Art
Modern
This is how Luca Grossi, born in 1980, tells his story when we ask him to explain to us how his paintings, sculptures, engravings and sketches take shape with such a strong identity. The voice is calm, the gaze far away, as if looking elsewhere for the original flash from which Creation came. In the studio-laboratory of his home in Arce (FR), where he lives and works, one breathes a sacred, austere atmosphere, with ancestral shades that blend with the colors of winter. He opened to us the doors of his kingdom made of straw, paper, wood, stone, color palettes, chisels and old photos. Raw material waiting for the philosopher’s stone in an alchemist’s workshop, sacred elements placed on the altar of a temple, in which Promethean hands try to give men the fire of the god, snatching it with the favor of the night to give shape to the ineffable. In this shrine out of time, light and shadow mingle, together with life and death, which invade the artist. Between the erotic tension of lack and the heroism of research already doomed to failure, Grossi returns presences and presence, as in the time of Orpheus, at the cost of desperate mediations with an oblivion that does not give discounts. The divine spark is then granted as a fragment, as a creative lamp which realizes the demiurgic promise inherent in the term “artist”, even with the fatigue of work inflicted on Adam after his disobedience. We look around and we feel observed... From canvases, sheets of paper, carved wooden frames and even tiny honeycomb cells, rows of figures that almost make you uncomfortable emerge with their almost material consistency, despite the faint features of the contours. Mute witnesses, recalled through the charcoals that now lie exhausted on the work surface, next to the brushes still standing like guards at attention. More and more intrigued, we can’t help but turn to the landlord again: “When did you realize that when you grew up you wanted to make art your life?” “I don’t think I ever understood it, because deep down I never asked myself what I really wanted to be. As a child I was strongly attracted to drawing. I loved drawing family scenes, the peasant world, the tiredness on the faces of my loved ones, the passage of time of a humble, slow and tiring life, but full of traditions, sacred values that are almost extinct today. I never left those pieces of coal, with which I was trying to draw story lines. Even today I always carry a few pieces in my pocket.” “What has changed since then?” “Very little. My childhood games continue with the same urgency but, with an adult awareness, they must now witness a passage, a movement which is that of existence, where life, death, identity, history… For me, creation is a physiological need, almost cutaneous, rather than a desire wanted. It is born and takes place in total, daily naturalness, through the gesture of reconstruction. I am often asked the most common question: “Do you do your job for fun or for a profession?”. I answer with an embarrassed smile. Ironically, I’ve always thought that in art you need to be able to die of hunger and fame, regardless of what happens around you”. “Has there been among your teachers, someone that you believe influenced you artistically in a particular way?” “After school I began my studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Frosinone, but it was above all the meeting with Dennis Compagnone, a landscape architect, that refined my technique, with the classic “workshop” training which has always been in all craft trades. Then the guidance of Marco D’Emilia, an artist of whom I have great respect, was very important for me. He paved the way for me to new conceptualizations.”
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Summer 2023 - The human rights issue