A seasoned urban explorer, Felice Varini possesses a studio in Paris’s cosmopolitan Rue St-Maur, hidden from the street in an insignificant rear courtyard. A simple room on the second storey, the white, sparsely furnished space appears enormous. There is absolutely nothing to see here – no apparent trace of Varini’s work – yet this is where everything begins, and also where it all ends. The space contains two work surfaces – one for the computer terminal, the other for design – as well as a wall of shelving on which Varini keeps his archives, lined up in chronologically ordered cardboard boxes, and his basic equipment: an overhead projector, a light box, colour markers, blades, tracing paper, etc. For this particular artist – if only one could find a word to express the combined activities of painter, scenographer and photographer – creates his art in situ, away from the studio, and his works cannot exist outside of the spaces that engendered them. While abstract and conceptual in nature, Varini’s three-dimensional paintings are nonetheless concrete and material. One discovers them from within as one moves through the architectural space which is their canvas, exploring with one’s senses their singular staging. As for Varini’s photographs, they generally take the form of large-format black-and-white prints placed in the landscape; rather than closing the view, they open it up to what lies beyond. Varini’s interest in the manipulation of space stemmed from his early experiences. A native of Ticino in Switzerland – proud to share the same origins as the Giacometti brothers and Niele Toroni – he experimented first with drawing and then with acting. As Varini himself recalls, “I didn’t really like school, I preferred to paint. Then, at 20, I became interested in theatre. After performances our company held discussions with members of the public. These conversations caused us to question our acting and stage direction. They taught us to steer the audience’s perceptions and manipulate distance with respect to the stage.” Varini’s return to painting occurred with the benefit of this experience. Feeling restricted by the format and flat surface of the canvas – the frame and stretcher inhibited his independent nature – he began looking for the ideal field of operation, orientating his search towards architectural space and urban landscapes. The volumes and perspectives they offer are rich in potential, the multitude of possible angles allowing Varini to feel that he is mobile, to play with the metamorphosis of form and to set his painted and photographic works “in motion,” in the manner of the evolving views and lighting conditions which, over the course of the day and the seasons, modify our perception of our surroundings. “Since my arrival in Paris in 1978, both my paintings and my photographs always place the viewer in an active position. My pieces seek to provide a staged space – in a way they invite the viewer to enter the scene and become a party to it.” Rigorously calibrated, Varini’s working method is always the same: he projects a form devised for the particular space onto its surfaces, which he then paints directly. But Varini can only measure the aptness of his work once the piece has been finished; to do so he must forget the original form and instead consider the fragmentations and pictorial dilations that have appeared on the nooks and crannies of the window frames, under the cornices, along the walls, on the floor and on the ceiling. The single point from which the original form was projected has become the source of an infinite number of viewpoints. Although the observer always feels a certain jubilation on finding the focal point – at last one has succeeded in resolving the perspectival anomalies – Varini’s works do more than simply inviting the discovery of a geometric shape developed from the point of projection, encouraging as they do a consideration of the paradoxical nature of his optical constructions. For the observer coming to this form of plastic expression without prior warning, the experience can prove slightly unnerving. Varini’s work plays with scale and proportion, troubling and disorientating perception. As Varini explains, “I generally compose simple geometric forms: squares, triangles, ellipses, circles, rectangles, lines. These compositions are rendered in the three primary colours, some secondary colours, and black and white. My paintings initially appear to the observer in the form of a deconstructed line which recalls nothing known or familiar, whence the effect of perturbation they produce. As one moves through the work, the line progressively appears in its composed form. One is thus under the illusion that the work is creating itself before one’s eyes.” Varini’s anamorphoses throw the observer into a three-dimensional world of which (s)he is the driving force: it is up to the viewer whether to experience the projected form or to escape from it. But Varini does not just operate in architectonic space. His photographic installations reveal to the urbanite, whether pedestrian or motorist, the existence of a “landscape within the landscape.” When working in towns and cities, Varini’s images generally show us the underside of our surroundings, the hidden face of visible things – a garden dissimulating its fence, or a horizon blocking out a tall building, for example. In a rural context, his large-format photographs evoke particular moments, such as the unchanging memory of a snowbound path in the full height of summer. “I fix the present so as to confront time with space. My photographic installations are intended to uncover the perception we have of the everyday.” Varini’s creativity is just as prolific in the urban landscape as in multi-facetted architectonic spaces. For the “Tabula Rasa” exhibition in Bienne in Switzerland, he placed a photograph 4.2 metres high by 15.0 metres wide on the side of a large apartment building. As Varini remembers it, “The building’s owner, who was violently opposed to contemporary art, blocked the erection of the scaffolding. Luckily, the exhibition curator managed to overcome the problem. Strangely, once the photograph was up, the owner radically changed his point of view!” While he would not be against repeating the experiment elsewhere, the thought of spending large amounts of time obtaining permission for his ideas rather puts him off... Although the project he devised for a dozen buildings in the town of Linz did not come to fruition, his intervention in the central-American megalopolis of Mexico City was indeed realized: a series of images parading non-stop across the windscreens of millions of motorists along a 5km stretch of the periférico. Unlike the majority of artists, who work within strictly defined limits, Varini uses every dimension. By creating work that is not portable and cannot easily be contained, he sidesteps the temptation to make a cult object of the artwork. For him the “art object” has become a rearguard concept. Indeed he has neither a collection to sell, nor paintings to store. “I’m entirely free from material and logistical constraints. Like a musician performing on stage, I ask for a fee from whoever is commissioning the work, whether a gallery, a collector, a town council or an arts centre. This does not prevent my works from being sold on, however – I undertake to adapt them to the new owners’ internal and external spaces.” The Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, for one, was convinced, and bought a piece originally conceived for a collector eight years previously. So are Varini’s optical compositions guaranteed a bright future? “When I’m no longer around my archives will still be here,” explains the artist before the row of cardboard boxes in his studio. “They contain my plans, my preparatory drawings and a record of my in situ realizations, which will allow reinterpretations of my work. When a composer dies his music still survives in the score!”

Marie Marques Paris, 1998

English translation : Andrew Ayers 12 July 2008