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KRITICA SCULPTURE
YEAR 2016 - STEEL WAVES by Alessandra Migliorati
Weaving is something ancient that has to do with having a body. Originally it was the necessity to cover oneself, but covering could not conceal the content and so it became declaration and narrative, and the narrative extended beyond the physical limits of the body into carpets and tapestries, finally overflowing into existential metaphor. Weaving plots, weaving a bond, weaving indeed a story, a brief stretch of an existence or an entire life, according to a patient and meticulous action in the choice of the design, the threads, the warp and the knots for each "line break" or closure. And all this in its rituality has something of the witch-like and the sacred, for its power to transform something shapeless, fragile and confused like disiecta membra into a completed whole that only the force of powerful scissors, fire, or the passage of time can destroy. Once the last knot is tied, the fabric will be a surface of dreams on which to rest, remember or walk, it will be to wear a peacock's tail or a protective chainmail, it will in any case be the spell of a story that repeats itself, mute of words, in the gesture, in the form and in the color.
In this plurality of metaphorical and physical meanings of weaving, Valeria Scuteri has always found the origin and the end of her artistic research, fully establishing herself among the protagonists of that Fiber art which a not too recent historiography recognizes as a practice in its own right, with a distinctly feminine peculiarity, since needle, loom, and thread have, by millennial custom, belonged to the long lineage of Eve. Penelope weaves the deception of waiting; making and unmaking is in her design. Valeria materializes and arranges in form the threads that, emotionally, every woman, by obstinacy or fate, perniciously or lovingly, has tied to herself.
Steel Waves, an unpublished work generously conceived for Perugia and this occasion, has complex layers of meaning that descend from the autobiographical into the depths of being a woman in a multiple social and emotional dimension, in the verticality of history that is memory and shared actuality of practices of ancestral origin, of being a woman that is also the cliché of the expected and disappointed female stereotype. Thus, the story embroidered with words and signs, steel fabric and strong hand, segmented into shorter narratives for reflection, finds its most fitting metaphorical value as a “multiple reflection” of events and emotions of the entire complex female world. There is no real beginning, nor end except perhaps in the “self-portrait” (The Earth) around which the story in its other elements revolves, violating the heliocentrism that governs the stars. Earth as solidity, concreteness, patience in waiting for the change of seasons, in nurturing its own fruits, as a cornerstone on which to build, but also as thirst in the need for water to generate, as fatigue, sometimes, in walking on one's own bare earth. Where the Earth calms its anxiety of being a concrete and finished fact is the Sea. Changeable, unpredictable, secret in the life hidden in its depths as in a parallel world, the liquid reverse of earth and sky, as inviting to a journey without destination when the horizon of its boundary is lost from sight. Synonymous with Ocean for Italian emigrants to America was the term Hope, and the canvas of Imprints is the same with the “USA” mark that an immigrant uncle sent in gift packages to relatives left in Italy. On the canvas, bare feet, ballet shoes, high heels, and spiked shoes mark the steps of a woman around her beloved while the mantra embroidered with uncertain hand echoes: “I walked barefoot/so as not to hurt you/with ballet shoes/to follow your rhythms/with high heels/to seduce you/with spiked shoes/to make myself heard.” I AM TIRED is the truth that every woman tells herself when the beloved, like a life project, really seems unwilling to respond to her gentle and willing seduction. Good shoes for walking with the step of a fairy, a child or a queen, however, wait at the corner for a new start and, who knows, perhaps even the light thrill of a waltz.
YEAR 2015 - THE FIBER ART OF VALERIA SCUTERI by Claudia Bottini
Thread by thread; the weft functions thanks to the warp; the warp is the reason for the weft and just as one without the other cannot form the fabric, so the other draws strength and support from the first.
(Maria Corsini, The Warp and the Weft: X-ray of a Marriage, 1953)
Valeria Scuteri, weaving iron, steel, and copper threads on an experimental loom, or manipulating wool and other materials with crochet, knitting, or free weaving, gathers ancient traditions and reworks them in the light of contemporaneity. One of the most famous Italian Fiber Artists, in her canvases, drawings, textile sculptures, and performance pieces, she develops a poetics that addresses the deepest themes of human existence.
For the exhibition and as a tribute to the theme of Valentine's Day, Valeria presents, along with her most famous works such as Innamorati-Il bacio or Le Rondini, new installation works that transform the space and tell us, by juxtaposing light and darkness, emptiness and substance, her poetic vision of love: Primo appuntamento, Sua Maestà il Melograno, Ritorno a casa-Cammino condiviso, Inutile orizzonte.
The daughter's wedding becomes a source of inspiration for the ethereal white dress "Susanna" from which it takes its name.
The Turin-based artist creates installations to be entered, among weavings and inventions, lyricism and refined experimental techniques. In her hands, the basic structure of warp and weft expresses, "as in love," the tension of opposites and takes on a dimension that goes beyond simple fabric. The weaves, the love stories, are born from the randomness of encounters and only our rationality makes us weave a long path together.
Scuteri acts on people's sensitivity and is able to promote renewal in them, acting simultaneously on the level of ethics as well as aesthetics.
Works where the texture is alive and dense with meaning, where everything is possible in order to create a new visual and tactile impact.
Scuteri's Fiber Art is an explosion of enthusiasm and creativity; a modern Arachne, she demonstrates that this ancient technique can continue to make an important contribution to human expression.
As I have already had the opportunity to write in the Armonie d’Arte 2013 catalogue1, on the occasion of the exhibition Vestiti d’Arte that I curated in Montefalco, where Valeria also participated, Fiber Art is a new way of interpreting reality and aesthetics, born in the early twentieth century, when artists broke away from palette and chisel to experiment with “fiber,” worked with or without a loom.
The starting point of these artistic researches is an ancient craft practice, traditionally belonging to the female sphere: weaving. Fiber Art develops—going beyond the concept of “utility” usually associated with this type of production—those revolutionary impulses that break with the traditional textile discipline. We refer, in particular, to the important role played by the weavers active in the Bauhaus Textile Workshop and to the legacy they passed down. The poetic sensibility, the knowledge of materials, the combination of the artist’s and the artisan’s skill bring Valeria Scuteri’s work back to that intuition which distinguished the Bauhaus artists. The German Gunta Stölzl wrote: “Because weaving is an aesthetic whole, a composition of form, color, and material in a single unity. While at the beginning of the Bauhaus we started from figurative principles—so to speak, an image in wool [...] today we know that fabric is an object of use and is a surface that contains static, dynamic, plastic, functional, constructive, and spatial elements.”2 It was then the United States that welcomed most of these revolutionary weavers who fled Europe following the rise of the Nazi regime, and who profoundly influenced the qualitative and aesthetic progress of American textiles3.
In 1962, Jean Luçart, founder in 1961 of the Centre International de la Tapisserie Ancienne et Moderne, inaugurated the first Fiber Art exhibition in Lausanne, an International Biennial that, through its transformation, still hosts Fiber works today.
In Italy, at the beginning of the 1990s, some cultural initiatives dedicated to Fiber Art were born, such as the annual Miniartextil exhibition in Como, which has been able to present the best international artistic production in the field of Textile Art or Fiber Art. In Piedmont, another industrialized region and cradle of Arte Povera, specifically in Chieri, Turin, from 1998 to 2004 the Fiber Art Biennial "Trame d’Autore" was organized, where Valeria Scuteri participated in several editions.
The first Off Loom exhibition dates back to 2000, curated by Bianca Cimiotta Lami and Lydia Predominato in Rome, in the halls of San Michele a Ripa, in an effort to spread textile culture even within institutional circles. After fifteen years, Off Loom returns to Rome, at the MAT - National Museum of Arts and Popular Traditions, to take stock of the state of Fiber Art in Italy, finally in a museum, after years of serious delay for our country4.
Umbria, with its important textile tradition, saw its first Biennial of Contemporary Textile Art in Amelia, in the province of Terni, from 2002 to 2006, where contemporary artworks were created using the ancient loom. Let us not forget the Gubbio Biennial curated by Enrico Crispolti in 1976, which presented the then young fiber artist from Trieste, Lydia Predominato.
Instead, linked to the historical avant-gardes, Wearable Art refers to a series of creations, particularly garments, accessories, and jewelry, made specifically to be "potentially" worn. It finds its initial expression among surrealism, futurism, and dadaism, when artists, rebelling against the tradition of classical materials, explored other languages, discovering the textile medium. When the creation of these wearable works of art involves more or less experimental and free processes of weaving fibers and various materials, Art Wear can be placed within the broader field of Fiber Art. Therefore, included in this context are the elegant black dress with crochet embroidery from the First appointment of this exhibition, or the high-heeled shoes with the pomegranate, a symbol of abundance and fertility, which in Renaissance paintings, due to its red color, was a harbinger of passion, held in the hand of the infant Jesus. However, it is a fruitful martyrdom, the result of God's infinite love for mankind.
At the top, the Swallows, symbol of rebirth, “help the dreams of lovers take flight,” writes Valeria. The swallows, messengers of love, long observed by the artist during her summer stays in Calabria, her homeland, rest for a moment on the long wire, before returning to the welcoming nest. The nest, reminiscent of Pascoli, protects from loneliness and the misunderstandings of the outside world and, thanks to Fiber Art, becomes a charming little handbag. In addition to the nest-bag, a refuge for the swallows, the exhibition also features the book-bag “useless horizon,” which collects the names of many couples famous for their sad and tormented love: Delilah and Samson, Othello and Desdemona, Paris and Helen, Tristan and Isolde, Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, Paolo and Francesca, Renzo and Lucia, Lancelot and Guinevere, Ulysses and Penelope, Hamlet and Ophelia, Cupid and Psyche, Aeneas and Dido, Apollo and Daphne, Orlando and Angelica, Hector and Andromache. A book of metal threads and poetry, produced by the intertwining of knowledge, memories, and collective identities.
Valeria Scuteri's Fiber Art weaves threads that form the marvelous fabric of life and love.
Innamorati-Il bacio is from 2008, evanescent figures kissing each other naked, stripped by the gaze that runs over them, in the absence of their bodies. Looking at them, one realizes that one is the base and support of the other, “as in love”: thread by thread, intertwined with each other without interruption, until eternity.
1 _ Armonie d’Arte, exhibition catalog (The Sacred and the Profane, Civic Museum of San Francesco; Dressed in Art, Cloister of Sant'Agostino, Montefalco, Perugia, June 2-July 14, 2013, texts by Claudia Bottini and Alessia Vergari), pp. 28-49. On this occasion, Valeria Scuteri exhibits for the first time in Umbria together with four contemporary artists, interpreting the "dress," the starting point of their artistic expression.
2 _ Gunta Stölzl from «Offser Buch und Verbekunst», Notebook no.7, 1926.
3 _ Recent is the exhibition Fiber: sculpture. 7960-Present, held in 2014 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, which retraced the history of sculptural Fiber Art.
4 _ Marta Picciau, Bianca Lami, Maristella Margozzi, Lydia Predominato, edited by, Off Loom, Fiber Art Art outside the loom, exhibition catalogue (Rome, National Museum of Arts and Popular Traditions, January-April 2015), Mantua 2015.
The most important historical information reported in this article has been drawn from this rich anthology catalog.
YEAR 2011-2012 - WILL KNOW HOW TO RECOMPOSE FOR LOVE by Paola Goretti
Bodies should not be worn inside these garments, which are not garments, no. But filaments of archaic jellyfish, tentacular tentacles, fluttering pinnacles of a surfaced mermaid, from who knows where ruins and waves in weaving, wrecks stranded by remoteness resurfaced by chaining. They should not be sheathed, contained, reasoned. They should not be hung on closet hangers or on those of the temple of flesh, for they do not want flesh but souls, waves. Waves crumpled to be crumpled on the rock, to dry among the saltiness. They are bamboo garments, bark garments, ancient book garments, olive garments, flood, shell, sibyl, spring. Apparitions and scales of the primordial. They are invertebrate matter sewn with oysters. With the silk of the sea as a lover. Inner garments of the age-old immobile, bluish filaments of silvery reflection, twists. Ruins emerged from sunken galleons, princes of flow and flowing, imperpetual returns of the undertow, voids of echo and nymphs of the primordial. Lemons and oranges. They are rituals of Phrygia, in the form of a capital, clusters of water, bubbles. Gauzes of ultramarine ocean. In the imagination of perpetual Greekness, pieces of dream from a very remote present. Ragged wrecks, in pieces.
Joy bursts from the eyes of fish like a rose and clings to the banks like a living thing. Siren-like in watery form, trilling without disturbance. They are garments of light. They live beneath the foundations, even lower, where the mosses of sanctuaries grow. Where the smooth water of cisterns rains down, where stone grass sleeps on the floor. Even the masculine compounds seem like diver's shields, liturgies of pinnacles encrusted on diving suits, armors of ancient heroes, carcasses from millennia ago. A mix of warriors on tiptoe, an underwater ballet: the perpetual surface beneath the waves, peoples and peoples full of waves, rituals of peoples trained under the waves, peoples and peoples full of waves, returns to the homeland. Under the waves of the skin, scales. Song of the loom and memorial of the epic narrative.
Sing to me, O Muse, the sweet reed of the sun is trapped and shines. The sun has already been here, it has already dried them in the July afternoons with the sultriness of the dog days and the immense meridian of every appearance. The sun has already accomplished its inexhaustible work in a river of living water. Most beautiful sum of what exists and is already a weave, living now dripping with beauty that has no end. The gold of sunsets declines, diamonds decline, sailors decline. But the memorial of what is lost remains, the glow of what was and is no more remains, the color of the spark remains, the squeezing of clay within the banks of announcements. Forever remains a holy thing that holds back joy. The ode to joy. Again. Without tears, without weight.
They will know how to mend themselves for love. To give themselves back. The time to come is the future in the open sea where everything burning has its soul unstitched, torn, mad with love, forgotten, offended, stranded, enchanted. Here are the loving hands in the open sea, the loving velvet silk gloves. The rescuing impulse of every seam, the healing. Here they are. Here they are again, in their fulfillment, Here they are. These are the things that remain. The things of return. He is there too. He will know how to mend himself for love. The midday cuttlefish is already passing like its long wave under the ashes.
YEAR 2009 - INTERWEAVINGS OF THREADS AND DREAMS by Anna Lea Santarcangeli
The Place as a historical world capable of arousing emotions and artistic inspirations becomes the chosen theme for the works included in this exhibition by Valeria Scuteri. The visit to Wesserling and its park generated the emotional and cultural exchange with this city and the Artist. The Mediterranean character and passion of the soul met the magical spirit of the North, characterized by the strong bond between nature and culture.
Immersing oneself in the peace of the garden oasis, both fairytale-like and everyday, has established a reassuring spirit from which the collection of the "Green Years" emerged: a carefree young girl reading on the lawn in a coy and naive pose, the Homage to Wesserling, "children on the swing" book, and the "Two Lovers" who, exchanging a kiss, become a symbol of primordial, uncontaminated love. The large and orderly green expanse recalls the purity of place and feelings that fueled 18th-century art and landscape treatises, transforming into an elective mirror of human feelings and impulses. The tranquility soothes and calms the Artist's "tumultuous" sensitivity.
The guiding threads of the origins and the two stories continue to interact in the series of sculptures and installations concerning the "Mediterranean" area of the exhibition. Here, then, are the “Panni stesi”, “Abitoulivo”, “Abitoginestra” and the various accessory objects, imbued with sensuality and metaphors of seductive femininity.
And again: evocative sculptures of pathos and mythology linked to Magna Graecia that converse with the installation “Mademoiselle”, a voluptuous concentration of feminine grace. The desire for freedom, peace, and spiritual beauty is instead found in the “Thread of Swallows” in which the graceful little birds become the ultimate symbol of love, embodying both strength and lightness. Not by chance do we find them at the feet of the female figure in “The Lovers”, almost as if to make her fly as well. The overall sense of airiness that emerges from Valeria Scuteri's works, however, should not be misleading. The manipulation of the weaving material is never random but the result of rigorous planning, physical effort, and strong emotional involvement.
What results are the brilliant and weightless surfaces that make these objects magical and rich in existential history, reflecting the general human condition and the female condition in particular.
Ultimately, it remains essential for the Artist to communicate to the world concepts that have been long contemplated and emotions perceived for just a moment, but no less important for that reason; all through the power and greatness of their own Art.
YEAR 2004 - THE THING IS “OTHER” by Pino Mantovani
The thing is "other," that is, otherness is named "thing." Even when we cross them or they cross us, things have different rhythms of existence and planes of consistency, so they often slip away using elusive tangents; sometimes, however, they collide and put our proud impermeability to the test.
Things themselves do not belong to us; if anything, the opposite may be true, that it is things that possess us: thus one can imagine that a path retains the traces of all those who have passed through it (well beyond the endurance of the last footprints); that a rock, like a protective or malevolent spirit, witnesses everything that happens at its feet over time, forever; that a jewel, passing from hand to hand, becomes charged with all the stories it encounters; that an environment memorizes all the murmurs that stagnate there in a definitive palimpsest.
We ourselves try to achieve a reification: for example, from the beginning we have aimed to turn ourselves into earth, into stone, into diamond or metal, into air, to leave traces less fleeting than those to which we entrust our daily lives, objective signs that we are not enticed or threatened by accidents and emotions. That is why we have developed some artifices that are inspired by natural processes: the cast that conforms from the outside, and the molecular substitution that reconstructs from the inside. In both cases, what changes is, above all, the material consistency, without altering the manifest identity. Of the processes, one is quantitative, the other qualitative (if the two terms can at least schematically render the type of artifice). Among the most effective ways for reconstruction from within, or qualitative, is weaving, in all its forms and with the most diverse materials. It is no coincidence that creation myths (the original creation and the one we attempt to revive by assuming the role of creators) are developed around these models, and that, of the two, the first is “masculine,” gymnastic and laborious, the second “feminine,” analytical and patient; that the first is based on a traumatic alteration, the second on continuity, in which prevailing repetition grafts the variant, triggers the error.
Among things, however, there is a particular kind that, having intimately shared our daily life, possesses a unique capacity for insinuation and provocation, a singular ambiguity: clothing, which etymologically refers to possession, both active and passive, prolonged over time. Clothing is a new skin (each of us knows what it means to “wear” shoes, a hat, underwear, trousers, a jacket; and the extent of our identification is revealed by the trauma of taking them off), but it is also the figure we consciously assume to represent us (even in our secular climate, each of us knows the symbolic, even liturgical, effectiveness of clothing). Yet, the nature and sense of perfect adherence are not lost, as demonstrated by the fact that it is not uncommon to feel repulsion at using again a skin that has so intimately shared another existence and another image project.
Where intimacy intertwines with liturgy, where the sign is so adherent as to be identical to what it resembles, it is precisely there that Valeria Scuteri—the artist who suggests these scattered, I hope not useless, considerations—acts; and she does so, as has happened in our latitudes in the higher forms of language perhaps only starting from the so-called "avant-gardes," transferring her commitment from the metaphorical to the metonymic, without for this reason renouncing the fundamental synthetic and symbolic value. Without the control of form being any less rigorous, in this phase of the work, than when the traces were lucidly intended and sought both through the traditional means of representation (painting and drawing), and through the mental tools of planning. I would even say that the artifice has become further refined, not only because it is forced to govern resistant materials with careful and skillful action, but above all due to the fall of representative alibis, regained if anything at the end of a process of presentation; as if—the same considerations by Scuteri herself support this—the garment managed to deserve the form, with the body to be dressed nullified, only by virtue of a most rigorous elaboration that is not superficial but structural, tectonic, self-supporting.
Here, then, a fixed point in Valeria's current work, even from a conceptual perspective, becomes the dress inspired by a prickly pear pad reduced to a "skeleton of veins and interlacings," left on the shoreline to bear witness to a sumptuous richness, drained of all its flesh. And another fixed point, the "from the inside" dress that pays homage to the innervated structures of Chieri's Gothic and Baroque: the two forms are more than ever architected, without having to concede anything to function, pure weaving in free space.
Valeria Scuteri approaches these structures not from a rational project, but from the “loving” side. For her, clothing and dwelling are both connected to the concept of gift, both for the one who gives and the one who receives. The gift with dignity and merit: being worthy, deserving, the merit of dignity, the dignity of merit.
An artist friend—whose loss I feel more and more—who in his youth practiced the art of tailoring, and throughout his life the art of inhabiting, used to tell me that the essence of great tailoring lies in the fabric and the cut: the fabric has its own intrinsic quality, and the choice is made based on its expanse and fold; the cut has to do with architecture, modularity, and the spatial rhythm measured to the body.
I find the two levels in Valeria's creative story, since she embarked on her new adventure: the first concerns the discovery of weaving (emptied of the body, the dress regresses to fabric, returns to being a piece of cloth; the absence of the body is even emphasized by the fact that the dress must be supported by a hanger); the second regains the image of the body underlying the dress, it once again belongs to a living being, indeed it is the strong sign of a regained vitality, in that mythical dimension that, from the beginning, we have identified with the "thing".
YEAR 2004 - MODERN PENELOPE by Cesare Roccati
Valeria Scuteri is a reserved, almost shy woman, who does not like to show off. I met her at the Imbiancheria del Vajro on the occasion of the IV Chieri Biennial of Fiber Art. Sitting on a bench, she watched the visitors who, in admiration, looked at her work: an installation with three or four pairs of shoes and a handbag, all strictly hand-woven, placed on an old shelf. A work with an apparently classical title (From horror vacui to awareness) but of sublime poetry. A cry for peace in the new season of the great horror of wars.
A few days later, I saw Valeria Scuteri again in her studio in Moncalieri: an ancient sacristy of a church (Santa Croce) nestled in the historic heart of the city, a labyrinth of small rooms chasing each other over two floors like in Kafka's castle. And there, as in Calvino's Path to the Nest of Spiders, are contained the secrets of this woman—an artist who has much to say to the people of our time. There are drawings dictated by a sure and rigorous hand. There are many nudes (mostly male) suspended in time and in a sensual and rarefied space, almost of the soul, oscillating between Caravaggio and Bacon. There are works from the evocative cycle of “embraces.” There are large portraits, wavering between expressionism and conceptual art, marked by an explosion of colors skillfully restrained, as befits an artist who has made her work the founding existential reason against any form of violence of man against man.
Valeria Scuteri, unintentionally, is a Pavese-like woman. Like the cousin from the South Seas, she is a taciturn person, as are the people from her native land, Calabria, which over the centuries has known tragedy and poverty (Christ Stopped at Eboli, Carlo Levi reminded us). Thus, inevitably, pain and hardship mark the entire work of this artist who, as a young woman, emigrated to the North to study painting with the great masters of the Albertina Academy, from Deabate to Martina to Scroppo.
Southern woman, a feminist ahead of her time, Valeria Scuteri (to whom the German State television recently dedicated significant coverage within the program “Das Ende der Mama”) paints rarefied figures that always exude great dignity and an infinite will for redemption. She has an almost obsessive need to recompose things, to continuously restore a dignified grandeur to joy and pain, to life and death. The large portrait of her father, conceived on the day of his passing, is emblematic. It is the portrait of a man who turns his back on the world and serenely faces the great journey of a new life. Even the color is serene, a subdued blue, rather than the green, yellow, and orange of prickly pears and apricots that colored the palette of her childhood.
But in Valeria Scuteri's studio, where a millenary dust filters through the glass, there is also a workshop, similar to the lair of Prague's goldsmith wizards, with large wooden frames hanging on the walls, on which the iron wire, worked with ancient mastery, takes on the magic of precious stones.
It is the magic of art, which becomes poetry when it is true art... That is where the works displayed in this Chieri exhibition were born, works that have the flavor of the sea, especially that of Riace, which Valeria Scuteri saw as a girl, walking along deserted and metaphysical beaches. That sea which, in its depths, has preserved for millennia fish, sailing ships, and those gigantic bronzes that are among the most beautiful works ever produced by man. In this sense, this exhibition represents a new turning point, one of many, in the work of this taciturn artist who entrusts her intense emotions to a diary every day. The idea for these new works, all conceptually linked to Fiber Art, was born two years ago on that cursed September 11 (but thirty years earlier, on the same day, Pinochet had extinguished Allende's great Chilean hope) when two planes of terror destroyed the Twin Towers in New York, sowing panic and death, destroying the lives of thousands of people. That day Valeria Scuteri, a modern Penelope, decided to reweave the threads of life and hope, using the only language she knows well, that of art and poetry. And, once again, the results are truly surprising.
YEAR 2004 - VALERIA SCUTERI. THE AWARENESS OF AN ARTIST AT THE LOOM by Silvana Nota
Dignity, the redemption of beauty from the degradation of death and pain, time and its illusion, but also the awareness of memory that offers possibilities for new landings, represent the core of Valeria Scuteri's recent poetics, in whose work the presence-absence of the sea insinuates itself, with the constancy of a cosmic background sound.
An epic sea, flowing intensely and Mediterranean through the folds of this final cycle, linking every thought, freeing boundaries, giving continuity as an imperceptible and essential glue to her artistic journey, which reaches this creative phase with coherent consequentiality and with the expressive choice of fiber art.
The art of fiber—which has seen artists, from the avant-garde onwards, but especially after the Sixties, learn the techniques of artisans to make them their own and create highly experimental works of pure art, completely detached from the craftsmanship they had drawn from—proves to be a perfect creative medium for the sensitivity of this silent and profound artist, who has always, alongside painting and sculpture, practiced this form of expression that until a few years ago was almost unknown in Italy, as it was mainly a Northern European and American phenomenon.
A pioneer, therefore, of innovative research, at the center of which lies the study of an alternative flexibility in the service of art, achieved with or without the aid of a loom, Valeria Scuteri encounters, with fiber art, a flexible alphabet, extraordinarily close to her sensibility and her contemplative spirit, associated with the urgency of technical, workshop-based commitment, as was the case for the ancient masters, according to whom knowledge of the disciplines was an indispensable means to translate what the soul and heart suggested. But for Valeria Scuteri, the exercise of manual skill today assumes a different and allegorical value, and the practical and conceptual choice of the loom as a creative tool becomes, in a historical context dominated by computerization, a targeted and fundamentally distinctive gesture; an absolutely complementary vehicle to the gestation of the idea that takes shape in her work through the meticulous study of development and formal resolution in which nothing is left to chance, to the improvisation of gratuitous effect, to decorative flourish. Every thread, every chromatic choice, every weave, has its own personality and its almost mathematical relationship to the whole, to the choral execution of the entire work.
The loom thus becomes for her a precise symbol to rebel against chaos with the steady rhythm of work and tranquility, a sort of philosophical refuge to find solitude illuminated by thought, and from there to be able to look with different eyes at the many facets of a daily life not always in tune with inner vibration. An almost Gandhian attitude, especially if we consider one of the many meanings that the great political leader and Indian guru attributed to weaving, namely that of an intrinsic value of psychophysical calm, suitable for the peaceful recovery of a human dimension indispensable for individual and therefore collective harmony.
Valeria Scuteri's passion for the loom developed during her childhood, when in her native Calabria she still had the chance to observe the last generations of women engaged in weaving—images of a now lost world that she has kept in her heart. Industrious and patient female figures, strong, habitually capable of long waits: for husbands out at sea with their boats, for emigrant children, for a new day in the hope that it will be better. Images that resemble Penelope of every era, which she has preserved in her soul and mind to rethink and develop until transforming them into art. Memories resurfaced during this phase of her research, together with the traditional popular broom fabric taken from the wardrobe, still fragrant with the herbs from which it is made, which she manipulated and transformed into a dress-artwork, now part of the installation “The Time to Fill.”
The exhibition “Song of Woman, Song of the Loom” is born from these premises and from a complex design process. While summarizing the previous journey around man, understood as an analysis of the male intimate sphere, it opens another one—this time feminine—explored through the play of antithesis that allows shifts in time and space, from one dimension to another, from individual experience to collective memory, from the real to the fantastic, from the descriptive to the abstract, from the search for the self to the universal. And to bring us into her story, partly autobiographical, at other times imaginary, this refined Italian artist-weaver pays great attention to the close relationship between form and content. She synthesizes the centuries-old classicism of the loom and translates it, with an artist’s methods, into a new and experimental practice. Simply by dismantling a large painting from its canvas, she obtains a “free loom” with which, using iron and copper wires (the latter being key elements of her most recent work), she develops an elementary weaving of warp and weft capable of giving life to three-dimensional sculptures and installations dominated by the force of pathos combined with extraordinary beauty and a strong visual and emotional impact. Sparkling and joyful effects, or more subdued and dreamy ones, or even those traversed by a Baudelairean melancholy, in fact represent her palette of threads in which she entangles the magic of stories that aim to lead back to another key interpretive point of this exhibition: the fairy tale understood in its imaginative sense and in its meaning as a metaphor for reality. A reality that inspired the guiding theme from which the entire body of work started: horror vacui, explored from the point of view of time, which she claims is “a time to be filled that has been lent to us with no notice of return. But also an awareness of memory that remains and defeats its passing.”
The exhibition therefore opens with the installation entitled “Time to Fill,” a “clothesline” on which she has hung an entire collection of small-sized garments, almost childlike, each one made by hand for this imaginary woman of hers who both exists and does not exist, a sort of projection of herself, somewhat the materialization of a dream to be lived with the freedom of the mind. For this work, which features sweaters, cardigans, underwear, suits, blouses, and anything else that represents the female wardrobe, she draws on, with entirely personal results and interpretations, the lesson of the American artist and leader of a feminist movement Miriam Shapiro, who in the first half of the Seventies sought to restore artistic dignity to embroidery, knitting, and sewing.
Valeria therefore uses knitting needles, crochet hooks, patiently spends hours with needle and thread, but above all she weaves. She weaves with great effort and dedication kilometers of iron wire with which she manages to give shape to her woman, who appears dressed in common materials, because – the artist further explains – “common is the destiny of humanity.”
Certainly sensual, charged with that vital seduction that exorcises death, is the magnificent red installation “The Redemption of Beauty,” a triumph of passion and joie de vivre, a flaming dress-object around which, suspended in space, swirl colorful, unwearable shoes, created to make one dream of fleeting beauty and the lightness of existence.
They are wearable art, the multicolored hats created by her hands to be lived in daily life, outside the institutionalized places of art, yet also detached from fashion with which they have nothing to do except for some stylistic ancestry, capable of receiving, when worn, new meanings—those of the wearer seeking poetry and imagination in everyday existence.
The entirely white installation (only a black motif interrupts the silvery effect) entitled “She will know, for love, how to recompose herself” extends for an anticipated embrace, a creature half woman and half goddess, whose features seem to materialize and take shape from that Greek world which, together with the sea and Mediterranean spirit, is for Valeria Scuteri a second soul. Indeed, this sculpture evokes the Nike of Samothrace, as if shaped by the wind, which presses the threads and drapes them like fabrics over a soft belly, at once Botticellian and warm, suited to motherhood. However, it is not citationism that interests the artist, who, if anything, pays homage to the past and, to fully enjoy it, projects it into the future. Fascinating examples of this are “Chieri Gothic. The past is my present” and “Chieri Baroque. The time of experience”: two tributes to the city hosting her exhibition in the fourteenth-century halls of Palazzo Opesso. The trimmings produced by the Chieri-based company Tosco, here reinvented, thus become modern ribs of the dome dress in honor of the baptistery vault in the cathedral, while the serpentine line, the whimsy, and the baroque opulence take the forms of a sophisticated column-dress. Studying Chieri, Valeria Scuteri notes: “I want to savor, appropriate, and internalize lines and colors, letting myself be taken by the preciousness of gold and cobalt blue that recalls Giotto in my thoughts. Mine will be a dusty, muted blue, not yet restored, as time has handed it down to us, full of lived experience. I will remember the sweat of the men who built it, I will ideally work alongside the stonemasons, the chiselers, and the architects; I will mix my story with theirs and thank Chieri for giving me this other dream, this other effort.”
It floats in space, as if immersed in an imaginary seabed, the dress woven with coral in mind and which gives its name to the entire exhibition “Song of Woman, Song of Loom,” a hymn to gentleness and grace that ventures into the feminine intimacy, represented by two tiny thongs more similar to dragonflies than to garments. Once again, the sea and fertility are protagonists of another highly conceptual textile sculpture “The Sea in the Net. “Shell-dress,” through whose meshes the waves enter without ever being captured, a metaphor for the freedom of the mind that no one can imprison.
The scents of Calabria, on the other hand, gather around the “Olive Dress”. Time will not erase the traces, the certainty of a life that continues and that the ticking of the clock cannot destroy. From the remains of the old, now dry olive tree, an umbilical cord-branch extends, a hold for new lives, hopes for new paths.
Perhaps carried by the tides and left on the deserted shoreline, it is the “Prickly Pear Dress. Dignity”, which encloses, without closing, the entire exhibition representation. Like the prickly pear, which is characterized by a layered structure and, one leaf after another, incorporates them all while letting them show through, the eponymous dress was created by Valeria Scuteri through transparent overlays of different colors able to synthesize the other works, concealing them without covering them, inviting a reading that cannot stop at the surface, but can and must go deeper, to discover sensations, knowledge, and cultured references.
Certainly, this latest work is the summa of what the artist is able to convey to us through the universal language of art, to give us a dream, to suggest that art is life and that its function, among the many discussed and philosophized theories, can still and always be exchange, human dignity, escape from conventions.
Stockings, the handbag, the hat, the dress, the guepierre and the tanga float in space, light as apparitions, coquettish and alluring, “Horror vaqui – accessories” once again recall the sense of a life that cannot be erased by the ticking of the clock: this is the installation.
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