chute d'eau, waterfalls, cascate - Mirta d'Argenzio, 2023
J’ai peur du mot “création”. Au sens social, ordinaire, du mot, la création, c’est très gentil mais, au fond, je ne crois pas à la fonction créatrice de l’artiste. C’est un homme comme un autre, voilà tout. (…) Le mot « art » par contre m’intéresse beaucoup. S’il vient du sanscrit, comme j’ai entendu dire, il signifie « faire ».
(M. Duchamp)
James Hillman’s series ’cascata/ondulata’ is an acute and current reflection on the meaning already evoked by la chute d’eau, the famous waterfall gushing in the distance in Etant Donnés (1966). The work, one of Duchamp’s last and most enigmatic, was described by the artist Jasper Jones as: “the strangest work of art in any museum.” At the same time ’cascata/ondulata’ is also a poetic meditation inspired by the homonymous series of prints by Hokusai: A Tour of Japanese Waterfalls (1834-35). Here Hillman brings together new images inspired by the artist's town of residence: Isola del Liri.
The small town of the Ciociaria, deeply rooted in its rural context, with a strong identity allied to its history of industrial production, challenges the expectations of what defines the bucolic and the contemporary today. The waterfall in the center of the town, a rare case in Europe, is the epitome of Romantic nature. Here in Isola del Liri, the waterfall has been harnessed as an engine of production since the first industrial revolution.
The waterfall has become a symbol of the town's industrial history, overcoming the Romantic myth of the landscape’s 'natural beauties' which was painted and narrated by artists and travellers arriving in Italy for the Grand Tour since the 18th century. In the journey between Rome and Naples, passing through Monte Cassino, many, starting from Richard Wilson (circa 1755), would stop near the famous waterfall on the island of Sora, in order to capture “such beautiful, varied, and noble views”.
Hillman’s 'cascata/ondulata' works are painted using traditional oil techniques, with the use of a special rolling machine to blend the colours. He captures the falling water, transforms it, and crystallizes it into a series of successive undulating and stacked plates. The machined spheres hover above the work’s surface like surreal molecules spilled out of a production line. The paintings ripple and flow on a bent wood structure, blurring the painted illusion with the sculptural form.
The classical interpretation of the work as painting is thus denied by the ambiguity of its structure, much like Isola del Liri's waterfall denies simple divisions between the industrial and the bucolic, the natural and the human.
Hillman (1992) is a young English artist who moved to Sora’s territory in 2016, living and working there ever since. He has worked specifically between San Domenico and Isola Liri, which at the beginning of the 19th century was the most important industrial and paper-making centre of southern Italy. The study of this territory’s transformations, industrial landscape and their intersection with the surrounding natural beauty, occupies a significant part of Hillman’s time and is the subject of a passionate and patient daily practice that has been guiding his artistic research for years.
Hillman experiments with hybrids of painting and sculpture. His work is devoted to the landscape and is a meditation on the variation of light in different seasons. Unexpected and cheerful, his nature is indeed that of an enlightened landscape painter who, despite everything, with a keen sense of humour, always manages to gracefully capture in the nuances the inevitable anomalies and distortions of the urban skyline. He returns them to us transformed into details, mostly hidden in the external or internal corners of the works and their superimpositions, which speak volumes about his wisdom in creating ‘art’. With the same grace and elegance, he now turns his gaze to the nature of water movement. And so, this latest sequence of new works on waterfalls was also born, specifically conceived for the Venice exhibition, which will be presented for the first time in the space of Campo Santo Stefano by Elizabeth Royer starting from November 9th curated by Mirta d’Argenzio.
Exibart - Cesare Biasini Selvaggi, 2023
James Hillman esegue dipinti dalle economie espressive di gesto e colore alla Robert Mangold, di straordinaria precisione e rarefazione quasi illusionistica, nonostante l’accentuata vocazione plastica. Si tratta di tele sagomate di legno e altri supporti, di grandi dimensioni, sviluppate da artista-artigiano qual è, attraverso una tecnica semi-meccanizzata, analitica e sistematica quanto quella di Jonas Weichsel, che guarda con interesse. L’esito sono “pitture-oggetto” dal film pittorico ottenuto da macchine per la stampa delle cartiere o dei giornali, in cui la carta gira mentre l’artista dipinge a olio usando dei rulli. Egli stende un colore luminoso, ma più piatto e omogeneo, trasformando il supporto neutro in un oggetto artistico dotato di propria autonomia e tridimensionalità, in grado di far coincidere simultaneamente l’oggettività della struttura con la soggettività della sua percezione.
Nelle sue “pitture-oggetto” da un lato c’è la scultura come archetipo della forma pittorica, dall’altro la forma pittorica come archetipo plastico. A un esame più attento, la sua pittura è la traduzione di esperienze sensoriali vissute, sul crinale ambiguo ricompreso nella linea d’ombra tra astrazione e figurazione, forma e funzione, bellezza ideale e responsabilità mondane, cultura alta e bassa, colori apparentemente uniformi, in realtà dalle molteplici sfumature che si mescolano l’una nell’altra. Uno spazio incerto che sta a metà tra la rappresentazione di idee e costruzioni mentali, memorie di un passato familiare spazzato via dalle tragedie della storia contemporanea e la definizione di marine e paesaggi industriale quanto di impronta bucolica del basso Lazio, nel cuore della Ciociaria, a Isola del Liri.
L’attenzione di Hillman, che tiene sempre bene a mente la lezione del suo illustre connazionale Anthony Caro (che “addomesticò” la materia bruta nei lavori in acciaio, gli Steel) tanto quanto quella di Robert Irwin, è sempre stata rivolta all’estensione spaziale dell’oggetto pittorico, collocato nello spazio reale, a muro, con o senza base/piedistallo. Riconoscendo la natura “contingente” dell’arte, ovvero il suo inscindibile legame con l’ambiente circostante. Non è un caso, pertanto, che l’artista abbia prestato sempre estrema attenzione all’osservatore che, muovendosi davanti alla sua opera, interagisce direttamente con il manufatto dipinto. Diventando così, nel movimento stesso anche percettivo, con tutto il carico di illusioni ottiche che comporta, parte del processo stesso.
Extract from Vivere di Paesaggio - Mirta d'Argenzio, 2021
'Quella stessa inconfondibile luce italiana, anima parimenti le meditazioni luminose di James Hillman; egli la osserva nell’avvicendarsi delle stagioni a Isola del Liri e nelle sue articolate composizioni la immagina, evocando un suo infinito di interminati spazi e sovrumani silenzi, ma di vive stagioni e la presente, vicina primavera.'
'That same unmistakable Italian light also animates James Hillman’s luminous meditations; he observes it in the changing of the seasons at Isola del Liri, and in his intricate compositions, he imagines it as evoking endless spaces and superhuman silences, yet ones of living seasons and the present, imminent springtime.'
Extract from text for 'Primi studi territoriali Ciociari' - Saverio Verini, 2019
Le maniglie in bronzo di James sono preziose, ma anche ruvide, come le porte a cui sono state attaccate. Mi avete spiegato che sono gli ingressi di due botteghe storiche, ormai chiuse. Mi piace pensare che quelle maniglie dalle forme arcaiche e misteriose possano sigillare le storie (i segreti?) contenute in quei luoghi; ma che, un giorno, possano anche servire ad aprirle, quelle porte. Immagino che quando il sole le colpisce, il bronzo di cui sono fatte cominci a brillare.'
On 'Voyager Fleet (Unione) - Mirta d'Argenzio, 2019
Voyager Fleet (Unione) sets out to explore the passages between the aesthetic and the political that structure much of the discourse around contemporary art and its current responsibilities. The two sails flutter between binaries of abstract beauty and worldly responsibility, high and low culture, artist and artisan in order to acknowledge how the past inhabits the present and to keep in play the fact that contemporary trends and interests are always mired in the history they seek to transcend.
The sails’ metonymy plays with the idea of perspective, inviting the viewers’ implication in how they read the work: ships and their symbolism are intuited via the abstracted and aestheticised sails, illustrating the mind’s move to divine more than is present thanks to an ability for glossing symbols such as logos and the brands they represent. The size and the neatness of these pieces give the impression of a masterful abstraction while inviting the viewer to appreciate their own desire for conquest in the form of understanding.
The making process seeks to perform this further: the contemporary and the traditional are blended through the semi-mechanized painting method, spinning strips on a rotating drum and applying lines of oil paint by hand to achieve the near-mechanical gradients that give these sails their billowing and illuminated feel. The relative ease and skill required in making these sails in this way displaces the touch and idiosyncrasy of the artist, performing the idea of artist as facilitator, artisan, making these pieces for someone else to use, sharing responsibility for its message.
These paintings posit in a playful fashion that there’s no easy way out of the bind of contemporary discourse on post-colonialism and what it means to inherit certain histories and come from certain artistic traditions. These sails point to the allure of exploration while refusing to romanticise it, foregrounding how aesthetics carry both important intentions and subsequent distractions from the here and now. Both autobiographical and taking autobiography as a theme, Voyager Fleet is a symbol that points back to itself in order to call attention to all the joys and difficulties in being an artist in the world today, seeking to make work that both escapes the self whilst paying due attention to it.
Voyager Fleet (Unione) si propone di esplorare i passaggi tra l'estetica e la politica che strutturano gran parte del discorso sull'arte contemporanea e le sue attuali responsabilità. Le due vele fluttuano tra binarie di bellezza astratta e responsabilità mondane, cultura alta e bassa, presentando il ruolo dell’artista e quello dell’artigiano in oscillazione come il passato che abita anche nel presente. L’opera tiene in gioco il fatto che le tendenze e gli interessi contemporanei sono sempre parzialmente impantanati nella storia che cercano di trascendere.
La metonimia delle vele gioca con l'idea della prospettiva, invitando l'implicazione degli spettatori nel modo in cui leggono l'opera: le navi e il loro simbolismo sono intuiti attraverso le vele astratte ed estetizziate, illustrando la mossa della mentre quando cerca di dar presenza ai simboli che ricordano loghi e marchi commerciali.
Il processo di produzione cerca di ottenere questo risultato: il contemporaneo e il tradizionale vengono miscelati attraverso il metodo di pittura semi-meccanizzata, filando strisce su un tamburo rotante e applicando linee di pittura ad olio a mano per ottenere i gradienti quasi meccanici che danno a queste vele la loro sensazione fluttuante e illuminata. La relativa facilità e abilità richieste nel rendere queste vele in questo modo spiazza il tocco e l'idiosincrasia dell’artista come grande maestro, eseguendo l'idea di artista come operatore artigiano.
Partendo da immagini generate al computer che osservano la pittura europea marittima, l'immaginario che ne risulta presta tanto a Judd quanto a Raffaello, un linguaggio doppio che unisce diversi momenti storici nel tentativo di comprendere il nostro attuale, un tentativo di quadrare un senso di contemporaneità con una storia culturale / tradizionale radicata.
Impegnandosi con un'iconografia che non si riferisce solo alla storia coloniale (navi) ma anche al commercio globale, i modi e i marcatori della divisione (mare come confine) diventano il mezzo di unificazione.
Soft Furnishing - Harry Denniston, 2019
Soft Furnishing offers us a way of exploring the decorative as aesthetic category through a playful approach to paintings that both depict and perform interior design. Aware of the inclination toward despondency and passivity coupled to postmodern conceptions of surface and simulacra, Hillman’s work seeks to posit a reparative and engaging relation with contemporary painting by playing, here, with softness and signifiers of comfort in a way that’s neither snide nor reverential. Rather, he re-instates a joy in the material, interested not only in ‘the reality of the viewer that confronts the object, but also the reality of that object confronting the viewer’.
The work in Soft Furnishing deals with the commerciality of contemporary painting: Hillman is interested in the commonplace migration of a painting through a commercialised space to a domestic one. His paintings are both focused and extended by wallpapering and floor tiles that maintain the paintings’ language of strived-for softness whilst prompting questions as to the extent or power of their decorative effect, as well as of the artist’s sense of control in organising how his or her work comes to ‘end up’ in a space. The textures the work purports to represent – luxurious fabrics that tend to signify a person’s personal space and which, as Hillman points out, seem ‘un-hygienic’ when put in a social context – intimate overindulgence, but the wallpaper and floor tiles dramatise limit by both extending and dwindling the work. There is a deliberate overshooting at play here that illustrates an artist’s desire for control over the afterlife of their work by pre-instating this ‘death’ into life, the decorative already in the artistic.
Hillman, then, seeks to make the language of decoration as luxury, baroque and moneyed clear so as to dissemble it, obvious so as to confound it. The play between two- and three-dimensionality encourages engagement thanks to the work’s purported plushness and apparent tactility: you want to see them as real; you acknowledge your desire to suspend disbelief, feel the softness or fondness of your way of seeing. Whilst these pieces have been made using a semi-mechanized spinning drum created by Hilllman to harness a kind of industrially-produced effect, they are themselves oil paintings, blending and blurring therein a classical language associated with old masters’ uniqueness of touch.
Through this playful confounding of senses and traditions, Hillman moves towards an acknowledgement of the inherent potential in an artwork’s decorativeness, and seeks to free this as a rich and difficult category precisely thanks to its ability to accommodate conflicting impulses and associations. Through playing with the excessiveness of decoration, Hillman both dummies the potential commerciality of his work and points toward the incessant potential that inheres in any category that comes to be derided as incompatible with art.
Miami, UNTITLED - Giulia Mangoni, 2017
James Hillman’s new work plays with the trans-historic motif of the snake, re-interpreting elements from its archaic symbolism and translating them into contemporary, industrial renditions. The guttural, sensuous nature of the original stories, be it Babylonian creation myths to Medieval tales – acknowledge the dual symbol of the snake as destroyer and creator, victim and perpetrator.
Either ferociously whole, dogmatically re-assembled or coiled up in moments of agonizing death, the snake refuses to be always the monster, presenting itself to us in its many guises. Through the meditation and dissection of the horizon on the picture plane, a balance occurs between structured human intervention and fluid organic form. The subterranean world acts as home for the chthonic being, whose concurring relevance winds its way through to contemporary contexts
Either ferociously whole, dogmatically re-assembled or coiled up in moments of agonizing death, the snake refuses to be always the monster, presenting itself to us in its many guises. Through the meditation and dissection of the horizon on the picture plane, a balance occurs between structured human intervention and fluid organic form. The subterranean world acts as home for the chthonic being, whose concurring relevance winds its way through to contemporary contexts