A Biennial of the engraver’s art offers the comforting sense of a safe haven in the tumultuous seas of the contemporary art world. I believe it is fair to say that this event has an intense value, in times that celebrate artistic stylemes and manners whose poetic scope often lasts no more than a single season^[i], constructed as it is on works whose creation sometimes takes no more than a handful of minutes. What is on offer here, on the contrary, is a festival of works of art whose production requires a lengthy, patient gestation, without the use of any mechanical artefact to help shape their outlines, save that of the energy that turns the press, applying the pressure necessary to bring forth bright, sharp-edged signs in imperceptible relief on the candid surface of a dampened sheet. The process is a slow, patient one that calls for obstinacy and enthusiasm and seems to fly in the face of contemporary rhythms. The tools used here are chisels, bits and metals, controlled by the sole force of the artist’s hands and guided by his sensitivity. Sensitivity is the key word: that quite unique terrain that is home to our feelings and passions, whose effectiveness and result cannot be measured by reasons of time. Passion and feelings are what make us linger over the signs on the plates, lengthen the times of printing tests, indulge in the obstinacy of detail and the painstaking care for powders and inks, so that we will eventually reach the final moment when the work makes it appearance under the shiny roller of the press, whose slow turn gradually reveals the spectacle of the printed sheet. But passion and feelings are also the seals that guarantee that this process belongs to the terrain of art. The art whose roots delve into each objects meaning and make the artists sensitivity blossom. And who is the artist but the one with the sense of observation that enables things to stand revealed? He it is who looks at the world around him to ask what it is and not only what purpose it has, thus revealing that he is guided by an attitude whose source does not dwell in reason, but which finds fertile nourishment in his feelings. The work of art demands of every component of the artist and of the material that they adapt to the special condition that develops between the revelation of the feelings of the material and their interaction with the feelings of the artist. This is not a use of material: it is respect. And this is not just curiosity: it is desire. And this is not possession: it is love. It is reality that senses that it is loved. The artist in love listens and acts. Stimuli are exchanged. No-one prevaricates. The work of art leads each of the two to his own inimitable result.

1.    The legend of the birth of art

Once upon a time, several thousand years ago, a beautiful maiden lived in a small village in the Peloponnese . Some say that village was Sycion, others Corinth .  We cannot be certain, but the exact location is not crucial to the importance of the tale told by Pliny^[ii]. His is the story that tells the legend of the birth of art. The maiden lived in the house of her father, whose name was Butades, a potter by trade. One day, Butades surprised his daughter in tears. The reason for her despair was that the youth with whom the maiden had fallen hopelessly in lave had to go away and leave her alone for no-one knew how long. Her father hugged the maiden and started comforting her with consoling words, while softly caressing the jet black hair that was the p ride of all the maidens of Sycion and fell in plaits on their milk white necks. But no tender gesture on the part of her father, nor any of his gentle words succeeded in comforting the maiden. So Butades went to call the youth and allowed the two young lovers to rest together one last night in his house. The youth fell quietly asleep next to the maiden, although sleep escaped her, as she was tormented by the idea that she would not see her beloved again for such a long time. Sitting on the bed, she observed the youth’s face which, as we all know, relaxed in sleep into the noble, sweet characteristics that soften every profile. Illuminated by the light of the moon reflecting off the waters of the Gulf of Corinth , the dark curls on his head cast swirling shadows on the wall of the room. The maiden was watching the trembling tangle of the shadow on the lighter surface when suddenly the youth turned over in his sleep and his splendid profile stood out sharply defined on the wall. At once the maiden got up and went down to her father’s workshop, returning with the brush he used to decorate his pots. Without making a sound, she painted the wall, following the outlines of the youth’s shadow, thus fixing the form of his beloved face and then of his body. The next day, her father discovered the painting in his daughter’s room and was much impressed by the wonderful lineaments that described the figure. In part because it fascinated him and in part because he believed that he would be able to console his daughter all the better thus, he derived a mould from which he made a statue, which he put with his pots to fire. It is said that the statue was so beautiful and the people so enamoured of it that it was placed in the Nymphaeum in Corinth and remained there until the Roman general Lucius Mummius destroyed the city and with it that splendid memento^[iii].

Thus were painting and sculpture born in a single night and the energy that brought about such a prodigy was the energy of sentiment: now the intense love of a maiden, now the melancholy of a farewell, now the affection of a father, thus etching the creation of art into the register of feeling, which is that place where each things endless potential beings dwell. From this multiplicity of feeling comes our legitimate freedom to sense and to feel, led by the hand by the itineraries of art, through the persuasive seduction exerted by the works on those who allow them the time it takes to unfurl the wonderment of their tale. Thus does slowness, which we already identified as the qualifying condition of engraving, prove to be a general and necessary feature of artistic production, both of its creation and of its action of generating effects on those who observe it, who distract us from the coercive force of reason and, in so doing, restore to us that terrain of feeling that makes the world a more familiar place, if it is true that we are not made of reason alone^[iv] and if it is true that reason is never enough to restore beauty to us.

2. «The office of the painter is therefore to represent with his art any thing whatsoever, in so similar a wise to the diverse works of nature that it appear to be real»^[v]

To be sure, it is difficult to digest the imperative tone attributed by Ludovico Dolce to the condition of art in the sixteenth century. In fact, almost a century after the début of the historical avant-gardes, the form of works has often waived any correspondence with nature, any recognisability of the subjects of the works of art, abandoning the skilled paths of mimesis previously trodden by the history of artistic expression for thousands of years.

On the other hand, the origin of art as the mimesis of nature has its roots in the mists of antiquity and is a quality that has generated sometimes admiration and unconditioned approval, sometimes profound conflicts or radical refutation^[vi]. Already in Book X of his Republic, Plato defines painting as the imitator not of the world as it is, but of its appearance and thus not of the truth. Without wanting to detour here into philosophical terrain that is not of my competence, I believe it is safe to remain with this quality of art that captures the appearance of things, in order to sense its aspect of naïve surprise at the activities of those artists who lay claim neither to judgement, nor to peremptory statements, as they have no truth to reveal but are intriguing, fascinating proponents of continuous questions to be addressed to the world. Thus do we discover that the artist does not have a rational vision that measures reality, because he has no metre to tighten and close: he has an ear that listens. The artist does not have blind reasons that offer explanations: he has eyes that observe. The artist does not call things by name, he does not define

them: he sings with them. The artist approaches, listens, surrounds, courts, blends, delves and dances with the world in a spiral powered by passion. Re is subject to the result of the work. Re does not govern it^[vii]. His entire person is the partner, not the protagonist, on the scene where the work comes about. Ali his components of affection, psychology, erudition, physical and mnemonic being enjoy the same rank as the senses of the material he manipulates, desires and loves. Between the material and the artist, neither has an imperative rôle: each does his own equivalent portion of work. The artist is like a naïve, curious adolescent, ready to discover every revelation of the material in his hands, continuously modified and surprising. He never grows up. He is a vagabond, rootless. With neither rhyme nor reason. He is not mad: he is crazy. Because beauty is not something to be handled with and for reasons.

This all begs a question: does this mean that it is also possible to enjoy a solitary sign that, in cutting a clean groove into the surface of metal, displays the absolute purity of a gesture, if not the solitary, anarchic affirmation of an artistic freedom won? Of course it is possible. But there is a condition: the fascination of a flash of lightning should not be mistaken for lasting, persuasive illumination. A flash that is repeated produces glare, but does not illuminate. A series of flashes of lightning will first make your head spin, then soon induce the boredom that comes of repetition, ultimately running the risk of a deterioration in vision. Such as the vision that, in those works whose horizon is nature, reaches out above things, enabling their details to be revealed, describing their idiosyncrasies, qualifying their forms, and in so doing unveiling the priceless, inimitable singularity of each being. But above all so that the uniqueness of every being, so finely qualified by light and shadow, can achieve a meaning in relation to the rest of existence, with which it interacts by exchanging that wealth of meaning that each thing guards behind the appearance of its representation, which, as Chekhov wrote in a note, enables men to be given an intimate aid by revealing to them how they are made, regardless of the subsequent consequences^[viii].

This is all the more pertinent when the method of representation does without the exciting emphasis that comes from painting and relies on nothing but the precious calligraphy of black and white signs, as in the case of an engraving. It is almost like an excavation into the essential forms of existence, produced by following the tangled network of lines, following every possible fold of the shape depicted And this all takes place in a venture that becomes more and more obscure as the work takes shape, being covered with paints and powders, or hiding behind the trick of the final image, which will be mirrored. Once it has been printed, the image will look as though the original composition has been turned around: an inevitable transformation that I like to interpret once again as a glimpse of the trickery used by the appearance of things to try to escape being possessed by us. It is as though existence does not want to be understood, but reminds us how consoling and revitalising it can be to let ourselves go to the energy generated by the fascination of its seductiveness. Once again, then, there is a reference to meaning that qualifies the territory of graphics as a field inhabited by art.  With its rarefied calligraphy, the engraving seems to stretch that refined net that enwraps and describes objects, physiognomies and environments in a single prodigy: the prodigy of the artist who translates light and shade into simple interlinked lines. We know that there is no such thing as a line in nature. So to use those strokes to illustrate existence also signifies for the artist to produce the spectacle of his own mastery at the service of the beauty of his work.

To be sure, some champion of so-called avant-garde art may argue the pointlessness of mimesis by citing the intrusive advent of photography, which is second to none when it comes to imitating nature. And there is no countering that argument. Except by pointing out that what we are talking about is art, not merely a technique of producing images as «real» as what our eyes see. Titian, Caravaggio and Velàzquez also made use of optical instruments^[ix], to say nothing of the entire work Vermeer or the shimmering ballerinas who star in the works of Degas. Would anybody have the gall to argue that Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love is no more than a perfect reproduction of a pair of attractive sixteenth century girls, just because there were no cameras in those days? Or that Degas’ Dancer on the Stage is nothing but a rather good still shot? It would be tantamount to failing to recognise that it is in the material of the painting, as in general in the materials of art and how they are manipulated by the artist, that traits of meaning are enshrined that mere mechanical reproduction cannot countenance. It would be like failing to see that it is not photography that cleared the way far a relaxation of the mimetic fidelity of form in works so that their expressive force could gain as a consequence. What else, pray are those swirling grains of paint created by Turner two centuries ago if they are not the poetic song of the very matter of the pigments thus transformed by the artist? Or again: what else are the bright symbolic abstractions of the gilded mediaeval backgrounds, or the glassy rigidity of the hieratic figures that stand so proud in the splendid Byzantine mosaics that date back more than one thousand years? What photograph could ever convey the troubled vision of the taut skin of Lucien Freud’s models, bodies that are our contemporaries, shot through with liquid brushstrokes of reddish purple?

But that is where we stand. Some pundits now rely on these fragile supports to argue that artistic observation is a pointless exercise, although its proponents would prefer it to relate back to our common memories, drawing its inspiration from the faith it should keep with the outlines of our world, so that it can then return that worlds countless meanings to us, respecting each individual’s memories and offering us the surprise of discovering it from points of view that differ from the sprawling and therefore inured and stereotyped image consumption of the present day. Those pundits quite possibly indulge in this argument far the purpose of justifying pretentious claims in support of products they define as «artistic», products that often undertake veritable intrusions when four words cancelled from a text or a rock standing alone in the centre of an empty room assume the mantle of high-browed, ponderous philosophical concepts whose only weight is often the dead one ofthe oversized catalogue that accompanies them, revealing that it is possible to maltreat philosophy by calling it «art», thus harmfully killing two birds with one stone.

All of this is of course part and parcel of the delirious rush towards «novelty» which, if we only stop and look for a moment, turns out to bave nothing «new» to it at all, seeing as nearly a century has gone by since Prampolini stuck some twigs and feathers on a canvas and Dada embarked on its shocking provocations^[x]. Why, after Duchamp’s Bottle Rack or his Urinal, are we still expected, nearly one century later, to say that there is anything «new» about an object displayed in isolation in an empty room, or a piece of furniture hanging under a portico? They will answer that this is all «research», distorting the word from its scientific lexicon and forgetting that art can never be science, as it has nothing to prove, nor to explain, but only the task of showing every possible meaning of existence, persuading with the seductiveness of its beauty. And so we find that the fashion of treating art as a «science» is organised in systems of dissemination whose language is often incomprehensible, in the immodest and arrogant attempt to get it «understood», as the saying goes, thus branding anyone who shows surprise or embarrassed annoyance at often gratuitous and sometimes simply incomprehensible topics as not belonging to the «cognoscenti».