The past pursues me, the future calls me…
Dialogue with Alfonso Leto
by Marco Meneguzzo
Alfonso Leto: … Here (showing a work from the end of the 1960s) this is a fantastic work of art, as could be done in Palermo: Surrealist and psychedelic…
Marco Meneguzzo: I note that you often use the term “psychedelic”, which refers us back to the 1970s and even to the 1960s, but if you talk about Surrealism then perhaps we are going a little too far back, to a period by now completely historicised, with regard to the time when you painted in this way…
AL: However, for many of us this fantastic painting was the only possible way out of the “vulgate” of the love for Guttuso, the Guttuso-connection that had taken over Sicilian sensibility and with it the galleries and the market. Besides this we had – I had – as our reference point a strong link to a figure from the Gruppo 63, Gaetano Testa, who for me was my teacher. It was thanks to him that I understood that the “centre” is where we are. It is from there that we must act, by establishing a system for communicating with and from the place in which we live and from which you theorise the language and in which your human relationships operate.
MM: This was the result of a fortunate meeting, … but how did you all meet up in Palermo?
AL: We would meet in galleries such as the Condor, the I Quattro Venti, or the bar Cuba at Villa Sperlinga where we could discuss freely. Gaetano Testa had always edited a magazine for the Flaccovio publishing house – “Per approssimazione” – of which I was a minor part, making a few illustrations and some small contributions; it was a continuation of the more historic magazine “Fasis”. Our generation of young people –there are a difference of twenty years between me and Testa … - also frequented a middle generation of artists, such as Toti Garraffa, Enzo Patti, Mario Vitale, and Nicolò D’Alessandro, which talked with us, Giovannino Valenza, Nino Quartana, Enzo Onorante…, and some of them were also our teachers in the most spontaneous and widest sense of the term, because through their uniqueness they gave us ideas about ways and directions … it was from this that there was born the fantastic aspect in Palermo.
MM: Would you define this as a movement?
AL: Perhaps a movement of affections and sensitivities. A movement in a “human” sense.
MM: So you are telling me that there was either a social kind of realism or there was you: weren’t there any other possibilities?
AL: Not many. There was the position, in some ways a similar one, of Francesco Carbone and his actions in Godrano: he was an amazing person who already in 1980 became interested in my work, and from then on there was a continuous friendship. Answering his continual requests for participation in works based on relationships with places contributed to my anthropological link to the territory, to finding a key for living there and not leaving it, without the slightest hesitation.
MM: Carbone, however, as the versatile intellectual that he was, also made works that were far distant from painting, and he was interested in all aspects of art. You, instead, seem highly concentrated on painting.
AL: Mine is a different generation. I was born in 1956. The greatness of such characters as Testa or Carboneo Garraffafu was their ability to be aware of this generation without visibility, without possibilities, without reference points: a kind of “generational hospitality” towards a group of artists who otherwise would have been lost as a result of a homologation that was not just linguistic but also due to a way of conceiving of life itself.
MM: Even without thinking about the diversity of their poetics, for your own part did you never think of “leaving painting behind”?
AL: I did. Even in this studio you can see works that are not painterly: wooden pieces, objects and so on. I have a periodical need to leave painting behind as though to breath in oxygen; but just as periodically I feel the need to return to painting, a kind of unavoidable recall, in order to interrogate myself and interrogate it about its communicative validity today.
MM: With these question, I am trying to reconstruct an image of Palermo in the 1970s and 1980s, and from your words it seems that according to you everything happened within that linguistic territory. Were there no attempts to follow other languages: concepts, objects, performances, dematerialisation…?
AL: At the time the neo-avant-gardes were rather worn out, even at the level of their fascination. There was coming about a generation that, if you like, was adopted by the protagonists of those neo-avant-gardes and who offered us hospitality, even by arranging shows or finding possibilities for us. For example, in 1976 there was a show curated by Aurelio Pes: “Leto Garraffa Storniolo Vitale” in which fantastic elements dominated; it was reviewed in the L’Ora newspaper in an article by Eduardo Rebulla, with the title “Senza compromessi”, Without Compromises. Two years later, again in the L’Ora newspaper, a long article by Giuseppe La Monica reviewed a group show at the I Quattro Venti gallery with the title “At the Quattro venti Fantatsic Art is leftwing”. This underlined the fact that there was another kind of political commitment in which fantasy and imagination were certainly not, so to say, the approved ones. Of course, mostly, apart from a couple of galleries, there were always difficult exhibition spaces, not quite official ones, from the Savarino winery to the Flaccovio bookshop.
MM: … and then in 1976 you were only twenty years old…
AL: Yes, but I already had a strong, continuous, obstinate production behind me. Starting from an obsession with Mannerism, the deformity of which I had understood, I was interested in everything that was hyper-narration, super-exciting, horror vacui. This was almost a new movement from a “hormonal” point of view … Certainly it was like with sexuality: the level of testosterone if high at that age, and the artistic act was consumed intensely, quickly and repeatedly.
MM: This regards your own personal path. However, would you state that in Palermo then there existed above all a vocation for painting?
AL: In the sphere of New Dada, Toti Garaffa went, and still goes, well beyond painting; Gaetano Testa has always been the creator of strange and fascinating objects … as a sensitive person; and Francesco Carbone too, though I do not remember any other outstanding practitioners of art outside painting. Painting was the field where almost everything was played out. On the other hand, if we think about sculpture or photography, significant were: Giacomo Baragli, by Enzo Sellerio, by Franco Scafidi and Letizia Battaglia. The theater was of extraordinary vitality, with the Teatés company of Michele Perriera, the “Teatro Libero” by Beno Mazzone, the “Compagnia del sarto” by Scaldati, and the “Teatro Vagante” by Ninni Truden…
MM: So in Palermo the fantastic was painted. However, there is the impression that the whole debate took place inside the city: we have mentioned the names of intellectuals of great moral and cultural importance, but they are not well known outside Sicily. Is this a problem of separateness, of self-sufficiency and self-referentiality, or were the problems so different as to be “other” with respect to the national and international context?
AL: That was how it was. It was necessary to wait for the reconstruction of Gibellina for the development of a new debate, one that was less local and with national dynamics, even though these citizens too certainly used “lofty” languages … But it was like certain dynamics of Latin American culture: a great deal of involvement and originality, and a great deal of marginality, at times submitted to, at others allowed to pass over.
MM: This is typical of Sicilian intellectuals who always develop things in a lofty manner …
AL: … however, in the 1980s, due to a new emergent cultural geography, there were three situations: Gibellina, first with the mayor Ludovico Corrao, and then with the Fondazione Orestiadi in which there was created a dynamic workshop with the presence of great international artists and great works. Then there was Antonio Presti, at the end of the decade, with Fiumara d’Arte and its visionary “call to art” as redemption and revival; and finally there was the evolution of the activity of Ezio Pagano who, as a gallery dealer, created the Museum in Bagheria: a private act of love for art to be shared in an ideal house for a community of artists. These, deep down, were my “political asylums” as against the menace of vanishing.
MM: But with regard to your personal position, to the germinal condition of your work, one has the impression that, despite a strong Sicilian cultural output, you always find yourselves in a border country, and that whoever works in it must deal with this.
AL: In other spheres there have been people how immediately became of national relevance, Sciascia for instance … however, they risked becoming stereotypes of Sicily, one in which many of us young artists did not recognise ourselves. We needed situations that were less canned, more libertarian, less linked to the rhetoric even of the left, indeed the deadly rhetoric of political parties – even though in this Sciascia revealed himself to be an irregular. The evolution of art at the time saw the birth of groups that had no other aim than being able to express themselves, to exist, independently of the end that their work would have had. The idea was simply to survive The idea was simply to survive beyond the Palermo-system. I believe that in Catania too something similar happened.
MM: … survive?
AL: Yes. To survive without aligning yourself, without adhering to the system, the system of the galleries, for example, with names like Arte al Borgo, La Robinia, La tavolozza, and where there were cooked up all the stereotypes of high-class Sicilian cooking: the so-called “Sicilianitude”, a system that was quite closed but that had a good yield, a brand as we would say today, a world that for many of us was a chokehold.
MM: When we speak about a Sicilian artist who lives in Sicily, we always arrive at this problem, one that evidently is crucial: was the problem openly posed or did you keep a low profile?
AL: In this sphere we were dwarfs in comparison to the publishing system, to the market, the “spin-off” that being Sicilian contained in itself … The great misunderstanding of the official, involved, referenced Left, the Left sustained by publishing, galleries, and institutions brought with it a fine pesticide.
MM: But in this sense was there no reply from civil society, for example? How did it react to this problem of identity?
AL: There were occasional moments of rethinking by a newspaper such as the L’Ora, for example, the most obvious side for recognizing ourselves: they undertook inquiries, probes, services, even if only with photos, as though they were an identikit. Then there was the Diario, there was the young Fulvio Abbate who was already active in the pages of the L’Ora; and then there was the anarchist circle Antorcha, the Locanda degli Elfi where Franco Scaldati tried to stage his earliest shows; there was the genial Ninni Truden, and Toni Costagliola the friend of Fabrizio Lupo, who was of the same age, and together with whom, as well as Peppe Rizzo, we painted walls and theatre scenery. And there was still the La Base association, the first "free radio" in Palermo, “Radio Pal”, participating actively with a program made with Gigi Burruano and one entirely mine … all of which should be recuperated, at least as the historical memory of an ideal tale of those years, because they were all a genuine countercultural network in the Palermo of the time.
MM: However they were all off the track, underground …
AL: Yes. We were also close to Letizia Battaglia who, in a garage in the 1980s, had created together with Franco Zecchin the Laboratorio D’IF, and in some nearby rooms there was the copper engraving workshop, La Mandragola, run by Totò Audino, and Roberto Lo Sciuto’s restoration workshop: another place for withdrawing from the official geography of a city that would not waste any energy on us …
MM: Perhaps in that moment there was not even a museum concerned with very recent events: the idea of a museum that promoted contemporary art came later.
AL: It was only in 1988 that the critics Eva Di Stefano, Sergio Troisi, and Eduardo Rebulla started up “Made in Palermo”, a collection of art by young, emerging artists at the city gallery of modern art, which was still in the Politeama theatre and that had never allowed contemporary art to be seen within its walls.
MM: With this climate did you never think of leaving Palermo?
AL: I thought about it many times. I preferred “working departures”, above all to Rome. In 1989, in an “off the track” gallery in Via dei Coronari, I held my first solo show “Quel che è stato è statico”. This was curated by Fulvio Abbate who wrote for it an unforgettable essay; he was also for me a fraternal guide to the Roman milieu. Then there was my frequentation of the La Nuova Pesa group and, finally, the Art Gallery Banchi Nuovi, a frequentation that tailed off in the decade from 1989 to 2002.
MM: However, you did not go to live in Rome. That is, you thought the battle could be fought here. How much of this conviction came – if it came – from the concept of “genius loci”, which in that very moment was being theorized, spread, and defended?
AL: The idea of staying here has made me what I am. Then, already in the 1980s, Acireale hosted some international shows curated by Bonito Oliva, where the concept of “genius loci” was built up. These events, and the utopia of being what we are where we are, had encouraged me to this situation of being settled. And the successive encouragement given me by Bonito Oliva, with his first essays about my work, underlined this conviction.
And in 1987, it was significant for me that the great international critic Bonito Oliva, and the young writer Fulvio Abbate, went to the remote hermitage of Quisquina to present my first major exhibition.
Furthermore, there was arising the new Gibellina with all his message of challenge and fascination … The fact that my work might be interesting for such a foundation meant that I could also work in the place where I was. But what was important in my personal story was also teaching. I taught for two years at the Palermo academy, then they did not renew my post; however, I began to teach in a secondary school. I thought that this might be the opportunity to go back and live in the place where I was born and to construct my identity from there. I was rather uncertain at first, but then I discovered how important was the relationship between me as an artist and a public school, to have to make freely available the experience of imagination and fantasy, and to gain sensitivity to art while my two children were growing up. In this I know I am a great resource: this is the right situation for to experiment a creative dimension twenty-four hours a day, both as a teacher and as an artist, roles that are often superimposed and are resolved through experiments of great pedagogical value and freedom. Because an artist, just like a teacher, serves for teaching freedom.
MM: This was in the 1980s or is it also so for today?
AL: Today too, and more than ever despite the radical change of generations.
MM: In all this I see you coming under the definition of an “intellectual”: it is not by chance that the achievement and priority of intellectuals is a battle for communicating the values in which they believe …
AL: … Is this to say “civil values”? I live in a small community, but I am not alone: there are also other artists living in Santo Stefano and with them I have the solidarity and affection of a lifetime, above all with Franco Sarullo and Lorenzo Reina. Then, of course, there have been and still are many battles, some very fiery, for the civil dimension of living, for example the battles for water. We live in an area of important sources of water, one that is always considered, frequently in an irresponsible and mistaken way, a kind of place to be wiped out. I have always been a participant in civil actions, but in the field and not with painting. This is why I feel a certain discomfort with those artists who think that through a work of art you can bring a serious contribution to civil and social life. This is not true. I believe that contemporary art is a privileged language and that artists must not ask for social solidarity, because what they do they do because they have wanted to and nobody asked them. And what they must do is find a linguistic dimension that elevates their gesture and create a communicative code, perhaps even a secret one but one with quality … the heroic years of Otto Dix and Grosz are over. At the end of the day, in Russian culture in 1915 a black square on a white background was subversive, while social realism instead was welcomed by the system. Of course, it can be argued that art can be made from anything, but you cannot think that a show in a glamorous art gallery can be of the same worth as five minutes of any journalistic inquiry or a film seen by millions of viewers. It is only the self-referential arrogance of an artist when he meets with the credulity of the public and the favour of the art market that can make you think the contrary. I adore the scepticism of the medium and “illiterate” public in the face of contemporary art.
MM: However, you yourself, in such series of works as “Al paradiso dei pezzi di ricambio” or in the series “Sacrifashion” where you paint over advertising images, do not turn your nose up at occupying yourself almost moralistically with the news.
AL: That a language can be ethically or critically motivated can happen; however, this must never be an alibi for artists who find that their conscience is in order because during the day they are concerned with globalised rhetoric and at night they dream of the market and success. That artists dream of success, dream of being loved, is true and is more than natural, but they do not sell wounds: this is not credible.
MM: However, artists can deal with any kind of argument, “as an artist”, and say what they want to say without, so to speak, the burden of proof, at least when this is done within art language.
AL: Of course. And with regard to this, I feel I have the traces of a Surrealist tradition which, as you know, was also politically engaged, but in the sense that the conquest of imagination, the possibility and right, that is, of employing and communicating it ,is perhaps the only aim of artists. This is their joy, and not that the work manages to change the consciences of others about dramatic or epochal facts about the life of humanity. To make paintings is a syndrome, it is the coercion to repeat and vary until the end of life: I hope my life ends while I am painting, of course; as De Quincy said, until “I no longer have the need”.
MM: You talk about repeating, but also about varying and so about variations: your work seems to me to be full of variations.
AL: Very. I do not love repeating myself. Each work is a “place for proceeding” towards another work until that particular path is exhausted and it is necessary to find another, a kind of ramification. I envy certain artists for the coherence that allows them to reproduce the same work with only tiny shifts, and I ask myself if this is a question of “supply and demand”, or instead if it is a spiritual fact, an almost Oriental one, due to which the artist lives in a “mono” condition, of only repetitions of the same theme … If I could I would multiply myself even more … I once said to Mark Kostabi, when we were in Rome to do a show together and with whom I have made a couple of works in collaboration, that the difference between the two of us was that he multiplied and I divided. I only hope I have enough fuel to surprise myself with what I am doing: when an artist no longer surprises himself then he is no longer able to surprise others, and for this reason I really hope to maintain this vitality.
MM: So would you define yourself as an eclectic artist?
AL: It seems so. For some that is an offensive word, but not for me. It testifies to a secular attitude to art. As well as, in all modestly, to the need to be well equipped and with full mental supply to dissipate as I like, otherwise you are just a vulgar imitator.
MM: However, there still remains your initial Surreal vocation …
AL: That is a genuine imprinting that risks becoming a counterproductive definition, almost as though defining yourself as Surrealist were an own goal. However, how many artists make Surrealist works without stating the fact, perhaps due to “good manners” or to craftiness or simply because it is not necessary? I have in mind Damien Hirst, Maurizio Catalan and many others …
MM: Perhaps they are making use of a paradox, something that is part of Surrealist armoury, but it is not the perquisite of only that movement …
AL: However, I believe that among historical avant-gardes Surrealism is the movement that has most earned the right for survival from that century, by transforming itself into other languages: if you think of other movements you see them by now consigned to the archives of history.
MM: Perhaps this happened because it is not a “visual” movement but, rather, an attitude …
AL: In fact there is a conceptual root to it. I believe that in my painting there is a deep conceptual root, despite it being covered by painterly artifice. Until now artists have been more respected if they are coherent and have a recognisable style, while my challenge is to lay claim to the possibility of doing whatever I want! Only the art market will tell you if what you do meets the public taste. And then if artists answer to this exclusive demand they will follow it, if not they will follow their own inclinations, their own wishes. Deep down, painting is anyway a gesture of pure cultural aristocracy.
MM: You confirm my idea that I see in you first of all an intellectual, and then an artist who undertakes what he thinks as an intellectual. This is why I have asked you all these questions about the social context, about Palermo in the 1970s: deep down, you must simply ask an artist how he feels and what he does, while with you I feel like asking how you feel in the territory where you live …
AL: This also derives from the fact that I am trained to dialogue with my work. I never “release” a painting if I haven’t “closed my accounts” with it, if I cannot way that its existence has a sense, at least with regards the language that constitutes it …
MM: … but this ought to be so for all artists …
AL: I hope so. I hope that everyone starts up a dialogue with their own things, as I do, but I don’t know if this is a widespread undertaking .. I hope so, but I also see among artists many attitudes that contradict a deep relationship with their own products …
MM: At times, though, there is also necessary a kind of “nonchalance” in freeing oneself from one’s own works, one’s own paintings …
AL: … well I am nonchalant! … What is important is that there is a sense to the work’s being in the world independently from the rest of the work: even if it were to remain alone it ought to have a sense. Then, of course, there is all the argument about its context; but from the point of view of the existence of the work, what interests me is its finiteness, its being a closed and complete discourse, to be entrusted to its destiny.
MM: A monad?
AL: Perhaps. The work must have an independent vitality; there must be nothing else to know, nothing to explain: I once wanted to do a show titled “Quadri soli” or “Opere sole”, “Only pictures” or “Only works”, and then I discovered that my friend Mariano Rossano had just done so in Rome. As you see, this is an idea that has its reasons.
MM: So, not to know the context then?
AL: Only an involved and attentive viewer can also find the historical-critical connections. But the work must be able to live beyond an expert’s analysis. It must be able to say something to everyone outside its codes.
MM: However, by now the context is an essential part of contemporary art. The usual banal example of Duchamp’s urinal is always useful: if it were to remain alone, without memory, without a context, it really would remain alone: but with a whole gallery around it!
AL: This happened before Postmodernism. Postmodernism has put everything into doubt with the global vision that it has generated, and it has put back at the top a vision that, indeed, is eclectic. Things change. Artists are pursued by the past and, at the same time, are reclaimed by the future, and these two dimensions are flattened or projected into the present dimension. The past really does pursue me … You cannot think of the future without paying the price of the past, understood as History.
MM: Do you think this is true for all the generations of artists? Even for the youngest? Do you not think that oblivion, non-memory, might instead be one of the characteristics of contemporaneity?
AL: I am talking about artists. Personally I could never live in oblivion. As I said, I feel the past is hot on my trail, and I think that the past and future are the two forces that allow the creation of a work. Past and future: between them is the work, the present! If you manage to join together in an object the receiving aspect and the transmitting one then you have conceived of a work of your times. Then other elements come into play, such as irony …
MM: … the spirit of Surrealism has returned once more … but to link it to the Postmodernism you have mentioned, I would like to hear from you what your conception is of Postmodernism, what categories it includes …
AL: I recognise Postmodernism at least until the beginning of the new millennium, and then there arose an even more free dimension …
MM: And yet it was Postmodernism itself that sanctioned the greatest expressive freedom, with the famous phrase “everything can work” …
AL: As far as I am concerned, this is not a question of subscribing to it but, rather, of a conjunction, the possibility of combining diverse elements. Of course, this is not a question of style, and I am not interested in Postmodern stereotypes … Nor do I consider myself a virtuoso - if anything, I'm a vicious- in the field of painting, and this saves me from many dangers, even though I am good at a technical level. When I come close to the preciosity of virtuosity I draw back, because for me a work is an energy field or, to use a definition borrowed from another language, a “situation comedy” in which it is the picture that lights up situations, creates sparks. I happen at times to see things that animate me and that even put me in a good mood; they help me to make my works, and I have no fear of saying that I also see them in other contemporary artists: a work like “Stadium” by Catalan, for example, or “Miss Kitty” by Paolo Schmidlin which shows Pope Benedict XVI in drag, works that manage to conjoin social comment with humour. Postmodernism has also sanctioned humour in art, and so certain works can make us smile or even laugh without losing dignity.
MM: Often, though, we are dealing with a principal category …
AL: … it must not be a principal one, as a program, though that can happen. I, for example, held a show titled “Leto ridens. Opere a piacere” for which I chose works in which a witticism, a paradox, was central, as in my obituary notice or in the work in which a broken glass, evidently referring to Duchamp’s “Large Glass”, was contradicted by the phrase “Conceptual, a bugger”, which turned the simple broken glass back into simple broken glass. In this sense I always have doubts about dramatic works, ones that speak of the Chief World Systems, because today it is extremely difficult to do so. Drama, the pretentious subject in front of which you reflect on something important about the world, about the human condition, are not for me: in order to do certain things it is necessary to be “believers”, and I am an atheist, even artistically atheist. An art agnostic. My “not believing” is the only real source of inspiration, it is the fuel that makes me go on …
MM: We began by speaking about the context of the 1970s; let’s end by speaking about the current context. What do you find has changed since then?
AL: Many things. I don’t want to seem too severe, but when I was young you discovered artists, but you did not invent them. Today it happens that many artists are invented. This is a new aspect of making art.
MM: This doesn’t only happen in Palermo …
AL: … in fact I was about to add that it is a global dimension that also touches on Palermo where, what is more, there are artists of great mastery and intelligence. Despite that, it is an almost artificial situation where young artists are greatly helped … we had no references, we were untamed, and we liked being so: we were “poor and proud”. Today “young artists” have become a category that is closely observed, greatly helped, even familiarly. The “talent show” aspect, after having invaded the record companies, is now invading restaurant kitchens and art galleries. My father hardly knew what he was doing and at times he looked at me with a certain sceptical suspicion. That secular gaze of his made me grow up.
Santo Stefano Quisquina, 5 February 2018