“Who seeks with curiosity
discovers that this is already in itself
wonderful.”
M.C. ESCHER
What characterizes and guides the works of Viola Granucci is a continuous search for individuality, understood not so much as an investigation of the multiple aspects assumed by the individual, but as an analysis of those fundamental principles that contrast, connect and intertwine defining the individual himself, constantly poised between balance and fall, between conquest and loss of one’s identity.
It is a happily successful attempt to describe its plurality or better its duality, in particular the split between male and female principles, where gradually abandoning the most evident meaning of opposition between man and woman, we arrive at the deeper and absolute meaning of to be as a coincidence of opposites, as a yearning for the recompositing of a primeval unity.
To this duality, in a certain way, also the art of Viola Granucci, at the same time photographer and sculptor, underlies: two different artistic disciplines that are closely connected in her.
If in fact in the various national and international projects – starting from Children of Belgrade (2006) through American Identities (2007) and Scatti dell’immaginario (2012) up to the most recent Exchange of Identity (2013) – Viola Granucci photographs investigates the phenomenal reality describing through his shots now the marginalization, loneliness, the fragility of the “lost identities” of the children victims of the war in Serbia; now the precariousness of the so-called “ordinary people” in the North American province; now the surreal, poetic, sometimes fabulous aspects of the real world transfigured by art; now finally the affirmation of a fictitious and imaginary identity on collective identity; in plastic works, and in particular in the most recent production, the Viola Granucci sculptress goes beyond the experiential limit of the photographic image to draw on a deeper, one would say archetypal meaning of that same reality. Driven by an insatiable curiosity that is also a marvel for everything that surrounds and involves her, Viola Granucci draws, through plastic art, from the innermost links of that phenomenal world evoked in her photographic shots, and goes further and further into depth in search of the ultimate meaning of things, of Man and his identity, to make it emerge on the surface in order to make it expressed, clear, manifest.
A process this alluded to by the many scales present in his sculptures, often built in a surreal way, would seem almost to Escher, and travelled in both directions, from the surface to the depth and vice versa, in an infinite, unstoppable, cyclical sequence of dives and emersions characterized by continuous reversals of perspective. Through these symbolic scales, sometimes even incorporeal as in Invisible Scale, some sparse bronze human figures (reminiscent of as many ancient Etruscan idolets) descend infinitely towards the most hidden depths of the ego, bringing to the surface the sense of one’s existence and one’s own identity in an eternal cyclic Jungian animation of archetypes, of which the works of Viola Granucci constitute a surprising astonished allegory. Some of these figures are solitary or destined to never meet as in Neverending stair, Upside down stair or Vertical stair; others, however, as in the Meeting point, are finally destined to meet and reunite. In this case it is a male and a female figure, an explicit allusion not only to the man-woman relationship but also to the exquisitely Jungian concept of the coexistence in each human being of a male and a female principle; principles that the Swiss psychologist calls Animus and Anima, the first incarnation of logos or reason, plurality and moral demands; the second of eros or of the spirit, of the independent personality within the individual psyche.
The materials in which the sculptures are made also allude to this dual nature of the human being: on one side the terracotta, which symbolizes the material, fragile, transient nature of each individual, on the other the bronze, symbol instead of the spiritual and the eternal that goes beyond human permanence in the earthly world. In this paradigm, the search for a balance between these two instances is central, a balance that is never static but dynamic, a very fragile balance that can, however, break at any moment and lead to the fall and inner catastrophe. The title of the work Equilibrium alludes to this dynamic balance, created by Viola Granucci both in small size in bronze and terracotta and in large size (2 meters in diameter) as an installation in shaped iron for the Wood of the Sugame Sculptures in Greve in Chianti.
In the first, the two bronze figurines, one male and one female, symbolic representations of Animus and Anima, are in balance in an alternate game of thrusts and counter-thrusts to which the opposing forces exerted by the muscular tension of the legs contribute while the back each of them rests motionless on the internal walls of a terracotta circle. A circle that symbolizes on one hand the circularity of life, on the other the wedding ring that sanctions the union between man and woman. Also, in The Kiss there are two bronze figurines, one male and the other female, both inscribed within a white terracotta circle, a symbol of the circularity of life and the eternal process of identifying oneself. Here, however, unlike the previous work, the two figures do not contrast, but intersect and interpenetrate in a sort of pas de deux inspired by Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, joining through a kiss intended not only in its eminently erotic meaning of physical communion between man and woman but also in that of spiritual communion, of mutual passage of breath from one to the other in a sort of re-enactment and eternity of the divine act of creation.
Allegory of this opposition-communion of the two principles, male and female, is The couple game where the two bronze figurines are seated on the opposite edges of a terracotta crescent intent on keeping a sphere (foreshadowing the world) in perfect balance in the centre of a symbolic swing. But the balance can sometimes break. This is what happens in two other works, like the previous ones, but with a diametrically opposite sign. In Pull the rope I the circle is broken just as the rope between the two figures is broken. They are inexorably condemned to fall along the surfaces of the two semicircles, still briefly joined for a short distance. The contrast between the two principles flows here into the internal catastrophe, the breakdown of balance: the dialogue between Animus and Anima has been interrupted.
The same happens in The Labyrinth where the harmonious crescent that constitutes the symbolic swing of The couple game is replaced by the broken up and fragmented lines of a labyrinth in the meanders of which a couple has lost irremediably lost condemning themselves to incommunicability. If in fact the two figures of The couple game look straight in the eyes, matching with the gaze tending to look for each other in a sort of dialogue at a distance, in The Labyrinth the looks are not only turned in opposite directions (the man looks towards the earth, the woman towards the sky) but even the two figures hide their faces with their hands, precluding any possibility of communication with a voluntary gesture.
The drama of the split and the duality of the human being, the inability to recompose the fracture of this dual nature, male and female, are found expressed otherwise in works such as Half Man, where the two halves of a male figure stand out on the opposite edges of an imperishable staircase that crosses the space below but that leads nowhere.
In the same way, in Conversations, two half figures, in this case one male and one female, face each other without identity at the opposite edges of a deep furrow that cuts the underlying soil in two, at the centre of which a circle is also equally interrupted. The faces of the two half figures instead rest on the ground behind their feet, precluded from eye contact by the two half bodies that rise above them. Here too Animus and Anima experience an incurable fracture and an impossible dialogue whose inexorability is sanctioned by the yielding gesture of the man who spreads his arms as a sign of renunciation.
But Animus and Anima can take other forms such as in Riva al mare I, Riva al mare II and Wave after wave. Here the Soul takes on the appearance of a child clinging to the body of an adult (Animus) in a sort of paternity representation. Taking up a symbolism dear to the early Christian and Byzantine art of representing the soul as an infant in the bosom of Christ (as in the Dormition of the Virgin where the Savior holds the soul of the Mother in the form of a baby in swaddling clothes) or Prophets (Sinus Prophetarum), the boy (almost a Pascoli reminiscence) symbolically expresses the deepest, purest, most uncorrupted part of Man, rising to the role of guide in his inner journey that takes place on the limit of being and non-being of life and death.
A threshold, a limit that is revealed in Viola Granucci’s eminently allegorical sculptures now in the form of a shore, now a beach, now the crest of a wave: physical lines (sand also joins the terracotta) and ideals that separate and at the same time they combine two opposing depths, that of the sea and that of the sky, two of the three essences of which the primordial Man is made up of water, earth and divine breath.
STEFANO MASI