Max Tomasinelli

What type of printing do you prefer?

My practice began in a darkroom, where I clumsily experimented with different media, facing   numerous technical, personal, and instrumental limitations. Completely flawed prints would emerge, which I would tear up and throw away, still unfixed. That randomness of wet, overlapping sheets of paper likely gave rise to my subsequent practice: collage, in turn followed by a laborious conquest of the third dimension, with a series of installations.
This slow process ultimately gave me greater freedom in my choice of materials. I use cardboard, paper, aluminum, canvas, and even wall, as in the case of my work installed at  Lunetta 11 .

Over time, I’ve decided to delegate the technological choices that best suit my subjects to specialized professionals.
Speaking of my photography, I’ve focused on large-format prints using Lambda print technology and mounted on Dibond, but during the lockdown, I was able to experiment with ChromaLuxe’s ​​Lux-Art printing from Newlab in Brescia, which produced astonishing results.

I have to thank my esteemed colleague Piero Mollica for his valuable suggestion.

What comes first, the idea or the fascination with the material? In other words, does the artistic/photographic project come first, or is it inspired by particular techniques or processes that strike you?

The idea comes first. The material is merely the means to the destination.
I believe beauty can be found in and with any material: a good idea brought to fruition with the right technique leads to beauty.

 

Do you have any Masters you look up to and feel close to?

I could make a thousand-page list. 

What arises from artistic practice is a special neutrality, a denial of belligerence, comparison, conflict and competition. 

The whole world is competitive, it’s a race, it’s time, it’s results, it’s numbers.
I think of creation as the opposite of this; at most, you negotiate with the idea so that it can be as slow in arriving as it wants, but as new as possible, so that it is interpenetration and not competition. And so, the urgency lies in declaring oneself, in laying oneself bare by doing something physiological, that cannot be held back. Like when you run away like crazy and it doesn’t matter where or how, but it has to be done. Even outside the jar. In that urgency there is a liberation, a sigh, a renewed vitality.

 
Among photographers I prefer the genuine perfection of Irving Penn, the narration of André Kertész, the unscrupulousness and courage of James Nachtway.
But don’t you envy Ansel Adams’ methodical nature? And Giacomelli’s compositional ability? The playful irony of Elliott Erwitt?

And among the artists who have illustrated, painted, sculpted and drawn around my life, I must have looked at Kurt Schwitters and the destructive power of Dada, and then been tempted by the gestural and generative, sudden, explosive force of Cy Twombly.
But I discover in my heart reminiscences of Emilio Isgrò, of Antoni Tapies, of Alighiero Boetti, of Roman Opalka, of Hanne Darboven, of Marcel Broodthaers.
It seems impossible to me not to have them as a reference, impossible not to look, in addition to these, at a thousand others.
Affinity lies in a slow processing of free contents, learned or encountered, left to ferment, of which more or less toxic, more or less painful exhalations are felt.
Here, perhaps similar to the Masters is the pain of inadequacy, which makes every soul connectable, in the honesty of awareness, to the most elective affinity.

Some time ago I passed by some medium-large sized Lux-Art prints, in which red tangles of cursive writing filled spaces, rooms, like enormous embroidered banners.

They were some works from her “Sense Out” series, begun in 2005, so similar in aesthetics to Maria Lai’s sewn books, but so far from them in intentions.

If for Lai preventing the decipherability of the written word through embroidery was a way to connect, play, make communication universal by emptying it of its univocal meaning and giving it many possible readings, in “Sense Out” “language becomes a meaningless sound to deaf listeners.”

Perhaps closer to the impenetrability of the deleted pages of Emilio Isgrò, your works reflect and become a metaphor for the failure of communication of a system, the museum one, towards its public.

These paragraphs of untranslatable words, so well arranged within the large exhibition rooms, maintain composure and grace, perhaps thus compensating for their laconic absence of meaning.

I wonder if this “Empire of signs”, quoting Barthes, has really been completely stripped of the rituality of its gestures, or if these graphic plots have retained a meaning for you, perhaps a memory, or a promise of hope.

I’m flattered by the common thread that connects you to me, Emilio Isgrò, and Maria Lai. Both converse with Nature and animals, submitting to their infinite poetry, weaving their sounds and actions.
I’ve always sought contact with Nature; I can’t stay away from it, and when I’m at home, my dogs mark this connection.
Humans exhibit language and a heightened awareness as distinctive traits compared to animals; from a biological standpoint, they are strongly relativized.
Often, our language is imprecise, inappropriate, erroneous, stereotyped, mysterious, impenetrable, uncontrollable, angry, misleading, hypocritical. The pandemic is a clear example of how language can become instrumental and biased.

My automatic writing, “Sense Out,” originates from conversations and discussions with over 150 artists, in which a significant disconnect emerges between the artist’s own conceptual content and that expressed by critics. Critical language often ends up forming a tangled and impenetrable web between the work and the viewer, complicating an otherwise straightforward experience.

From this complex network of lexical virtuosity, which unbalances the work/observer relationship, I imagine language urgently needing to conquer a role, having just lost its native function of communicating: I transform it into a sign, a trace, an electrocardiogram; physical and impetuous, it covers, decorates, clashes, tangles.

The contents, always present, are generally attributable to the situation of the photographic session during   which I find myself immersed in silent and suspended spaces, with other dimensions and other contents, as in a parallel world, made of pure whites and distorted and echoing voices, in every language and with every content.

They dissolve into an inextricable web, bound by the continuous gesture, and, shortly after the execution, they will deny themselves to me too, just as our own language does, when it emerges uncontrolled and disruptive, betraying the most genuine intentions of the sender to plant itself in the flesh of the recipient.
An underlying pain, perhaps involuntary, without fault, but still the pain of those who have not understood and those who are not understood.
I don’t know about hope; there are greater things to hope for. And I would never want to be the one who promises hope: if I were truly decisive, I would promise understanding.

Future projects?

I’m working on publishing a book of pure photography, a reportage of a stay in Moldova. It will tell a story common to many people in Eastern Europe, who find themselves having to migrate and rebuild their lives from afar, like a sad copy-and-paste, pervaded by inadequacy and   confusion.