Some notes regarding the use of the object

As an artist, I give particular attention to materials and process, and my sense of each has always been expansive and incorporative. Those tendencies were encouraged by my teachers, Jay DeFeo and Manuel Neri especially. Both were products of the Beat era in the San Francisco Bay Area, and they contributed to the early development of strong, still-durable assemblage and funk traditions in the region. Assemblage came naturally to them. It was simply how they built. The integration of objects into an artwork was compatible with my own inclinations, and I soon absorbed the technique into my own practice. Since then, I have looked carefully at other artists who use objects: David Smith, as one example, Stephen de Staebler, Oliver Jackson, Robert Rauschenberg. Each has been a source of valuable information.

I rarely use the term “found object” as descriptive of my own technique, however. Some objects, yes, are “found” — whether in antique stores, by the roadside, as gifts from friends aware of my interests, or elsewhere — but I make many objects, too, including the bundled letters and drawings or journals that appear as motifs in my assemblage pieces, or scraps of old paintings. To me they are all object, just objects, whatever their origins, and often I am drawn to them primarily for their color, surface, or form, and how they fit into a particular work. I ask only that they satisfy the painterly compositional values that inform my constructive procedures at all times, in any material. It is not necessarily their former uses or histories that most concern me, although the past life of an object may in fact have a great deal of personal significance.

As much as I enjoy building with objects and other non-art materials, I also have a passion for paint. And vice versa, really. I regard this tendency as a matter of heritage, cultural in nature, an ingrained Italian affinity for fine building, artisanship, and craft, and for the informed presence of various kinds of objects in day-to-day life. Italians were making superb ceramics, jewelry, metalwork, and furniture even during the greatest periods in painting. I have always felt this as a guiding force. Painting and building proceed together, hand in hand, informing and instructing one another. I need both.

When I built sculpture as a student, I often used scraps gathered from other artists. One studio mate cut shapes from steel sheets. I collected the discarded bits, the so-called “negative shapes,” and welded them into form. I liked David Smith because he built from parts in a similar manner, leaving the work open, linear, available to light, adaptable, yet true to the authenticity of the materials themselves.

I cannot always predict if an assemblage will emerge from an idea or from a specific object. It may be either. Sometimes idea and object cross at a moment in the midst of the process and the work suddenly moves in an unexpected direction. Thus I have learned to trust the process as it unfolds in time. It entails engagement, the handling of materials and objects, building, but it can be a kind of dream, too, and I must avail to this condition.

Ritorno began as a trio of panels. They leaned against a studio wall for five years before I knew what I wanted to do with them. I had a lot of sheet copper taken from the restoration of a nineteenth-century cathedral, and eventually I began mounting it on the panels. I wanted to evoke the walls in Italian villages where people attend to the dead, putting small objects into niches, little mementoes and offerings, as a way of acknowledging and remembering. Gravestones, too, may be carved with niches, which are transformed into private altars as objects accumulate there. I am fascinated by those walls, imbued as they are with the life of time, of usage, history, and memory, often secret, marked by embedded, enigmatic associations.

A variety of objects and materials permits specific types of visual rhythms internal to the individual work. In Ritorno, this can be seen in the passage from metal to paper to metal and back to paper again. Simultaneously this pattern forms the basis for a row of altars, each functioning in relationship with the others, thematically and as composition, returning the work to the image of the village wall.

Because many objects have been subject to long and intricate lives, their presence in an artwork can be especially evocative. This, of course, is the unique poetry of assemblage, as objects are recast to become a powerful source of energy in the work, and I make use of this potential. But what do such objects mean to me? It rarely seems to matter much in the end. They will evoke other things in someone else. That is the life of the work, which continues onward in time, regardless of my intentions. On the other hand, objects can also be very mysterious, a quality I like to exploit on occasion. If you see a purse, there might be letters locked inside. Or letters might be bundled, wrapped or tied with twine, and sealed. Journals, too. Some of the bundles on Ritorno contain my own drawings of gloves, hundreds in all, made over many months. More drawings are inserted into a compact. Sheets of paper are partially — sometimes entirely — covered by other materials, disclosing fragments of their contents. Each hidden element is itself a story, personal in nature, to be shared selectively, if at all.

Assemblage is one language. Painting is another. Together they create a hybrid. Like beauty and rawness. Or ballet and jazz dance. Or Italian and American. But the technique is not new. Artists have been employing similar practices for centuries. When I am painting, the same methodology enters the making process as the paint layers develop into a thick, intricately textured skin and I begin adding raw pigment, pastel, oil pastel, or collage. It is the spirit of assemblage alive in the work once again.