"A work of art is an apparition, a staging." Conversation with Concetta Modica

Concetta Modica was born in Modica, lives in Milan, works and studies on the present and its paradoxes, in particular the concept of the contemporary epic: the present as what remains of something, as a relationship with other artists, with matter, with different means that always have to do with sculpture, sculpture to be understood as time. In this conversation with Gabriele Landi, Concetta Modica tells us about her art. Among her solo exhibitions: Excoperta at Gamec in Bergamo curated by Giacinto di Pietrantonio and Alessandro Rabottini, One more time at Galleria Umberto in Marino, Quel che resta curated by Francesca Pasini for La quarta vetrina/Libreria delle donne Milan, Epico/Fragile curated by Agata Polizzi, Segni per far fiororire vasi curated by Ilaria Mariotti for Villa Pacchiani, Orlando’s Trilogy curated by Michela Eremita, a project in multiple venues including Nottilucente, Spazio COSMO and Francesco Pantaleone arte contemporanea her Gallery of reference. She participated in a parallel event of Manifesta 12 and one of Manifesta 7. She is co-founder of the project RaccontoDi20. She has participated in exhibitions in public and private spaces including: American Academy in Rome, Galleria Biagiotti in Florence, Vanessa Quang in Paris, Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella, Fondazione Ratti in Como, Biennale Giovani Artisti del Mediterraneo, SerrOne in Monza, Botkyrka Konsthall in Stockholm, Docva in Milan, Villa Romana in Florence, Italian Cultural Institute in Copenhagen, Das weisse haus in Vienna, Museo Riso in Palermo, Placentia Arte with which she installed a permanent work in the Margherita Gardens in Piacenza. Her project the Night of St. Anne commissioned by the Civic Museum of Castelbuono is the winner of the PAC2021 contemporary art prize announced by the Ministry of Culture, was invited to the Cheng Du Biennial 2023 and the Wuhan Biennial in 2024. Her works are in public and private collections including Palazzo Riso and Children’s Art Museum at Santa Maria della Scala in Siena. Her books include In pasto al presente published by A+Mbookstore in 2013 and “28 notti” in 2023 in the series I Limoni edited by Pietro Gaglianò for the publishing house Gli Ori.

GL. Childhood often plays an important role in defining what is the imagination of those who later decide to embark on the path of art: was this the case for you as well?

Childhood is an important and foundational moment for all and sundry, “arising” as Virgilio Sieni would say. I experienced it in different places, in different homes, but with rituals I think always similar. I have traditionalist parents, but at the same time intolerant of certain things of the past, anti-clerical when I was young, but I had a very believing grandmother. So it seems to me that everything I experienced contained a little contradiction, slight, not too intrusive that maybe I also find in my work. Once my mom had a huge concrete bowl brought to the fourth floor, the low ones at least a meter in diameter, and together we dug the caves in the earth, putting all the characters of the nativity scene, the string of lights buried together with plants, a spectacular result! My guess is that I started from there! Sometimes I think that the preparation of the nativity scene, which had to be new, surprising and unusual every year, seems very similar to staging an installation or one of my compositions. The next one will be entitled Composizione intrepida lunga sedici metri ( Intrepid composition sixteen meters long), curated by Michela Eremita at the Conservatorio del Refugio in Siena, a small, beautiful museum inside an old shelter, where an important collection of ancient art is now collected.

What was your artistic “first love”?

I have a hard time remembering: I started late with art. Probably the first love was one of those paintings in the home, the kind that when you look closely you see a disjointed brushstroke and from a distance you see a figure, a fisherman I remember. The paintings in your familiar environment after a while you don’t see them anymore, but they get inside you: maybe that’s exactly why I prefer not to do painting!

What studies did you do?

I didn’t go to art school. I did a few years of Modern Literature, which I later dropped out for the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. I have always somewhat regretted dropping out of Humanities, not because the Academy was not interesting, on the contrary! But because, in hindsight, you get the idea that Art could also have been done with another kind of training that would have expanded your being more. Literary study in Art has always seemed to me more complex and articulate than that offered in academia, and still I could have been an artist anyway. Perhaps, however, that is not quite the case. Brera was important because of the encounters, because of the people, because of the artists I went to and because at that time in the Academy there were completely different worlds together that you could choose according to the path you wanted to follow. I think that’s still the case, at the University you had teachers based on the letter of your last name, whereas at the Academy you could choose based on the poetics and the themes that the teacher dealt with and that you most preferred.

Were there any important encounters in your formative years?

The formative period was important: at Brera it was beautiful for me who was coming in those years from a small town where people only talked about the School of Scicli. I had come to follow Luciano Fabro, but the air in his classroom was unbreathable for me. So I enrolled in Giuseppe Maraniello’s class and was attending Alberto Garutti’s classroom. One morning we were waiting for Garutti. He when he arrived started telling about his concierge, their dialogues, and then at one point he said, “Just now I was thinking that this morning I woke up, I met the concierge, we had a chat, then I left to come here and all the steps I’ve taken in these 53 years brought me here to you.” I was amazed, and that sentence then became a title of a series of the most beautiful works of Italian art, for me. It was formative to attend his lectures. Even in Maraniello’s classroom there was a good energy: everyone would present a work and the slaughter would start from everyone and everyone, while you had to defend your work. I miss this from time to time: I would like to do it even now, to present a work among friends and artist friends and have them tell me sincerely what they think about it and understand to what extent they are able to defend and argue a work.

How has your work evolved over time?

In the past I often relied on existing elements; found objects or pre-existing elements. Today I find this a kind of weakness; I am no longer interested in it. I want to start from a blank sheet of paper, from something that does not exist before, from an empty table. Over time you certainly become more aware, less concerned about the approval of others and others; you understand the value in doing one thing rather than another. Doing exhibitions does not become an obsession: in fact, now, apart from solo shows, exhibitions stimulate me less and less. I find it more interesting to find other projects, related to places, to permanent works, to collaborations with other artists, working with small museums, with books, collaborating with interesting people. In the end, the relationships that arise are the most beautiful things, not the exhibitions themselves.

What are the major differences you identify between what you do now and what you did years ago?

I think each work is a fragment of a lifelong work. Of course, we are constantly changing and we change, and also new elements are always being added to our work. We probably develop ideas that we already had as teenagers; they get refined, enriched and become more and more complex and sophisticated. When I started perhaps I was more focused on the idea of time. Today I question how this time becomes epic in the contemporary. In the end I realize that the starting ideas are not so important. In art, words are always crutches: they should not be needed if the work speaks to us and supports itself. So now, compared to the past, I listen more to the body, the belly, and the suggestions emanating from the material, elements that become ideas in a process that can also be traveled in the opposite direction.

How important are the materials you employ in your work; are you interested in the dimension of transforming them through the practice of art, whether in individual or collective form?

I continue what I was saying. The materials already contain the ideas and almost always suggest the way to get to the work. Personally, I am interested in this very transformative act: the idea that something is born that did not exist before. The idea that a small shrub becomes bronze, then covered in pure gold, excites me, or I am always amazed that some clay takes shape and put in a kiln at 980 degrees becomes as strong as stone. Or an enamel of a dull, opaque color at high temperatures becomes colored glass, iridescent, with unpredictable tones. I am faced with the wonder of change, the predictable or the unexpected. These are transformations that each of us experiences every day. This is what we have to accept: things are constantly changing and transforming.

Does the idea of Iconography interest you?

Yes, very much; it reminds us that even if an image is recognizable, if we don’t make an effort to read it, we may not necessarily understand it. Study is necessary to understand art, both past and present, and the development of phenomenological insight and reading skills. Often people don’t concentrate on reading a work and seem to need someone to explain it to us, but if you stop in front of a work as if it were a person and start looking at what colors he has, his dress, the jewelry he wears or whatever, you can understand something about what appears before you. A work is an apparition, a staging; you start to wonder why it looks the way it does, you start to ask questions of the work, and the answers come. They probably do not coincide with those of the artist who made it, but it is precisely that multiplicity of readings that makes it Art.

The idea of the sacred often returns in your work: can you talk about that?

My travels in recent years to China have greatly influenced my sense of the sacred. Also the reflections on emptiness, on the absence of action and ego that characterizes the Eastern view of things, made me rediscover the concept of neighbor in the Christian religion. One would like an indefiniteness of boundaries between people, diminishing the need for the individual in favor of a closeness with the other. In recent times this seems to me to be a topic that has been little addressed compared to the past. Starting from here, the sacred, more and more, I connect it to immanence, to the here and now, to the rituals of the everyday, to horizontality to the figure of the circle in which we confront each other as equals and work together. Even my Tomato Sepal that wants to become a star is true that it aspires to heaven, to an ascension, to a complete transformation of self, but above all it defines a new place, other, not to make a hierarchy of value. Heaven is no better than earth: it is also a place that invites you to the journey. Aspiration is movement, knowledge, displacement. The transformation and shifting of the gaze is the most important thing in art practice.

What is your idea of time and space?

Let’s say they are the main areas in which not only science, but also art works. The sense of time that will end is the major stimulus that makes us want to leave something behind and contribute to a vision of reality for those who will come later. Space is the main element in sculpture, which is my favorite medium: many sculptures I worked on were precisely made up of the time factor. My grandmother’s Ex-blanket was made up of time spent working with the wire, and taking it out and putting it back together was a gesture to go through that time again.

What is your idea of nature?

It seems to me that the idea of nature is getting more and more distant: when I go walking in the woods outside Milan or in the natural quarries in Sicily, I realize that it’s all too close to the cities to feel real nature. In China I saw incredible parks and I was staying in a place with a mountain looming in all its beauty. You don’t climb mountains there: you stand at its foot to contemplate it. At the foot of the mountains it’s full of people using hoes and rakes in vegetable gardens with canes holding up vegetables or acting as water channels, like the ones my grandfather used to do in Marina di Modica, when he planted broccoli for the Christmas pie. For me nature was feeling that thing, the gestures of certain gestures that are the same in all latitudes that create a relationship between the earth and our bodies.

Are you interested in the idea of staging your work when you exhibit it?

That’s the most important thing: until it’s exhibited for the first time, it’s like it wasn’t born; the work is gestating, under observation, you try to see if it has a character you like, like people, and then you decide whether to make it known or hide it in the closet like one-night stands.

What is your idea of beauty?

Beauty for me is what inside has a fragility, an attention; it is something unexpected, not necessarily surprising and especially not necessarily new. I like the reiteration of concepts over time, a vase of flowers, a kiss, a hug, things that have endured over the centuries; certain decorated porcelains endure us and have survived our grandparents, our ancestors, and are always shiny; sometimes they are chipped, but always ready for a hot tea.

Do you think a work of art exists if there is no one looking at it?

No. A work does not exist if no one is looking at it, however, it only takes one person or even an animal to look at it for it to exist. I remember when I was taking Humanities, in the first Institutions of Criticism class, the professor was talking about the written, printed poetic text, the typefaces used in reading it, and he had said, "But if all the copies of Leopardi’s L’ Infinito were burned or lost and everyone who remembers it forgot about it, would L’Infinito still exist?" He walked out of the classroom with this question that always challenges me.

Where do you stand in relation to your work?

I almost always position myself as a spectator: I want to feel the doubts and suggestions that accompany the making of a work. This tension is enough for me, beyond the success that the work will have; it is enough for me to have the pleasure of feeling part of an artistic community, of being an author, of sharing this tension with the artists. This desire, this common horizon of being and practicing fills my life.

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