Interview in the occasion of the exhibition

Antonio Grulli: I want to start from the idea of underground spaces you have been working on in the last few years: the hypogeum. It is the concept that links most of your work and mine, since I’ve been researching a lot around it too, and starting also from premises not so far from yours. My starting point was the friction between iconoclasty and what we can call iconophilia or iconodulia. I would have never imagined until ten years ago we would face a new huge wave in iconoclasty and censorship of images. Today images are in serious danger: we saw in the last years a not only cultural war for the power of images in social networks and on the internet where many things cannot be shown for cultural, religious, gender, cultural identity reasons, etc. We saw censorship canceling shows of Philip Guston, fighting against Balthus and his young girls, and trying to present as criminal the images of Egon Schiele (I loved how an Austrian Museum used OnlyFans to communicate the show). But we also saw the destruction of Ninive and Palmira in Siria; the ceiling of Agya Sofia in Istanbul been covered again and made invisible to the eyes; we saw a terrorist attack at the Bardo Museum in Tunis one tempt to do another at the Louvre in Paris. So iconoclasty is here with us, alive and kicking. Art is in danger today as it has never been in the last decades.

Your research is based on the first examples of Byzantine paintings in caves and raw churches. In Italy, we have a city, Matera, which got inhabited by a huge wave of people escaping the iconoclast war in the East Roman Empire. They started living there and painting in the caves also as a way to escape from the iconoclast, exactly like the first Christians in catacombs.

So in the last years, we again see the possibility of bringing art underground again as a way to save it. We already have a complete militarization of art institutions all around the world: there are metal detectors, guards with weapons, cameras everywhere. Once Andy Warhol said “In the future all the department stores will become museums and all the museums will become department stores”. The time showed us he was a prophet. We should update his prophecy saying “In the future, all the museums will become military compounds and all the military compounds will become museums” (UN is already moving in that direction trying to become a force able to protect art and archeological sites all around the world). Maybe the bunker is the next white cube? Why not.

I think in art we should always be able to see everything in a constructive way and to turn everything into new doors of discoveries. First of all, there is a good sign in this war against images and art today: it means art still has huge power, it is still something scaring, something telluric, something still able to make us bleed, something still able to produce disquiet, Polemos, energy, still able to put under question all the certainties we have in our soul; art, thanks god, is not entertainment, it is not a patronizing tool to educate the folks, it's not a comfortable sofa the mind of people can sit on. Good art has to be seen as a revolution and that's how every good artist from the past has been seen as a dangerous person.

On top of this we should never forget the first art humanity produced (at least the surviving ones) was made in caves, and also with huge results. A genius like Hans Hollein understood it when he proposed an underground museum in Salzburg as the new Guggenheim; a sort of negative of the one in New York somehow. He also put in the rendering of the museum rooms images of tigers and big animals painted in some Pop style as an ironic allusion to the first cave painting humanity did. For sure he understood also we need a way to go beyond the glass facade and white walls. Maybe the question behind Holleins project was: are museums of today really obliged to look like banks' headquarters or malls?

I loved the way you are bringing back painting to an underground space, which also strongly reconnected it with a space of intense sacrality, one of the reasons art started to be made, and one of the reasons why, up until a few centuries ago, art was created at all. Is maybe art dying of too much light, of too much visibility?

Nina Zeljković: My interest in underground spaces began with some classical painterly questions about representation and my uneasiness around figuration. I started researching the iconic regime of the Byzantine empire and ended up in the early Christian catacombs. Their ideas at the time were too hot to handle so they had to take them underground, where these ideas continued to develop in the caves and around tables for selected groups. And soon these dissident ideas would destroy the antique “rational” naturalist image of the world (the image that would be resurrected in the Renaissance) and already here begun the autonomy of the image that would be further developed in modernism. The Underground was always the most fruitful place for radical ideas. And where is the underground today? Peter Lamborn Willson suggests temporary autonomous zones, as a socio-political tactic of creating temporary spaces that avoid formal structures of control. For him online community is an oxymoron, it is required meeting in person of three or more people to have have a community.

And i think it was Angela Nagel who made an interesting point that it is easier to publish today in the physical newspaper than on Twitter, where one can get reported in no time,  while the printed matter has its urgency and its irrevocability… So one could argue that one can descend underground by going offline. For me, my studio space is a bunker, and a monk cave, a place of urgency and a refuge.

And what is our situation today? As said by Ivan Illich: “Even today, I feel guilty if I find my attention distracted from a medieval Latin text by the afterglow of the MTV to which I exposed my eyes”. 

AG: A book that has been super important for me in the last years is the Dostoevskij’s Memory of the Underground. I’m sure you read it. And is amazing how he used two architectural metaphors as the backbone of the book: the Crystal Palace in London, the space of rationality, made of glass and iron, where everything is visible, but also where everything is under control, and where the dark sides of man are not conceivable, where the shades of human being are not possible, and its opposition, the space of the underground, where his miserable man lives, a space where all desires and fears we are made of can still have a citizenship, where a man can have dreams and not only rationality, a space where freedom is still possible even if apparently useless in the time of rational science.

NZ: When you evoke the rationality of the crystal palace, here is where the parallel can be drawn to the central point perspective that reached its peak in the renaissance and its rational worldview. “The new naturalists want the object to be shown as it is in itself; they want a blueprint of the object that can be used by an artisan who has to reconstruct it as a three-dimensional model. They want measures, not views. They look at the world, more architectonic, according to the layout of architectural drawings. They do not want a facsimile of vision, but an isometric plan of things. They want to adorn their textbooks, not with views, but with maps. They want to show a biological specimen, not as it looks when you hold and turn it in your hand, but as you can photograph it with a powerful telephoto lens on the farther shore of “objective reality”” (Ivan Illich).   

The reality of one's body and the bodily experience differs from the rational model of the single point perspective, in the reverse perspective we have the body with two eyes moving through space. Not every show can be grasped through our phones. And our brain can trick us into believing that we have seen the show, even if we saw it in the size of our palm, we have a rational grasp of it but did we participate with our senses? Did we approach this body of work with our body? 

How did it affect us? And I got increasingly interested in the way the Byzantine scopic regime gets the body involved. This is something i would like to resurrect within my painting practice by inviting the reverse perspective model into the painting. So i guess that i paint with my body for the body. It brings us back to the painting's fleshly presence.