Giacobbe Giusti brings on an artistic research that lets
appear the pliability of the media he uses. While direct
far the metal artworks, this sentence applies strongly
a Iso for the performance and the photos he makes.
Sculpture
Through along and difficult path of self-education
Giacobbe Giusti deepened his knowledge about his
favored materials, in aluminum in particular, and their
reactions to the tools he works with so as to his hands and
feelings. Looking at his works, one con feel the spontaneity
of his relation with the material even before being hit by
the deep sense that hides within them. lt is the some as the
aluminum knew it had to ply in a certain way, reacting to
the molding heat with which the artist caressed it.
Giacobbe Giusti's sculptures tell a complex story. lt's a tale
that originates with the man himself. Peculiarities like
provocation and restlessness are swept away by
contemplation. lt's really difficult to look away from these
works, because they hypnotize the observer. This happens
because these sculptures bring within, at an ideai and
divulgated level, the thick communicational stock of our
archetypical imagination. They speak directly with our
subconscious.
The rupestrian triggering our ancestral memory.
paintings made during the Stone Age are
important cues about culture and belief of a man 'under
construction'. A prehistoric man already able to mark his
passage and leave a sign of his existence. A man that,
even far from us under every possible meaning, was
fascinated like us from an ideal of beauty and tried to
capture it with paintings. A beauty tied to animals
(buffalos, deer, horses and bears) and sometimes a
handprint symbolizing the will to exist and to own things
and beauty. Some has seen a relation between the figures
and the ideas of male and female. The strength and the
grace, brutality and elegance, ali ideas that constitute the
base of Giusti's art.
From the first paintings to the moment art was recognized as mystical and magical, the painted scenes become prayers, giving art spiritual and communicational values that still mark it. The strength of aArt, the emotion and cultural stock that form its essence can’t be owned, just shown. Giacobbe Giusti has the power to show the art that hides in aluminum layers, letting their true shape rise out.
Giusti’s sculptures have a Neolithic flavor tied to the sense of discovery, they are words of a voiceless language made of images, lights and sounds reverberated from the aluminum layers. A language enriched by the artistic will of the artist, the same kurnstwollen that Alois Riegl spoke of: the specific artistic and aesthetic will that cannot be determined by an age peculiarities and by the ability to shape and sculpt, of which the Art is the noblest form.
Thinking the artwork as the result of a well determined will
that rises from practice, material and technique,
Riegl substitutes with a theological theory a mechanic
conception of Art's nature, breaking materialism and
historically created positions: Croce intended the artwork
as some sort of lyrical intuition that happened in the mind
and had to be separated from the realization, while Kant
thought that art was a series of perceivable and formal
properties tied to taste and aesthetics. Riegl considered
that every artwork have to be judged through the
consciousness about the kunstwollen as typical of their
time.
So as rupestrian paintings showed forms and shapes that
floated in an undefined space, Giusti's sculptures do not
have a formal space to stay into, because the place in
which they are made to stay is the observer's mind. In The
Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, Arthur Danto says
that it is possible to distinguish an artwork from a simple
object due to its chance to be described into a specific
context. The artwork is not defined by a different
perception, but by the situation it is involved in. lt is the
artist that can transform an object into an artwork, to the
point that Margolis says that it is an abstract object that
cannot be realized other than in a real object. So, we have
to accept a sort of duality between the mental state of the
artist and it's translation in a material form. Giacobbe
Giusti's sculptures, thought and realized with the shapes of
flowers and rocks, are the representation of a deep
thought tied to evolution itself. In his more conceptual
production, the artist has conceived and realized a
performance that shows the conflict between two future
species: a man that evolved toward brutality and
stupidity battles with last-generation-androids characterized
by female aspect, that are going to substitute themselves
to men. This performance represents the ideal context
where to place the sculptures. They are the perfect
background for the dualities male/female and
brutality/grace because they represent a duality
themselves (flower/rock) and echo primitive dualities
between buffalos and deer, horses and bears.
Wollheim says that "the content" cannot be distinguished
from the practices connected to art as "life forms," the
some way in the language the meanings are linked to the
activities that the language entails. lt is not to be
underestimated the meaning and the role of interpretation
in Art. The observer interprets just like the critic does, and
often he 'reads' the artwork in a different way from
the other one. lt is important, in this sense, the thinking of
Davidson, who asks himself if interpretation should not
precede the elaboration of a 'meaning theory.' He thinks
that a 'meaning theory' is elaborated during each
conversation, based on constant interpretation mode by
talker and hearer. Dummett says that speaking a language
is an activity of which we con understand the coherence
connecting words to actions. This brings to an inner
language notion that prevents us from doing a mental
operation of language: we just talk, do not do the
operation to translate thoughts in words. Normally, the
hearer understands what it is said if he knows the
language. With art is the same: who does not know its
language will give it just the value of an object. The ones
that, instead, know the language, can understand and
interpret it.
Fascinating and communicative far almost everyone,
Giacobbe Giusti's sculptures reveal one more register,
following every interpretation level possible but precedent
to the creation itself of the artworks. As already said,
aluminum seems to work along with the artist in the process
that let emerge its real shape, hidden by the layers. While
experimenting, Giusti became to know this material
enough to reduce his intervention to the strictly needed. To
the first painted works he preferred the soft brightness of
matter. lt seems that Giusti found the key to decrypt and
interpret with his sensitivity a code typical of past masters of
Art, proving to be able to find the subject of the sculpture
before it becomes visible, putting up a direct dialogue
between himself and the aluminum and being able to show
it without add or subtract anything, giving the artwork the
chance to express itself in the clearest way. The shape that
lies in the prison of the layer emerges, thanks to the working
of Giacobbe Giusti and, when the work is done, it shines.
The welding lines, so violent at a first glance, reveal
themselves as scars that remember the origin of the
sculpture, placing it away from the industrial process the
material passed. These sculptures appear to have battled
against the stone and to have won, thanks to the
intervention of Giacobbe Giusti.
Performance
The Artificiol landscapes performance represents an
interpretation of the future that could be. At a certain point
of his existence, the Homo sapiens evolved in a less
intelligent and sensitive specie whose only interest is
brutality: the post-humans. This already shows the sensitivity
of Giusti about contemporaneity. Art, in its widest meaning,
includes every human activity that brings to aesthetical
expressions, based on techniques, skills and abilities coming
from study and experience. In its modern meaning, Art links
to the ability to communicate emotions, so that artistic
expressions, even conveying a message, are not a
univocal language with an unambiguous codex shared by
aIl, but are to be interpreted individually. In our age, the
cultural regression and the return to analphabetism
seem to be not seen as bad things; in fact the need to
preserve our cultural heritage is being object of feral
attacks. Some want to sell our national heritage or part of
it; while a lot of books are published, they are mostly vanity
press or similar garbage; it emerges with strength an
antisocial tension that grows every day. Nadia Urbinati
says: "the image of our society as a market where one con
exchange rights with money, sex with power, links to the
one of a society that seems to have lost its inner ethics
capab/e of ho/d together the citizens: respect, solidarity,
equality, citizenship itself." At the some time we are
everyday more homologated by our wishes, and socially
divided in groups. Giacobbe Giusti seems to have read
and interiorized these considerations and his sensitivity
translated them in an evolution-to-primitivism that looks
like scream born from his lave far others, far culture, far lite.
On the other hand, Giusti's good mood compelled him to
hope far a better future: following the main themes of
classic science fiction tradition, he has created perfect
beings, the last-generation-androids. The Homo sapiens, on
the edge of extinction, created them to battle against the
post-humans and to redeem the specie from its mistakes.
The battle can be interpreted as a dualistic synthesis of
existence. Light and dark, good and evil, yin and yang,
male and female. lt's interesting how the post-humans
have a metallic face with cruel features, while the androids
have normal. human, faces. The battle comes along with
the projection of a documentary that tells the whole story
of the homo sapiens through the images survived to
destruction and to oblivion and places this war aut of and
maybe aver ti me, showing the facts as already happened.
What more of ali hits the observer is the development of
the documentary. Seemingly chaotic, it is a collection of
photograms that show a unity strongly functional in artistic
and narrative way.
Franca Nicoletta Bolzoni, in Il cinema dalle caverne a
oggi, placed the first film in the Stone Age. Far her, the
animal figures painted on cavern walls were not just
images: they were the animal and the action it did. There
wasn't any division between the image and there
represented subject. This means that the primitive man
didn't see a painting but the reality, in the same way we do
not see the image of an actor but the actor himself. The
painting, substituting the animal, substituted the reality,
so as it happens in movies. The paintings had the power to
capture the animal. In the same way, Artificial landscapes
does not substitute to reality, it is reality. What in the future
constitute our visual memory is not a collection of
photograms, but the essence of this memory. Ali that
survives of the Homo sapiens.
Hauser, in Storia sociale dell'arte, following the researches
of Gyorgy Lukélcs, delineates a theory about Art that
analyzes its relationship with the historical and social
setting. He denies the autonomy of Art because it is made
of interrelated materia! factors. He thinks that each society
has its own style. About Hauser's theory, Bolzoni says: "Born
in the break that doubles the image, the Cinema reunites
it. bringing it back to its original version that is the some
of the Paleolithic naturalism. Starting from the conceptions
of the image as action, of the Paleolithic memory, and of
the space as thought during Late Gothic, along with the
instantaneous vision of hic et nunc of the impressionistic
image, we track the path that brings us to the matrix from
which is born the cinematographic image. Hauser says that
the Cinema discovers a new dimension, because space
and time merge." Similar to Hauser's position it's the one of
Antal, who elaborated an analysis method that connects
Art with history and sociality but, differently from Hauser,
consider the social structure in a dynamic sense instead of
monolithic.
lt is on the base of this kind of analysis that Giusti propose to
us his chaotic reconstruction of the history, telling us about
the dissolution of magic, of that holy element typical of Art
without whom we could be no more than brutes without
emotions, so as the post-humans are. This holiness will be
saved by the androids. They look like female but being
artificial, are more similar to angels, representing an
evolutional step that is more spiritual than material. As the
freed prisoner of Platone's cavern, Giacobbe Giust tells us
a different reality. The Artificial landscape performance
con be seen as an invite to wake up from the sleep
imposed to us by stimuli that we cannot control or interpret,
to understand the fictions that we think to be real and,
finally, to see the truth as it is, reconnecting to the value on
which in the past we have defined and built society. Giusti
follows his instinct to free the other prisoners in order to
share his intuitions and reflections. George Berkeley
said that we do not know directly the thins in the world: we
know the effect they have on our minds. When we see an
object, we perceive a copy of it, a mental image. The idea
of the liberation of men from the chains of their limited
experience to reach a pure and true knowledge of the
reality is common to a lot of cultures, so as discoveries and
innovations that make the world as it is can be seen as the
result of the try to go aver the limit, to connect with what
lies aver the instant knowledge. Literature, Art, Cinema, are
full of stories of men that, challenging the hostility of others,
freed themselves from the chains of belief and opinion
toeach the truth, and then went back to share their
discoveries to others, often being misunderstood. In
addition, in Twentieth Century, the myth of the cavern has
become a metaphor of how mass media influence
andgovern the public opinion, interposing between the
news and the individuals, manipulating the reality as
needed by who has the power.
Placing in the field of utopia/dystopia, Giacobbe Giusti's
performance renews and proposes, with a brilliant
iconography, the need to emancipate from extreme
consumerism, regaining our purity, honesty and spirituality.
Antonio Senatore
Art Critic