this ob- jection (because it is an objection we are dealing with and it is useless to deny it: the chronological primacy of a typology is worth something in contemporary art!) Cecchini has repeatedly responded by pointing out that while Oldenburg emphasised gigantism, the “deflating of an object (ethical direction?...), his were 1:1 scale models, and not soft, ra- ther they collapsed under their own weight, by force of gravity. This is all true, but it is necessary to go further, because next to the short me- mory of our times, lurks its complementary feelings: the schematic rou ghness of perception, even a work of art. As actually we do not dwell on the details and concepts that lie behind these details (as opposed to an- cient art where we dwell -and how! – on the pictorial differences bet- ween one of Raphael’s Madonna and one of his students, even though the composition of the scene and colours are absolutely identical), but we rely on the glance that instantly stabilizes to which category the work we have in front of us belongs, the risk is that for all these Stage evidence the only category used to perceiving and appreciate them is that of their softness, of their sagging on themselves, and that therefore in front of this immediate evidence the rest of the thought passes into the back- ground. Instead, as in the No casting series, it is not the first impression that counts, but the emergence of other peculiarities where nothing is as it seems: the non-colour, for example, that neutral grey that doesn’t characterise anything, is an important element, almost as much as – we’ll see later – the action of gravity that makes Cecchini’s objects fold onto themselves. An elementary consequential analysis; the grey is a factor of uniformity, that equates every object under its chromatic, or better non-chromatic cloak; that is, it brings a sort of indifference to the quality of the object, because each one is part of a single category, de- termined by a single common element, the grey non –colour; ergo, the colour serves to cancel the individual characteristics, and restore per- ception towards the single principle that really counts, namely the col- lapsing under the weight of its own body, dragged to the ground by the force of gravity. Like this, grey is a secondary, instrumental element and what is really important is not so much the reproduced object as the ac- tion that causes this. Action means process, but which process can be relevant in this sense, after the apple fell on Isaac Newton’s head? It is pertinent to call to mind the postmodernist tendency of the late 1960s that go under the name of “Antiform”, where shapes arose from the spatial autopositio- ning of the various materials that constituted them – remember for example Robert Morris’s large felt pieces – making use of the mere form of gravity: however he was looking for an objective and finally absolute and thus, perfect shape, whilst in the Stage evidence the shape already existed – that of the reproduced object: a bicycle, an umbrella, a radia- tor, piping, a large door, cinema seats, monitors, cables, pianos and po- tentially everything that surrounds us,- and becomes on the contrary “unshaped” in this process of folding on its own weight. What is the meaning of this real and metaphorical collapse?
When transporting these works to place them in some exhibition, they oppose the resistance of a dead body: they escape from all sides, they no longer have consistency but only weight, they no longer have shape but only encumbrance, and their configuration is a reminiscence, a ghost, and as in a body which when dead no longer has a soul, which has left it, it is the same for these objects, their reproduction in rubber, “no lon- ger has a soul”. Note that the word “soul”, in sculpture, has the precise meaning of that usually metal armour on which the plaster is modelled, and which allows it to support itself: it is the soul of the sculpture, it is its structure. The objects of Stage evidence lack structure, they are like characters whose skeleton has been “filleted”, they are the indication of a lack rather than a presence, and all the formal paraphernalia that ac- companies them is just the shell of what really counts, what makes them live like objects, and this is the object of Cecchini’s research.
Just by thinking of this need, of the constant research into the soul of things, we can understand Cecchini’s next phase, who gradually aban- dons the dangerous success of Stage evidence to juxtapose it with Mo- nologue Patterns, the dwelling modules, now similar to caravans, now to inflatable or transparent architecture, that lay on structurally strong and resistant elements, such as trees, walls, pylons. The feeling is that of a concretion – a cross between the organic and architectonic – that de- velops in an almost parasitic way, taking advantage of the existing ob- ject as would a wasps’ nest or a beehive. The protean capacity of the artist to vary the scale of his operations from microscopic to architec- tonic, shouldn’t fool us: Gulliver always has the same size – the human dimension –whilst the context, now gigantic, now Lilliputian – chan- ges, it tests the ability to adapt that then, on closer inspection, isn’t just an aspect of structural flexibility. Are we dealing with an architectonic utopia? An ecologist’s suggestion? A science-fiction citation? A childish game by an ambitious baron? This probably isn’t the main point (still a false aim in Cecchini’s art): it is not what it seems), even if here, as in all his other cycles, however, the visible formal aspect, is strong enough to induce someone to stop at the surface of the work or, in this case, to linger within the works, rediscovering the ancestral sensation of shelte- ring “inside a shell”. Also here, behind a veil of almost romantic feelings, the problem is structural, and to build without having a real structure, or having an extremely fragile one (see in this regard the transparent coatings of the “caravans” or the aerostatic necessity of the 2004-2006 Blaublobbing), so much as to fear the dissolution from one moment to another.
At this point, all Cecchini’s route we have analysed so far, seems to move decisively towards the definition of “structure”: of course, the critical reading that he gives here intends to highlight this part of his work, perhaps leaving to individual emotion the perception and the sensation of individual works, or single details that don’t belong to this concep- tual and ideal mainstream that has been identified, but the more the work of the Lombard-Tuscan-Berlin artist develops through time, the more evident is the urgency to discover the internal structure of things within their shell, so much so that with the modular installations – such as Morphing wave (2005-2007), Cloudless (2006-2008), Floating Crystals (2007-2008), Steelorbitalcocoons (2007-2009) – every iconic residue les- sens, whilst the structural research grows, through the use of three di- mensional modular construction models.
Understanding the structure as a module removes Ceccchini’s work – all his work, even the iconic – from every superficially pop environ- ment, to replace it in a territory that goes from the minimal to the programmed to real architecture itself: his research, the design and the use of a module, i.e. a simple – the simplest possible element, beyond which it can no longer be simplified – with which to build objects, or, rather, to make potentially unlimited organisms grow, means clarifying to oneself and clearly indicating to others, the real nature of one’s own work, that atomic nucleus that in a flash makes everything achieved up to now slide in front of us. Everything revolves around the structure of things, and each structure revolves around a modular element that al- lows it to exist. But Cecchini does more. His attention to modularity isn’t limited to the classical plastic modularity, experimented from Bauhaus to today (but perhaps also by Seurat to today: what is the point of colour if not the module of painting?...), but extends his interest to include mode- lization within modularity, and vice versa. Modalization, understood as a cognitive process aimed at the systematic creation of a small se- mantic universe with the purpose of defining of an event, isn’t itself an aesthetic process, and usually does not fall into the interests of the lan- guage of art as much as it falls into those disciplines – from physics to economics – that need to standardize phenomena, but the fascination, aroused by the possibility, or also just by the logical system within which any object of event can be placed, is such that the attempt to transfer a spacial module into a more complex system is a challenge that an artist accepts and looks for, with a clear and hitherto unprece- dented awareness. With Crystal Engineering (2009), that after two years became The developed seed, (from the significant subtitle of organizing a system that can continuously construct itself, with Waterbones (2013) and other variations on the same modular theme, Cecchini introduces the element of “time” into that of “space”, through the visible concept of “process”. Even so called “Processual Art” is a great conceptual whole which is by now established in artistic language (even if not so immediately visible, as the examples of pro- cessularity can formalise works which are very different from each other), but the quality of the “process” put in place can take on diffe- rent values and meanings, that essentially go from the reverberated processuality on the ar- tist – through the work where I see the action of the man artist – to a processuality where the artist is absent, or only minimally present,
as a demiurge who “gives the La”, who starts up the process then re- treats to contemplate the ever changing – and unpredictable, even for him, result of his work. Cecchini belongs to this last category, to this last typology of artist. It is no accident that, observing his last works, the word that immediately and intuitively comes to mind is “growth”, much more than “construction”: growth is an organic process, regula- ted by stronger laws than those of constructed rationality, you grow a plant, you build a house...this is the difference between an animate and inanimate being, and the animate being means “becoming”. That is why the process put in place in the latest works of Cecchini is a tem- poral process quite different from the one, although existing, that is im- plicit in every construction (in fact, building a house is also a temporal process), because the intrinsic becoming of these structures is an orga- nic, molecular, becoming, which has its own life, and not simply mo- dular. How has he reached this result, that in the moment in which he manages to grow his structures autonomously, he theoretically reaches one of the various “zero degrees” of art, one where the figure of the ar- tist is no longer necessary to create the work? With a little, big artifice, which allows the combination of modules to move themselves – that is to grow- in many directions, but not in all, or rather with some li- mitations given their initial structure. It is enough to just offset the screw connections, which join one thing to another, by a few degrees to impose a new direction, a line-force of development in space. It is just this, together with the polished shape of the steel, to streamline, the dynamic element, the “life of the shape” that Cecchini has im- pressed as his seal on every single element of these latest works.
A few days ago, Loris confided to me that he had bought a microscope: “I don’t know yet what I’ll do with it, what will come out... but so- mething will happen...”.

© Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro 2014

Marco Meneguzzo: There is a structural and organic idea in your work, for example, if we think of Clouds, of modules, of a kind of growth. That type of modularity is almost biological, but at the same time is also something else: a potentially infinite systematic composition.

Loris Cecchini: Programmatically the organic concept was already in my work when I approached the idea of the object and the distortion caused by its intrinsic inability to support. During the productive moment, this made me look closely at the material, its fluidity and its organic nature. Being organic and fluid have multiple references, for example, to our behaviour in space and our ability to make language. Specifically the module gives me the possibility to develop my work in a minimalistic and organic sense. Minimalist because the module is an individual and completed shape, that starts from studies in 3D or to watercolour for the observation and suggestion of natural elements. However, I also look closely at the idea of diagrammatic representation that often takes place in other areas, namely the open diagram where we can place sculpture. Sculpture, intended as an open diagram, gives me the possibility to work on the expansion and contraction of a shape in space. At the same time, I am speaking of diagrams because I am fascinated by the designs that are found in different fields from chemistry to social sciences where, when the design is decontextualized, it remains an open diagram, which depending on the cultural baggage you read it with, generates more images.


MM: When you talk of a diagram, are you referring to a three dimensional structure? Let me explain: a diagram is basically an abstract and essential representation, of all types of phenomena, of which we try to identify a model of development or understanding through the most efficient outline possible. The x and y axes are those with which we build the observation ‘field’, but now the complex phenomena include the third dimension, since the fourth – time – pervades the entire model.

LC: Even two-dimensional. The performance of a fluid, the seismic movement, the molecular composition, are all diagrams that in each specific case can be applied and serve as the base concept for a definition, I decontextualize them and place them in an open field that generates other images.

MM: In every diagram, there is usually a zero point where the things all meet, as if it were an origin….

LC: Yes, if you are referring to Euclidean and Cartesian geometry. But, for example in the diagrams of the social sciences, which are circular with the various definitions and multiple lines arranged radially, there is a different origin…

MM: …Are you also fascinated by the graphic and schematic representations of phenomena that can take many forms, sets, lines, tangents, systems…

LC: By speaking of systems, we are moving into the constructive theme, which, as you know, is for me a very important element. The idea of building and the utopian form of architecture represent a form of symbolic tension for me.

MM: What do you mean by symbolic tension? Compared to building? It is as if you were presented with a brick and you see a house?

LC: Yes, we can see different houses, because the brick in itself is the module, the possible forms are manifold.

MM: I wonder if you played with Lego when you were a child

LC: Always, but I played with it in the countryside, so that I put the Tuscan experience together with a more pragmatic experience that comes from a city like Milan. I have a 360-degree curiosity and I like to measure myself with the possibilities of ideation in other areas too.

MM: You have taken things from other sectors and brought them into the language of art: transferring the idea of the diagram into an artistic language has become the core of your work. Has the opposite ever happened, to be able to carry the result of this transformation of language into another field that was not exclusively of art?

LC: I think so, starting with my photographic works and the use of plastic materials, to the traditional fusion and industrial production. The use of technology and technique is a form of knowledge that allows me to play with the things in life, fielding different projects. For this reason, from photography and rubber I then developed other types of work: Thinking about it, with an instrumental logic, I would have been able to make rubber objects for a lifetime…

MM: Some might see a rift between the initial work and that of today. You have already answered that partly with a reference to the internal structure of things and objects you have deployed. If I think of the ‘soft objects’ of your previous works, I think of things that lack an internal structure, and such are limp, inert, without energy, heavy as corpses: Today you are engaged with showing what they lacked, the structure, in fact. Probably this is the link between the one and the others.

LC: From the first idea of deconstructing a very familiar element that I wanted to express as a ghost of itself (a job I practiced for seven or eight years); I have gone from the idea of deconstruction to the necessity of reconstructing something. Perhaps the particulate, molecular aspect and the unit to be divided, responds to a type of material culture that is virtual, typical of my generation, where the medial elements related to virtualization are really part of the everyday life.

MM: Wasn’t your work still not part of this process of virtualization, of modelization? Was it a discovery?

LC: I took this stance because in 1995/96 there was the “slide” from analogue to digital, first with photographs and followed by the use of increasingly virtualized instruments. Today from a single element of design to an entire piece of architecture, we pass through many areas of virtualization before producing the pieces. And especially in those years there was a strong culture of the simulacrum, meaning a difficult identification of what reality was: if you remember, in that period Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio who have always tried to define the borders of our being in space and our relationship with objects.

MM: They – and especially Baudrillard, even more Guy Debord – did it coming from a quasi-ideological generation of the sixties and seventies, the simulacrum was a false aim, something that wasn’t reality even if it could have become so, there was an almost negative meaning.

LC: This is no longer the case; the simulacrum is like a part of the perception. Going back to those years I started to use a digital camera to look for a certain type of landscape, because I felt painting at that time had very little grip on the viewer.

MM: Was it a clear choice for you not to be a painter, even if you could have done so?

LC: I tried to make pictures using the electronic collage because in that environment of simulation I was able to best capture the perception of the observer in that real interval.

MM: The discourse worked, but if one wanted to be provocative, one could say that you started with the photograph where there was a narrative aspect, then you went on to moving objects – that brings us back to Pop Art -, where the strength lies in the object itself, and then suddenly this change takes place with the modules….

LC: It was no longer an object! Because what you saw, was the replica of an object. That object made with traditional features, those which Arnaldo [Pomodoro - editor’s note] still uses in his work, is not the object removed from reality as Duchamp did, I remade the object. I made copies trying to change the structure, and then I felt, concerning a continually changing cultural landscape, that that action was no longer enough. After pianos, chairs, bicycles and radiators, I risked remaining with my head in a noose. In 2003 at the second exhibition at Galleria Continua, I presented two architectural models, two machine interiors (which were both objects and spaces) a large distorted space that was a sort of play on the Euclidean box, and then a double distortion of mathematics that bends like objects bent.

MM: That is much clearer; the strength of the object was still very much present even though it was a replica. The narrative aspect intrigues me because the module that you are making now could represent the opposite, but your photos suggested a narrative. The photo itself is a narrative, you always think of a before and after, of relations between people, of what will happen and what has happened, in short you go looking for the story.

LC: Of course, I came from there because the narrative aspect in the 90s was important, just think of Jeff Wall and Thomas Demand and many other American photographers, just like at the start of video, that I never practiced, but if you remember at the 1993 Biennale, there were lots of them. My work came out in 1996/98; hence, I was seduced by the fascination to recount plausible but fundamentally surreal situations. A landscape created in the studio, where real characters gave rise to plausible but almost absurd situations, gave me the possibility to work as a director and at the same time with photographs and its two dimensional images, in which I was looking for a quality of work, an aesthetic language, which I still tend to do today. In this sense, I am very Italian.

MM: Do you mean a formal quality with that cultural and geographical adjective - “Italian” -, something that Italians should lay claim to?

LC: Yes, a formal completeness. I think that the greatest interest, for me, between 2003 and 2006, was architecture. For me it was the best way, giving me the possibility to start with watercolours, passing by computers and then from the object trying to characterize the space where this small or large object was found. For example, the caravan, curved spaces, the corridors crossing with film, still act as levers to make space through an object.

MM: The idea of architecture as construction, transition, and modular creation, seems evident to me, almost a point of arrival, as for various artists such as Alberto Garutti. For you, instead it is a crossing point, which allows you to get where you want.

LC: It is a workflow, identified by two simple words: micro and macro. If you think of my first compositions – when I was twenty-five, twenty-six years old – everything started from the construction of a landscape in a studio on a table full of debris, taking pictures with the macro lens that I have always used in photos. This use of the macro, also happened with the considerations that took place with the modules, a form seen in the economy of a thousand pieces, of fifty thousand pieces, then it transforms itself into a multicellular structure. I find there is a parallel with photography, for example with the latest series that are images of minerals in the foreground where I can read their structural and chromatic qualities and their metaphysical radiance. They are Tuscan formed, the end of this work is always metaphysical, and they must act as a bridge with another vision: if before they were narratives now they are abstract, featureless, and structurally highly complex, they have to keep this metaphysical vision, otherwise they are reduced to nothing.

MM: Summarising this, first, you seize on a visual situation in which the observation was on an everyday human scale, then, with these modules, you change the scale, you penetrate into a sort of microcosm: paradoxically you could make one of these modules 30 metres big, but it would still remain micro. In the sense that only the scale is gigantic, but it is the magnification of a microscopic observation.

LC: If there is one feature that has distinguished my work for ten years it is distance. In my work there is a thread that leads me to suspend things, the fact of looking up as in the structures of trees or clouds. This places you in state of observation with different sense of distances, because the raised point of view immediately creates a form of separation from that which is happening on the ground. Calvin’s poetics are perfect, it is the desire to build possible worlds through one’s own imagining, that I too would like to trigger in the spectator, lifting your feet from the ground, creating a metaphysical suspension. The approach and the poetic distance remain the foundations of art, as opposed to a socio-anthropological artistic conception, where the artists become witnesses of a more politically defined condition.

MM: The political or ideological aspect has never touched you…

LC: I was never interested. I need to bring people to a planet that they do not know or do know but want to see again. It is also a question of revision. The fundamentals concern aesthetics, the formalization and an ancient knowledge, something which sets us apart as Italian. A poetic and scientific knowledge that does not necessarily show us political events as a fundamental aspect of our existence.

MM: From this interview but also from knowing you, I note – strangely for an artist of your generation – that you often repeat the word “Italians”. As if you distinguish a characteristic that was important in previous centuries that is becoming more and more lost. How far has living in Berlin made you more aware of this, observing it from the outside?

LC: I think I have always had this kind of perception. I have travelled enough. Therefore, I was in the position to measure myself against other countries, from France to the United States, from England to Spain, even as far as China, long before I went to Berlin. Moving to Berlin was not an escape but was part of my work, part of the way of moving, something that artists have practiced for hundreds of years. The identification of some Italian qualities came after some time; frankly, I use this as a lever. In his book Franco La Cecla writes that we eat many types of pasta and pizza: there are over two hundred and sixty types of pasta. I do not say this to bring up the disparaging formula of “Italians-spaghetti”, but rather to remember that we “eat shapes”. It is clear that we are linked to landscape, to food, to be surrounded by the history of the shape. The international language of the last twenty years has flattened the thought, but I still believe in the peculiarity, I firmly believe in it. The capacity to translate and interpret is an important factor.

MM: Have you ever glimpsed these features in your colleagues

LC: As a position, absolutely. If I think of Gianni Caravaggio and Diego Perrone, there are some very specific characteristics. Living in Berlin you can really feel the conceptual and practical framework in everyday life, also in the decisions. This setting is perfectly felt in Germans; each of them is a point in well-organised and orthogonal grid, and even puncturing a small point means that the grid opens and no longer works. In Italy, but also in Mediterranean countries, the grid is made up of curves; we come from a baroque style construction of space unlike the northern countries. It is certainly the evidence of a position, because aesthetics are the translation of a process that concerns everyday life, the structures that associate people.

MM: In your opinion, is the quantity of these cultural typologies and behaviours fixed? That is, can you determine how many associated possibilities there are or instead are they simply reduced to an orthogonal or curved structure, as in the diagrams that you like and inspire you so much?

LC: I think there are two of them, obviously speaking metaphorically. Perhaps other realities exist, I have never thought about it...

MM: It is obvious that when you speak of curves, the mental association is that of the curves in the diagrams. Taking the figure which we have just talked about – diagrammatic too – of the relationship between culture, now defined by curves, now by straight lines, grids and points, we know that the diagrams involve curves that stand on the lines in order to define how far they move…

LC: Points always define the curves.

MM: …But to identify the movements you need to place them on a grid.

LC: Yes, of course. Anyway, my reference was to Europe, but if you think about the grids that Orientals may have, the structural modalities are very different, for example, between China and Japan, also for Africans, the approach changes according to the zones.

MM: Do these differentiated structures remain, compared to a levelling globalization and apparently the same for everyone?

LC: Yes, Lately I have been interested in aniconic work in both the West and the East. For example, in Arab countries the module is an element that is very near their culture. I get there having fun by seeing the formulas or the developments of natural elements, as nature and mathematics touch the base functions of the representation, that act on all the latitudes leveraging different cultures.

MM: To these basic functions you overlay or interpenetrate your story and your culture, otherwise the base functions would be the same for everyone…

LC: Exactly.

In Milan, in my kitchen 22 January 2014

© Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro 2014