Curated by Laura Mattioli

From February 14 to April 7, 2009

Article by Fabrizio Montini published in Exibart on 11 March 2009.

From anthropology to art, a minimalism with a human face. Simple structures in iron, wood and stone, handcrafted, rethink the environments and induce suggestions. Forming mysterious archetypes with universal significance …

With a superficial glance one would be led to consider the poetics of Richard Nonas (New York, 1936) as a mere declination of the minimalist current of the 60s and 70s. With the art of the various Flavin, Judd, Andre and Morris, just to name a few, his works have in common first of all the elementary and reduced structures, but also the particular importance assigned to the relationship with the space in which are exhibited.
The works on display, although not site specific, have been chosen and set up by Nonas specifically for the gallery spaces, and seem to invite visitors to become aware of the perceptual changes that have occurred with their location. Unlike the industrial production of minimalist works, however, all the sculptures were handcrafted by the artist with the aid of ancient tools such as a hammer, an ax or a saw. Because, in their imperfection, as Nonas writes, “numinous things, made by hand, can radiate an aura of simply legible meanings through temporal and spatial gaps”.
Nonas starts from anthropology, a discipline he dealt with for over a decade before becoming an artist. Or, rather, he reflects on the interpretative problems that participant observation, field research, cannot escape from. Words cannot convey the profound meaning of his experiences, even more so those he lived among the Inuit of Canada or with the desert tribes of Mexico: “Descriptions, explanations, understanding and theory were basic tools of anthropology, but now they seemed to me to be his problem ”.

His sculptures derive from this impasse: they do not refer to any subject and move on a territory common to man, to any culture he belongs to. Three iron bars lined up on the floor; wooden panels, some of which assembled to form crosses, others in different ways, still others engraved and partly painted red; trapezoidal plates; carved beams with pointed indentations; a series of structures resulting from the union in different combinations of three pieces; small geometric structures hung and isolated on the wall. And, in one room, four wooden beams placed one pair on top of the other, to form a square, surrounded by lightly worked sticks, resting on the walls.

In short, the famous minimalist slogan, less is more, also seems appropriate for Nonas’s works.
The simplicity of his works condenses – synthesizing composite processes through visual intuitions – an irrational understanding. Full of ambiguity and suggestions, these sculptures become, precisely by virtue of what they do not explicitly say, a more adequate communication tool.