Felice Varini
Common Places and Particular Perspectives
An inventory of the "figures" that Felice Varini has used
to this date can be drawn up quite quickly : broadly speaking, they
fall into two categories. The first is defined with respect to a fixed
viewpoint : circle or ellipse, diagonal, rectangular or square. Within
this group, different constellations are possible : concentric circles,
a triple diagonal, a square within a square, an ellipse inscribed in
the rectangular format of a mirror, and so forth. The second category
is determined by a spectator turning around his own axis, his gaze describing
a 360° rotation : a panoramic band, a plane inclined from the horizontal.
In short, the perfect exercise ground for a formalist-type approach.
Indeed, it is possible to analyze Varini's works as entities formed
of different fragments assembled according to certain laws, as figures
then, or as structures. These figures, endowed with very precise properties
(in terms of form, color, etc.), can be related to the context in which
they are inscribed (the background). Let us begin, therefore, with the
most elementary aspects, at the risk of repeating a few things that
are now common place . If we beg in at the very basis, might it not
be possible to discover other viewpoints, new perspectives ? To carry
out different speculations?
Excepting a few works in black-and-white photography installed in outdoor
spaces (Tielt, 1987 ; Kerguéhennec, 1988 ; Bienne, 1991), all
of Varini's proposals involve the dialectic of part / whole, fragment
/ totality. To form a whole, the constituent parts must be in partnership,
interdependent, structured. Each element is determined by its position
in the ensemble, and this position is dictated by the point of view.
The image of the whole only becomes possible when someone occupies the
point of view; it is therefore a function of the act of perception.
This act is not successful, the relation between the work and the viewer
is not consummate, until the latter has seen the whole thing!
The fragment always remains an element forming part of a whole; it
is never a consciously incomplete work (to be attributed, for instance,
to the artist's aphoristic turn of mind or his penchant for "open"
forms). In its absolute quest for fulfillment in a whole, the fragment
according to Varini is the contrary of the unfinished (the non finito).
It will never be autonomous. Though it may be individually perceived,
it will never make any sense outside its correlation with the other
fragments (thus it excludes all fetishism). It is as if the part bore
the traces of the whole, as if the whole preceded the port. In Kantian
philosophy, wholeness (Allheit) is an a priori form of sensible
and rational knowledge: it forms the synthesis of the categories of
unity (Einheit) and plurality (Vielheit). For Kant, wholeness
is the perceptible unity of a plurality of elements. The gaze of a person
confronted with a work by Varini circulates, oscillates, not only between
the fragments and the unified form, but also between the "completed"
figure and the space that contains it: the gaze is necessarily totalizing,
it concentrates on the synthesis of particular bits of visual information.
Now, what are the indices that allow us to perceive a work as a totality?
What unifies the fragments?
The striking thing, that which we grasp and retain from these works,
is above all the "perfect" form, indeed the figure, more than
any specific detail of the shattered contour. The artist actually has
a hand in this, since he hesitates to publish any photos that are not
taken from the point of view. The classical opposition between figure
and ground is based on a very simple mechanism: a part of the perceptual
field seems to stand out as a whole, while the rest is attributed to
the background. The elements recognized as forms are principally the
familiar or regular ones, geometric elements above all. The more these
are simple, elementary (circle, ellipse, square, rectangle), the more
they "leap out" at one's eyes, whatever the complexity of
the background. The figures "come forth" to meet our projective
gaze. This encounter is possible because there is re-cognition, identification
of the perceived figure with a known, assimilated schema. Shall we say,
getting back to Kant, with an a priori form?
This leads us to pose the following question: in what reality does
the work really share ? Is it merely a projection ? 1 All that
exists are broken lines of color, pointed in an architectural space.
My eye is what makes the work, what gives meaning to the lines assembled
into a figure and, retrospectively, to each of the Figure's parts. The
common clue that allows them to be put together is primarily color!
And it is above all the primary colors (plus black and white) that permit
these different Fragments to be linked with one another; only secondarily
does the trajectory of the broken or twisted lines tend towards a specific
figure. Even if the light is not homogeneous throughout the space, 2
with the help of color one will always perceive forms possessing a continuous
and consistent (or isotropic) identity. The use of the primary colors
is quite fitting in this respect, because these are artificial colors
belonging to the realm of the artifact and barely to be found in the
real world (both natural and architectonic: the world in which the artist
operates). Monochromy creates an optical unity accentuating the separation
of the figure and the ground and allowing for the simultaneous perception
of all the planes.
Felice Varini makes us believe that the figure appears on a single
plane. He attempts to annul depth by enlarging the lines in proportion
to their flight into the distance. Binocular vision permits the synthesis
of the information furnished by two eyes, notably the perception of
depth. Looking at a work by Varini, we automatically close one eye in
order to provoke the loss of depth. From the ideal viewing point, 3
we have no means of defining at what distance the figure stands. The
circle has no diameter, the side of a square has only a minimal and
maximal dimension. The gaze has no precise anchor-point, it must continually
adjust, without ever finding its benchmarks. Simultaneous perception
of the figure and the ground is impossible. The viewer unknowingly carries
out a process of reduction, of abstraction. He must decide on one or
the other: standing immobile at the point of view, he chooses the figure;
outside the point of view, moving through the space, his preference
falls on the background. Varini does not seek to anchor this zoom-effect
in photographic or pictorial practice, in the manner of Barnett Newman,
for example, 4 but rather to provoke a tension between the local
and the overall: or, to use a phrase dear to Michel Serres, between
paysage and dépaysement [landscape and disorientation],
between rambling and method .
Formal analysis possesses distinct advantages. It permits us to situate
the form in a precise temporal perspective: to relate Varini's work
with, let's say, research carried out by Brunelleschi or Mondrian. Certain
formal analogies invite connections between his optical systems and
those used in classical stagecraft. Since the Renaissance, the word
"scenography" designates the art of perspective, of the point
of view as applied to painting, architecture, the city, or the theater.
Sebastiano Serlio revived the classification of stage-scenes developed
by Vitruvius, on the basis of the three dramatic genres: the tragic
(which unfolds on a monumental plaza), the comic (in a street or marketplace),
and the satyric (in nature). In the first two volumes of the Sette
libri dell'architectura (published in Paris in 1545), he
groups the mathematical foundations of architecture, perspective, and
scenography as a single theme. The engravings that accompany these tomes
5 show architectural spaces constructed according to a perspectival
schema with a single point of view. The seventeenth-century theater
will replace this frontal stage by a system with double vanishing points
(views on an angle). As for Varini, not only does he adopt similar principles
of construction, but even more, he does so in the same universalizing
spirit: his artistic method is that of a generalist who embraces a vast
range of aspects, scientific, psychological, philosophical, architectural,
urbanological... and, precisely, scenographic. Operating from a transhistorical
typology, the artist uses the two most widespread scenic systems: the
focused scene that concentrates the spectator's gaze and the panoramic
scene that dilates the space and causes the gaze to diverge, entailing
a visual scanning and a movement of the head. In Varini's theater, however,
the public is formed of a single spectator on whom everything converges
(indeed, in the installation photos the scene is always empty of human
presence). Little by little though, this spectator discovers that he
or she has taken on the role of the leading actor.
Illuminating though it may be, this extremely summary comparison of
Varini's procedures with those of another scenographer demonstrates
once again that a formal analysis has neither the capacity not the will
to grasp the totality of all viewpoints. In fact, it privileges the
"ideal" point of view and ignores the shattered vision, the
apparently fluctuating, imprecise, chaotic side of Varini's art, the
side that constantly escapes us. In short, if one considers the quantity
of possible viewpoints, the formalist inquiry "skips over"
99% of the work. Whence the need to develop a phenomenological type
of approach, centered on the relations between man and space. How does
space appear to us? How do we apprehend it? In this context it is not
the work as such that would interest us, but rather the path toward
the work, our pathfinding toward the point of view. The study of the
figure / ground antinomy would have to be replaced by an analysis
of of the process of figuration. Instead of seeing space as the work's
support-medium, and the point of view as its alpha and its omega, we
should have to conceive a frame within which the work can take place
(can take the place of space), and in which the perceiving subject can
give up his place, his point of view on the world and let himself be
understood in another sort of ubiquity. This approach to Felice Varini's
art has yet to be written.
Being unable to consider all the points of view, all particular situations
without any attempt at hierarchization, let us at least select two among
the multiplicity of possible levels (knowing that we schematize things
to an extreme). Varini's work always brings two mutually exclusive spatial
forms into coexistence: the second and the third dimension, concrete
and abstract space, "real" space and the space of art (of
fiction), and so forth. Returning to the comparison with theater, we
can say: every scene is an actual and a virtual space, both instrumental
and metaphorical. Considering Varini's works both as physical reality
and as apparitions, one observes that they do not inhabit the same spaces.
The notion of anamorphosis helps us to account For the difference: "The
principle of anamorphotic painting involves two imbricated spaces: what
is recognizable in one is not in the other. The right form of the representation
is deconstructed by the "wrong" ones." 6 In reality,
anamorphosis, illusionism, geometric forms, primary colors, all the
"artifices" that make up Varini's repertoire are only modes
of applying a far more vast design, which could be called "pan-optic"...
But let us return to the terribly simplifying principle of a division
into two levels. The tendency of Varini's work to bring two heterogenous
(or anisotropic) levels into coexistence con be compared to the relay
between two levels of meaning. The work then functions as a metaphor.
In the classical definition, this rhetorical figure consists in transporting
the proper or literal meaning of a word to another meaning, which only
fits it by virtue of a comparison in the mind. For Jacques Lacan, metaphor
is the substitution of one signifier for another, such that the latter
falls to the level of a signified. In this way, metaphor permits the
coexistence of an absent and a present signifier; and in the same way,
Varini's figures (!) are based on the superimposition of two signifiers,
such that each can substitute for the other - according to the viewpoint
one adopts. Thanks to a change in the focus of the gaze, we can condense
two signifiers into the figures of the circle, the square, or the 360°
line: we can superimpose, for example, "the concrete marking of
a space" and" an abstract geometric surface."
Jean Molino very aptly remarks that "...the metaphor comes close
to the act of intellection. To pronounce or understand a metaphor requires
mental research and the discovery of new relations between things. The
metaphor draws us on to the enigma, to the joke..." 7 In
the approach to Varini's works - whose playfulness is undeniable - the
gradual discovery of the different fragments that determine a figure
does actually follow the structure of a rebus : First I am a... next
I am a... my whole self is...! Like the person who has "gotten"
a joke, the person who has discovered the point of view, who has understood
how the system functions, quite simply experiences... pleasure! Sigmund
Freud has taught us that pleasure is released by an act of recognition
bringing about an economy of psychic expenditure. 8 The pleasure
procured by the discovery of the point of view results from that fact
that one recognizes the circle, the rectangle, or the diagonal. The
immediate, dazzling act of recognition (the Aha-Erlebnis described
by Karl Bühler) thus provides pleasure. But the repetition of a
joke doesn't make anyone laugh, for the economy of psychic expenditure
is no longer operative. In the some way, our discovery of the point
of view seems to satisfy us - there is no need to go down the same path
again. Once the figure has been rep;cognized, it is known to us,
it is familiar. But Varini's advantage over the joke is enormous: the
pleusure of play can be transformed (sublimation !) into an intellectual
pleasure, which consists in drawing parallels between what is before
our eyes and what is known to art history (perspective, anamorphosis,
the primary colors, geometric abstraction, monochromy, etc....), or
to ethology, philosophy, psychology...
And there we have it: the passage from spatial dispersion to the readable
figure, from chaos to order, in a progressive illumination that recalls
what Freud (him again!) called the "dreamp;work" - that
is, the passage from the unconscious to the conscious, or more precisely,
the introduction of the dream's latent thoughts into its manifest content.
Freud describes the unconscious as being ap;spatial. The dreamp;work
is what "changes temporal relations into spatial ones and represents
them as such." 9 The dreamp;work favors representation
(the creation of a plastic situation), 10 condensation (the fusion
of several latent elements into a single manifest image), 11
and displacement (the transferal of an emotional charge from its real
object to another object). 12 These three processes of transformation
all leave traces in Varini's art, which ultimately refers us to ourselves,
functioning as a catalyst that reveals our position "in reality."
For the works function as dreams - and "the dream is the theater
where the dreamer is all at once actor, stage, prompter, director, author,
audience, and critic." 13
Theater, metaphor, witticism, dream: sites wide open to the most varied
mechanisms of substitution and transference, places of potentials and
realizations. Space - Felice Varini's material - is always another space.
Its ambivalent nature lends itself as much to formal analysis as to
speculative research: "..for if space is ambivalent, that is no
doubt because it is linked to many more themes than initially meet the
eye." 14
1 Of course these questions only apply to the painted works.
The photographic pieces present a clearly material character determined
by their support medium (waxed canvas of a specific Format), their texture
(the grain of the photo) and their color (most often black and white).
2 With respect to the photographic works one would have to say
: "even if the space has perhaps undergone a transformation between
the exposure of the film and the exhibition (APAC Nevers 1986)..."
3 The ideal point of view is also the privileged point
of view : it cannot be occupied simultaneously by another person by
a second eye.
4 On this subject see : Yve-Alain Bois "Perceiving Newman
" in Painting as Model (Cambridge Massachusetts: 1990) pp.
187p;213.
5 Also see Hans Vredemon de Vries, Scenographiae, sive Perspectivae
(l560)
6 Jeanp;François Lyotard Discours, Figure
(Paris: 1974), p. 378.
7 Jean Molino "La métaphore" in Languages
# 54 (June 1979) p 7
8 Sigmund Freud Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious
(Standard Edition vol. VIII) p.l28: the activity of play releases "pleasurable
effects which arise from a repetition of what is similar a rediscovery
of what is Familiar similarity of sound etc. and which are to be explained
as unsuspected economies in psychic expenditure."
9 Sigmund Freud New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
(Standard Edition vol. XXVI) p. 26
10 Representation: "On this path... the dream-thoughts are
given a pictorial character and eventually a plastic situation is arrived
at which is the core of the manifest ´dream-picture´"
(Jokes... p. 162).
11 Condensation: "...an element in the dream corresponds
to a nodal-point or junction in the dream-thoughts and as compared with
these latter must quite generally be described as ´overdetermined´"
(Jokes... p. 163). The term "overdetermination" is particularly
interesting with respect to Varini's work. The manifest content of a
dream or joke represents the overlapping and common end-point of two
or more associative (signifying) chains. The overdetermination subtends
the work of condensation which is Finally a superimposition of signifiers.
Which brings us back to metaphor.
12 Displacement: "This is exhibited in the Fact that things
that lie an the periphery of the dream-thoughts and are of minor importance
occupy a central position and appear with great sensory intensity in
the manifest dream and vice-versa" (Jokes..., pp. 163-4).
13 Carl Gustav Jung L'âme et la vie (Paris: 1963)
p. 94.
14 Gérard Genette "Espace et langage" in Figures
I (Paris: 1 988) p. 102.
Bernard Fibicher
retour