Paolo Falcone: Dear Piero, I want to start with a ‘dear Piero’ in view of our friendship which has lasted for many years and given that your artistic journey, your history, your wandering self, have always aroused great interest in me.
I’ll begin by asking you about your origins: you are an artist born in San Giuseppe Jato, you have always lived with great ambivalence probably due to the strong contrasts of your home town, on one side laden with ancient history beginning with the early establishment of the Greeks in Sicily followed by successive occupations, and on the other our modern times affected by the phenomenon of the Mafia.  San Giuseppe Jato is a town which has produced many Mafiosi implicated in crimes such as the massacre of Portella della Ginestra on 1st May 1947 and the murder of Judge Giovanni Falcone.
In the last fifty years the prevailing culture has been that of the Mafia, certainly not a model to boast about.
Piero, tell me about your origins and the social background of your birth and upbringing.

Piero Maniscalco: It’s true! San Giuseppe Jato is a town lying in a really beautiful valley, the valley of the Jato. Just as you said, Greek colonists arrived on Monte Jato and enriched the city by building an agorà, a temple of archaic design dedicated to Aphrodite and a splendid theatre, the third largest of Greek theatres in Sicily. Its destruction came about in the Middle Ages, caused by Emperor Federico II of Swabia in 1246.  But since the Second World War the name of the town has been known for the crimes taking place in this valley, like the massacre of Portella di Ginestra on 1st May 1947, and for the growth of Mafia families under leaders from Corleone; one of many murders committed by the latter was indeed that of Judge Giovanni Falcone and his escort.  It is well known that in the countries where the Mafia prospers, there is often collusion by the government who is prepared to make compromises with them.  It’s clear by now that in Italy, after the Second World War, officials of the State and the Church made pacts with the Mafia with the sole intention of halting the advance of international communism, resulting in the present consequences.  As we see, dear Paolo, there is always a ‘reverse side’.
Like many others in the town, my family was of humble but honest descent; my father was a manager in one of the last estates remaining in the centre of Western Sicily.  I could always see in him a great openness of mind and I also owe him the freedom to first enrol at the Istituto Statale d’Arte and later at the Accademia di Belle Arti at Florence.

PF: Where did your passion for art come from and why did you choose to become an artist?

PM: I think it’s born with us, perhaps its first impulses come from within the womb, I don’t know . . .

PF: When did you have the first sign that made you realise you had, let’s call it that, this inclination?

PM: At primary school I preferred drawing and painting, making collages and working with clay, rather than studying maths or other subjects.

PF: Something else that interests me about you is how you managed, with this artistic sensibility, to make relationships with your peers and other boys interested in philosophy and other styles of life.

PM: In childhood nearly everyone is in a pure state, when an adult everyone either through external pressure or internal sensitivity comes to choose their own lifestyle; thus there are those who tend to ‘appear’ and those who tend to ‘be’. To me, Paolo, it came naturally to exclude myself from those who ‘appear’.
As an artist I had my space and my friends respected me for what I was and for what I did, even if sometimes they took me for someone rather outside the norm.

PF: Francesco Gallo has rightly called your book ‘Itinerarium’. I should like to talk about your itinerary which begins in your birthplace and continues when you left San Giuseppe Jato and Sicily to enrol in sculpture at the Accademia of Belle Arti in Florence.
Tell me about your experiences at the Accademia and about your great desire to travel and know the world.

PM: In November 1987 I enrolled in the first year of the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, in sculpture.
At that time the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence really was an international centre of attraction for a great many young people who came from all over the world to study art. On my course there were Israelis, Iranians, Lebanese, Chinese, Kenyans, Icelanders and new arrivals from Eastern Europe. Life gave me some marvellous experiences, rich in every way.
I made many friends that I went to visit in their countries of origin, and that was how I began to travel. Thanks to their hospitality, I had the opportunity to visit and get to know Israel, Jordan, Greece, France, Germany and Spain. It was a rich experience both culturally and humanly.

PF: Who were your teachers at the time? Those who noticed how you were developing?

PM: There were two mediocre sculpture schools that squabbled between themselves, and I realised that the Accademia was finished as an institution. There were schools filled by teachers whom, in my judgement, were really ridiculous and presumptuous, who were behind the times, even with regard to the avant-garde and the Biennali at the end of the 1980’s.
I became great friends with the painter Silvio Loffredo, who at the time became a beacon in my education and who introduced me to the art of Florence.
I learnt etching techniques and film-collage with him.
Another landmark in my artistic education was the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Pecci, at Prato.
I often didn’t go to lectures at the Accademia and instead went to spend the morning in the museum at Prato to see the latest exhibition, visit the library or to look at the latest catalogues on contemporary art.
At that time the museum was well directed by Amnon Barzel and the most important art of the late 80’s and early 90’s could be found there.
Here I came to know the art of Julian Schnabel who painted on large lorry covers, and I realised that I wasn’t the only one to paint on hemp canvas.
Years before I too had painted on this material, often used by the farmers near my home, while painting scenery for a theatre company in my town who were presenting Luigi Pirandello’s ‘Giara’. This artistic experience with hemp canvases was one of the landmarks of my painting.
At the Pecci in Prato I also had the chance to learn about the trans-avant garde at the exhibition of the artists Achille Bonito Oliva and Enzo Cucchi, whose interesting little fountain is installed in the museum garden, and which I was very struck by.
In the same museum I admired the beautiful installations of Mario Merz and the most recent arrivals of Perestroika art, Erik Bulatov, and the artist Ilya Kabakov, with whom, dear Paolo, you have worked and know personally.
Mario Merz was in innovator in installations, and very influential in my artistic education.
Like Dani Karavan and Ilya Kabadov, with his lessons on ‘public art’ and the spirit of place.
During those years I experienced Leoluca Orlando’s ‘Spring’ in Palermo, of which your splendid exhibitions were a part, those of Kounellis, Richard Long and the other artists who were part of your MicroMuseum.
For Palermo and Sicily, they were truly years of real cultural and artistic fervour, it’s enough to remember the rediscovery of some of Palermo’s spaces, such as the Reale Albergo dei Poveri, the Cantieri Culturali of the Zisa, the re-opening of the Spasimo, the Festival of ‘900, Teatro Garibaldi, the opening of Teatro Massimo. The city was host to great names such as Bob Wilson, Peter Greenaway, Pina Bausch with her contemporary theatre, Pedro Almodovar’s cinema. I think it will be very difficult to repeat a cultural experience such as occurred in those years in the city of Palermo.

PF: Let’s say that these visual experiences not only enabled you to see at close range the work of international artists, previously admired and studied only from books, but also confronted you with their methods of communication.

PM: Yes, that’s exactly right!

PF: Tell me about your years in New York and what persuaded you to visit the United States.

PM: After finishing at the Accademia di Belle Arti and military service with the parachutists, the United States were for me a dream and an opportunity to throw myself into the great contemporary art market of New York and to see for myself its famous museums and their collections. I mean the MoMa, the Metropolitan, the Guggenheim, all of them renowned for contemporary art which I had only seen in books and catalogues. The trip to New York was for me a primary experience; I had the chance to display my works in the galleries of the well-known districts of the city, Chelsea, Soho, Tribeca, crowded with artists in those years.
In America I stayed for a short period with a family originally from my town who had moved to New Jersey about fifty years before. I worked there in a hotel.
After a while I realised that living in New Jersey was like living in my town, too provincial, and so I moved to New York, to the East Village district, where I became part of an active artists’ community. And from there, after a while, I moved to Soho and Tribeca where I found a flat/studio to rent cheaply and where in the meantime I worked in a restaurant in an ex-cinema – an interesting place particularly with the kitchen placed right on the stage, where as a good Italian, I was given the job of cooking pasta ‘al dente’.
I think that anyone who can survive in New York can manage to live in any part of the world. At that time it was a very expensive city, with a strong dollar, and in spite of what I earned with exhibitions in the Chelsea galleries and at the restaurant, I only just managed to survive, while the kitchen work kept me busy until late at night.
The most interesting thing that happened to me at the restaurant was getting to know an Italo-American photographic model Joan Passanisi, who introduced me to New York events, though by then rather faded when compared with those effervescent happenings in the ‘80’s.
I did various shows at Chelsea where everything, I remember, was very expensive.
One day I said to myself, given who I am, why don’t I take my portfolio to Annina Nosei’s gallery?!
I realised however that it was all too big-headed from the success of previous years; can you imagine that he told me to send him photographs of my work by post!
By nature these big-headed people who have ‘arrived’ don’t interest me.
However it was another story when I took my portfolio to show Leo Castelli, the ‘saint’ of Pop Art. At the restaurant I got to know an American Cosa Nostra ‘scarface’ called Jo who went to fashionable restaurants and cafes in New York, including the Caffe Cipriani, and there he told me I could meet Leo Castelli who was a frequent customer. I gave a tip to a waiter to let me know when Castelli usually arrived at the café and we arranged that he would tell me which day he came as I wanted to show him the portfolio with photographs of my work.
After a week the waiter called me and said he had arrived and was sitting in the usual place. I got there quickly and saw him sitting there in a camel overcoat, already pretty old. He was accompanied by someone else who looked very annoyed as soon as I arrived and asked him if he had time to look at my work. Leo Castello instead was much more human than one could possibly imagine, he invited me to sit down and offered me an espresso, we spoke in Italian and he wanted to know how I had come to America from Palermo.
In spite of his age he was very lucid and he seemed able to see into my mind; I believe he still went to work at the gallery every day.
He liked my pallets, which he thought original, and I explained the meaning I gave them, as influential elements between nations. For example, pallets of arms arrive in a state at war, pallets of supplies arrive in a hungry nation, so that certain insects, even as dangerous as the ‘tiger’ mosquito, might get to other continents by this means of transport, travelling on pallets.
And that’s why the contemporary has elements of influence; with writing and letters, alphabets and symbols, from the countries where they originate, that’s why, for me, they are means of communication, where frontiers are abolished. I showed him photographs of the doors and the big canvases, which he found clearer and more laden with symbolism than Julian Schnabel’s. He invited me to his gallery, at 420 West Broadway, where he told me to carry on working and studying, studying and studying, studying and try to carry on living in New York, because it’s a very difficult city to survive in for a recently arrived artist like me!
But what impressed me most was that his colleagues were terribly jealous of anyone who approached him to talk, particularly in Italian. And another thing that he said to me that made a great impression was, ‘either add something new to art or it would be better to go and make pizzas’! Moreover, he promised me that he would exhibit the pallets in his gallery.
About a year later, on 21st August 1999, he died.
His funeral was strictly private, with Jewish rites; all the newspapers from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Post wrote it up.
And for me a dream had vanished as well as a ‘springboard’.

PF: I see now why you painted a pallet with the American flag; because the most powerful nation in the world sends you either soldiers or provisions.

PM: So my American experience ended, because I understood that in the American art mentality, they make their own artists famous.
So, either you are already famous and talked about in Europe. . ., or you are part of some ‘lobby’ that helps you get there, become established, with a house, a studio and a dealer who will sell your work. The last such trip was for a few Russian artists of Perestroika art. Today I think the centre of the new world and art economy is moving towards Eastern markets, with the new art Biennali in India, with the interesting Moscow Biennale and with the new art market opening up for contemporary Chinese art with its well-known artists in the world art market, with its newly rich who also collect contemporary art.
With 9/11 and the beginning of a war between rich and poor states, reduced to simple survival and shown as such on the maps, but with no economy to define them as nations. For example, Somalia, Burundi, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Palestine . . .
It’s as if America were suffering from a collective suspicion of permanent assault by an unidentifiable ghost nation. . .
In America people are misled by the newspapers, television, by taxes and the central bank, with its world-wide forecasts.
They believe they are the centre of the world, with the best democracy, though excluding some cities like New York – the rest are provincial.
In the cities and states round New York, public places are full of little flags commemorating the fallen in Iraq, with a patriotic flavour of days gone by.
It will be very difficult to make good the errors of the Bush administration.
Today in an ever more globalised world, art travels the world reaching the richest markets, like other speculative commodities, jewellery and diamonds, drugs, arms, human flesh, technology and biotechnology, fashion, energy sources.
I think we are living through a period of great geopolitical change, equal to the Neolithic; of great human migrations who will integrate the races, in a planet ever more crowded and polluted, where the nations possessing energy resources will control all the rest.
I have done a series of works on this theme, called Babel.

PF: I too think it’s like that.

PF: Before going on to talk about what you have been doing in your second period, after your American experience, I’d like to try and trace your artistic journey. Your first works began with the doors of 1986-87, a series where your paintings are based on man’s experiences that each day begin, or finish, behind doors.
With this basis you use a door, painting in the manner of Carrà or Enzo Cucchi, and depicting a Louis XVI armchair, a portrait of Dante or a red Bishop, all with fiery letters. I wanted to ask you where the idea of painting on doors came from.

PM: I was still going to the art institute, and at home we had changed the doors and some of them were white like canvas and so I used them as a base for my new work. In the history of modern art written by Giulio Carlo Argan, that we read at school, modern art finishes with the crisis of art as ‘European science’, so I had no idea of the most recent avant-garde at the end of the ‘80’s.
Years later, when I came to know the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo and the trans-avant-garde, I realised that for these new artistic movements any base was good for creating and experimenting.

PF: I wanted to ask, what influence did the knowledge, or non-knowledge, of those who were the artistic names of that period have on you? The time of the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo, with Tano Festa, Franco Angeli, and Mario Schifano and the generation getting themselves known as that of the trans-avant-garde, of Cucchi, Chia, Clemente and De Maria, was past. There are a whole lot of references in your work to the international trans-avant-garde, nearer to David Salle, David Deutsch and Robert Zakanitch.

PM: Well, I think that my generation of artists comes after the one you quoted, the international trans-avant-garde of Cucchi and Sandro Chia.
Sandro Cuticchia, known in art as Chia, years before, attended the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence; his work on returning to painting was decidedly traditional in the style of his and my training. The traditions of illustration and painting are still strong at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence; Carlo Carra, Otone Rosai, Oscar Gallo, Vinicio Berti, Osvaldo Licini, Mario Tozzi, Giovanni Colacicchi and Silvio Loffredo: the traces of studying traditional painting of figures and of sculpture were very strong both in the painting and sculpture of Marino Marini, Quinto Martini, and Romano Romanelli.
Certainly the trans-avant-garde has strongly influenced that generation of artists, of which I too am a part!
But we also need to consider the fact that, and bearing in mind the phenomenon of the end of the ‘80’s and ‘90’s, that thanks to the theories on the trans-avant-garde of Achille Bonito Oliva carried to all the contemporary art museums in the world, something that hadn’t happened in centuries.
In my opinion, this was lucky too because the world at that time did not have the global and economic problems and the fears that we have today.
It was a generation of artists that made some money, for a decade these five artists were fashionable, they were in all the magazines, they bought castles, they spent the winter on other continents.
Today I think the trans-avant-garde has collapsed into itself, because it hasn’t been regenerated by present-day subjects and the big international collectors don’t buy them any more, or not as much as in the ‘80’s.
And their market has finished up on television sales programmes. I mean, there must be a reason, to finish up like that, what’s happened?
Perhaps they were too desperate!

PF: The big canvases; how did you start painting them? What made you paint on these canvases like the American artist Julian Schnabel, on these lorry or railway truck covers?
To me your canvases seem to have older origins, to do with the farmers where you come from, what they used them for and their memories.

PM: I knew what the Sicilian farmers used them for, these hemp canvases, before the ‘60’s arrived and the mechanisation of the countryside. They were considered essentials for country families, who sometimes passed them down from father to son. They were used above all for the grape harvest, during the vintage, when you took everything you had picked that day and carried it in sacks, with mules, to make the wine.
That is why they are often stained by red or white grapes.
Then, the farmer had a certain devotion to these hemp canvases. After the harvest they were washed, stretched out in the sun and if they had holes they were repaired with pieces of the same material sewn on with care, a job frequently undertaken by several members of the family. Often they had symbols, letters or initials, to recognise them between the families. Then they were put up in the attic, with all the tools, to be re-used for the next harvest which might be olives or oats or wheat.
The first time that I used one as a base for a painting was when I was attending the Istituto d’Arte and on Saturdays I painted scenery for a small parish theatre company, who were presenting Luigi Pirandello’s play, ‘La Giara’. As they didn’t have any money to buy materials for the scenery, the stage manager brought me a big hemp canvas to paint on. As a base it was interesting because that type of material lent itself well to absorbing any kind of colour.
Years later, in 1989, when I was studying at the Accademia in Florence, I saw a beautiful exhibition at the Museo Pecci in Prato of Julian Schnabel’s work on lorry and railway truck covers. And so I had the idea of using the hemp canvases of the Sicilian peasants.
So I too began to think about using these canvases as a base for painting on; more than painting, it was for me an interaction between memory of an already-existing base, already coloured, with the natural colour of wine, stained, with symbols, sewn with patches, to then re-use them and with my latest pictorial and symbolic addition, restore their memories which were lost.

PF: There are ancestral symbols on your canvases, like spirals, double spirals, triangles on top of each other, words like: baroque, memories, soul, theatre, my metamorphosis. What do they mean for you?

PM: For the canvas painted with a large amphora and the word ‘Memory’, I had the idea of doing it after my trip to Israel and after having seen the museum at Jerusalem where the amphorae from the Dead Sea caves are kept and inside which they found the rolls of the Torah. What, for me, is the symbolic significance? That during their history the amphorae of the Dead Sea have contained the memory of the Torah within them.
My amphora is painted with a simple design, as if it were a transparent object where you can see the interior, where the canvas has been mended, sewn with a hemp canvas patch, during its history and tied to life, to the peasant’s work and his memory.

PF: Inside these canvases, full of texture, symbols, history and memory, the first thing I notice is a certain relationship to mythology and literature. For example, My Metamorphosis, brings me to Franz Kafka, or else the Camel of the Camel cigarette posters with Rimbaud letters. How much have myth and literature and the new forms of communication, large-scale beside the road and attached to city buildings, how have they influenced you?

PM: As Benedetto Croce wrote in ‘Breviario di Estetica’, ‘What is art?’ One defines art, literature, dance, intuition, fantasy, vision, imagination, contemplation, illustration, representation and so on.
I am involved with all of that, in a certain sense I can trace my imagination and my fantasies, thus, reading, literature, travel, history, mythology, (and why not!) publicity and the media, are all studied even at university, as a phenomenon of modernity and visual language.
My work never arrives from nowhere and from nothing, it is always linked to my reading and to my experience of life and travel. I seek to make these experiences visible in my installations and in my work, I carry them inside me like a container of memories that one day will disappear, like everything else in this world.
I think therefore that all this has strongly influenced my perception and my art. I’ll give you an example, with my reading of Karoly Kerenyi, in Umberto Eco’s ‘Nel labirinto’, Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘Aleph’ and Friedrich Durrenmatt’s ‘Minotauro una ballata’.
These authors have influenced me, have nourished me, for the work I did on the Labyrinth, the Minotaur and with mirror installations. Kafka’s “Metamorphosis’ inspired my canvas on Mia Metamorphosis, with the six-clawed lion spitting fire being the symbol of the Italian petrol company Agip.
Arthur Rimbaud and Vladimir Majakovsky – without them, modern poetry would not be the same! Bruce Chatwin’s writing and travels, I find them very close to my repressed vocation of restless wanderer.
You know that I would love to be a traveller.
One day I want to set eyes on the mountains of the Hindu Kush, like Alexander the Great, Fosco Maraini, Bruce Chatwin, and perhaps I’ll paint a watercolour of them, those legendary mountains.
I think that art is the influence of different thoughts and pictures in a continual transformation.

PF: There is one work that I find very symbolic and interesting, Speculum Palazzo Butera, set in a baroque palace in the historic centre of Palermo, very beautiful and elegant, with its pictures rich with symbolism, where you introduced an installation of mirrors on the floors of the rooms.
Will you tell me about this work and how you developed it?

PM: I was invited to do something by a bank which was celebrating the anniversary of its arrival in Palermo and had to present some project.
Whatever was exhibited in those great rooms would be crushed by the strong presence of the pictures and baroque stuccoes on the vaulted ceilings.
So I thought of creating an interaction between those 17th century paintings and the many people who would be attending this event at the Palazzo.
I thought of mirrors on the pavement, which would reflect those splendid mythological pictures of the God of the Sun with his chariot.
Whoever looked in the mirror placed on the ground, at the same time as seeing themselves, would be interacting and taking part in the baroque painting, could be reflected near Apollo or near a muse.
Then I accentuated some details with other convex mirrors. The idea of convex mirrors came from some artists from the past who used such things in their works.
What does this work derive from? From a passion for reading; starting from Archimedes’ burning glasses, to studies of the reflecting mirrors of anamorphosis, mannerism and the baroque. One of the most beautiful examples of European baroque is here in Sicily, the reflecting mirrors of the saloons of Villa Palagonia at Bagheria.
There are other examples of the rooms with reflecting mirrors of the mannerist period, in Prague.
I must tell you the truth, it was a very reflective work, and people were really interested in the effects of the anamorphosis and finding themselves next to Apollo.

PF: I too find working with mirrors very interesting, and it appears in the history of art and in contemporary art, I’d like to quote some interesting examples of this kind of work, I would begin with Jan Van Eyck’s ‘Arnolfini Marriage’, where the painter represents a bourgeois family of the time, places a convex mirror within it which also reflects himself as the painter and provides an entry into the same picture that he is painting.
Then interesting artists such as Velazquez have used mirrors in their paintings, Parmigianino’s self-portrait in a convex mirror, Titian, Hans Holbein the younger in ‘The Ambassadors’ with an anamorphic skull at their feet, up to our times, and one of the imitators of international contemporary art, Michelangelo Pistoletto, or the installations in Dan Graham’s parks. Tell me about your relationship with mirrors, with time and the interaction of space in your work.

PM: Mirrors have actually been written about very scientifically since ancient times, because as Umberto Eco says in his essay, ‘the mirror always shows the other side of your truth when it is reflected’. So one has to be very careful when dealing with this subject and not speak about mirrors unless one is very well prepared. Indeed those few scholars who have written books about mirrors have taken years to do so. For this type of research, I can quote the learned Lithuanian Russian, Jurgis Baltrusaitis, who took almost half a century to produce two essential books, one on mirrors and the other on anamorphosis. But Archimedes, whom I mentioned before, undertook his work on mirrors when he went to study at Alexandria in Egypt, centre of knowledge of the ancient world, and where they had constructed one of the seven wonders of the world, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, which reflected light at night for sailors; and who knows what techniques and theories on mirrors were required, now lost in time and in the mythology of mirrors, to burn the Roman ships at Syracuse.
The mirror has always given rise to fascination, marvelling, magic, and has nourished mythology, because a mirror does not have to be of metal or glass, it can also be a mirror of water, as in the myth of Narcissus.
It is nature that gives us the first opportunity to teach ourselves about mirrors.

PF: Let us talk about another very important work that you made in the Greek theatre at Monte Jato. How did you come to do this mirror installation, with a type of Punic-Phoenician boat on top which was reflected, in the chorus area of the ancient Greek theatre.
This also was loaded with mythology and strong symbolic references, the eye of the goddess Tanit, the cargo of bottles carried by the boat with a Dionysian mask. I find this installation, in this context, very esoteric, with symbols, like the all-seeing dominating eye of the protecting goddess, strongly linked to passing time, day and night, that is reflected in this installation.
How much did your own thoughts influence your work?
I find this work of the boat very near to, for example, ‘The boat of my life’, by Ilya Kabakov, who within this boat recounts all his Russian experiences up to the beginnings of Perestroika, before his move to the United States.

PM: First let me say that I love Ilya Kabakov’s work like you do! Paolo, I know his work ‘The boat of my life’ very well, this boat that he made, where the spectator can flow inside the work reading the story of his life as though it were a personal journey.
I think we draw on two different sources to create our installations.
His source was part, by now, of the past and the memory of Perestroika, with his works and in his creations he re-lives it, the period of the individual’s social confinement with all the contradictions of the Soviet era, up until the fall of communism.
But I draw my thoughts, as you say, from knowledge, in a dreamlike pilgrimage made of prodigies, marvels and nightmares, classical ruins, gardens of delight, or even from the tablets of Francesco Colonna’s ‘Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’, or some other mythology.
I presented this plan for an installation linked to the theories of public art or the spirit of place, naturally a design that could not go far beyond this theme in the place where the installation was to be sited, that is in the Greek theatre of Monte Jato.
I started off with representing a mirror of water. Water is an element that contains memory and could have been a small lake, representing in this square shape a Phoenician-Punic cothon, in the Greek theatre.
Then I wanted to represent a boat or ship, close to the sort of model used in the ancient world, linked to Dionysus and the Dionysian festivals, where the god entered the theatre on a cart representing a ship on which he lay.
The idea came to me of a famous red-painted cup of Greek times, the cup of Exekias at Munich Museum or the symbolism given by the Egyptians to the boat, of temporal passage, metaphysical, of the dead, for a journey from here to there.
What is the symbolism of the installation I created? The sky is mirrored, it becomes like sea or water or even an axis between the sky and the earth, where you can see the passing of time with the passing clouds which are reflected, the boat with all its symbolism, the journey linked to the myth, its cargo of bottles linked to the amphorae of wine and the myth of Dionysus, to the drunkenness given by wine and bottle as container of memory.
After all, in the past, sailors placed their thoughts, messages and memories inside bottles.

PF: I suppose that the other installation in the archaeological park of Monte Jato, the Aeolian harp, placed in a great five-metre high chair, will always be tied to the ancient myth and theories of public art projects and the spirit of place. Creativity and territory in these new creations in nature clearly emerge in a transformation scenario, with the growing importance of places outside the asphyxiating world of galleries intended to bring the public to see art in public places.
Previously it happened with those Anglo-Americans who had other experiences behind them, including Land Art, or instances of art connected with ecology

PM: Yes, this other installation of the Aeolian harp placed on the god Aeolus’ throne, that I wanted to represent with a big chair of wood and metal installed on the rock at the summit of Monte Jato, is always tied to Greek myth and the spirit of place of the archaeological site.
I became aware of this instrument which plays the wind, I studied it more deeply and then I made an Aeolian harp, always connected to the ancient myth which stretches from Northern Europe to the Altai shamans of Siberia. The Bible refers to it as well, where King David’s harp plays to the winds of the north.
But also these new theories on art, particularly widespread in the Anglo-Saxon world, from Land Art are linked to these new experiences of art and ecology.
My installation here is more environmental art linked to nature, in this case the wind and the sound it produces and thus to the people who visit the place and appreciate this kind of artistic experience.

PF: We arrive at your exhibition, with an installation, where you devised the Rooms of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth in the Agorà gallery in 2006.
This work contains so many elements; mirrors on the floor of the gallery that reflect the whole interior; there is a bull’s skull, a sword placed on the mirror on the floor and the thread of red wool that is Ariadne’s thread that runs through all the rooms of the gallery, on which an egg is hung from above and is mirrored together with the bull’s skull in the mirror on the floor.

PM: The idea for this work came to me when I returned from Moscow. It is dedicated to the Labyrinth and the Rooms of the Minotaur. I was lost inside Moscow’s underground; this jewel of engineering, architecture and art of Soviet times. After various wanderings and various notices in different languages, I met a girl who led me out of these interconnected rooms, tunnels and stations. Once I was outside, I realised that, not speaking Russian and not reading Cyrillic, I was truly lost in a modern labyrinth with all its mirrors and its decorations. I thought at once that the Labyrinth is not a myth and the Russians had managed to build one.
Then how could one not think of two 20th century tales about the Minotaur and the Labyrinth that mention mirrors and rooms; the ‘Stanza di Asterione’ by Jorge Luis Borges and the ‘Minotauro Una Ballata’ of Friedrich Durrenmatt, that inspired me for this installation.
The thread of red wood, Ariadne’s, where the egg hangs, in its symbolism representing life, that she lowers into the Labyrinth. The golden bull’s head represents the Minotaur, whose existence is not his fault. The sword represents Theseus, and finally, the hanging egg and the bull’s skull which are reflected in the mirror on the floor represent life and death which are connected with each other.

PF: The presence of gold in Russian icons and in 14th century Italian altar pieces, have I think influenced your vision, finally arriving at the American artist James Lee Byers, the artist who died prematurely, for whom gold represented an essential element in his inspiration.
Is a relationship possible between the gold of your bull’s head, that you had painted gold, with the Russian icons and with the surface work of James Lee Byers?

PM: Yes, certainly my bull’s skull that I covered with gold leaf is the sum of golden surfaces of Russian icons and the golden surfaces of James Lee Byers . . .
In spite of the centuries’ distance between the Russian icons, the altar pieces of the 14th century and the golden surfaces of Lee Byers, they are also very intriguing for my head.

PF: I find in your art a strong link with the Mediterranean, with your journeys that have certainly influenced your ideas; from Palermo to Malaga, to Tunisia, right through to living in Tel-Aviv, in Israel and eventually travelling as far as the White Sea and the city Archangel, to land in the Baltic Sea in the beautiful city of St. Petersburg, that could seem a place entirely at odds with your culture.
But talking to you, I realise that you have certain memories linked to Russia where your grandfather was sent during the Second World War but who will never return from those cold unknown lands.

PM: My grandmother lived the rest of her life with us, like a Penelope awaiting the return of my grandfather, until the very end of her life.
In the ‘70’s, when they talked about Russia on the television, as a family we always paid particular attention to any news that emerged from that great country, with its iron curtains.
The opportunity to visit Russia, from my reading about its culture and going to look for my grandfather, came years after the fall of the Soviet regime.
A friend, Prof. Leoluca Orlando, introduced me to an international journalist friend of his, Svetlana Lutova, who put me up in St. Petersburg where, among other things, I visited the Hermitage and realised one of my life’s ambitions, to visit this museum with its unique collections.
Searches for my grandfather were fruitless, it was as if he had been swallowed up by this country. With the end of the Soviet regime and its territorial dismemberment, other states emerged where the Don campaign had happened, where part of Italian youth of the fascist era had met their death. Bureaucratically it was difficult for us to search between gulags and new states, with such tremendous distances between them.
Months later I came to live in this stupendous city of St. Petersburg, fascinating for me, indescribable with its white nights and its snowy winters where the white of snow is broken up by the pastel colours of the buildings designed by Italian architects like Bartolomeo Rastrelli, and Giacomo Quarenghi of the 18th century who were called to build the most European city in all Russia.
And these Italian architects, they were loved in Russia a long time before the building of St. Petersburg, like the mythical Bolognese architect, Aristotele Fioravanti, who moved towers in 1400, who was invited by Ivan III to work at the Kremlin and who finally arrived at the Solovetskie islands in the White Sea; as soon as he got there, during the time of white nights, he thought he had arrived at the end of the world. What can I tell you, Paolo, about St. Petersburg, a city full of different styles, from Europe, from our Venice, from Amsterdam, Copenhagen, which all these different styles of art make such a fascinating place.
When it was called Leningrad it was the humanist and artistic capital of the Soviet Union and whoever wanted to study art had to go there.
In this city artists became known who had exhibitions in their homes, with their first manifestos and combined forms outside official art; from them was born Perestroika art, Ilya Kabakox and Erik Balutov, Igor Kopystiansky and Vadim Zakharov.
Or the last arrival, ‘Sots Art’, witty fusion of socialist realism and Pop Art, of Leonid Sokov and Dimitri Vrubel. There, to tell you the truth, I found a society that was very cultivated in art and very aware of what was going on. Aware of everything that was going on beyond the Iron Curtain.
For example, I discovered in Russia that the volumes of Frank Gehry’s architecture would not be so interesting without the influences of the Russian architects of the avant garde in 1920-5.
I think that Frank Gehry takes a lot from Vladimir Krinskii, but none of this is mentioned in any of Frank Gehry’s catalogues, where everything is as though it’s his own work.
Art is everything that is talked about by Benedetto Croce, that is, it is often copied without ever mentioning what style or artist has helped you to find your style.
Even if, I think, that in this world, everything has already been done, even by mother nature and we can’t create anything astonishing; (man has invented the atomic bomb) and has only imitated a millionth part of the sun.
Every day, the same light comes to us from the sun, the sun that man has invented only to destroy himself.
Today either one can believe or not that for an artist to become famous and to make his name he has to be supported by a lobby and external forces.

PF: But what was the reason for your move, for part of the year, to Russia? Was it just a reason to know a different culture from your own which attracted you or perhaps in some way Palermo or Italy had exhausted your motivation and expectations in general, in these last few years.
Or the opportunity to develop some new work, with new visual impulses or even for some sales reasons given that in some parts of the world a new economy is arising after the fall of certain regimes. Look at China with its drive towards capitalism and the free market.
And also Russia has a new economy tied to energy sources.
Or else, like an artist of past times, you wanted to know other cultures in order to enrich your art.
Beyond the experience of sculpture in wood and also perhaps contact with the nature of the great country of Russia; I think that your art is becoming richer, nourished by these studies of environmental and naturalistic art like the work you did to achieve the Aeolian harp, which you had already experienced in your country, like Monte Jato.
In the north of Russia, you got to know, let’s call them, flowers of stone, the ancient labyrinths traced on the land by people like the Vikings or Ungro-Finnish peoples, where you can develop work into nature art. A tradition begun already in the 1960’s by artists of Land Art, English and American, differently from the English, the Americans required machinery for constructing their works in the deserts, you work with Richard Long’s methods, by hand, with stone, with the simplicity of gesture.
Also with the transformation that has occurred, what I notice between you and Richard Long is something that does not want to deal with primary elements, which are the stone, the circle and the point, but with a sign that is always symbolic and which eventually becomes part of your work on myth, labyrinth, in these northern populations as well.

PM: Certainly this experience of going to Russia enriches my tireless researches that are evident throughout my work.
But it’s also due to the fact that in Italy nothing new is happening; in the whole world vertical cities are being built and changes are being made for more modern and liveable-in cities, with industries and great communication methods, with architects of world-wide fame; in Italy one goes one step ahead and two back.
I think that in Italy the church is too involved with politics and with state affairs, even the very Catholic Spain has shaken off the church. Then we can talk about the brain drain that enriches the universities of other countries, in Italy one still doesn’t understand what sort of power dominates all others.
Dear Paolo, let’s talk about those labyrinths drawn by the Vikings. But in these stone flowers, as you call them, the labyrinths have been left to us by people from the north; anticipating Land Art by centuries, the things that fascinate me the most are the symbolism and the values they give to these open-air works, perhaps for magic dances or perhaps we will never know their meaning.
These stone traces interest me, for their symbolism that can influence present times, also because they are usable in their interior and aesthetically beautiful.
What fascinates me more, what is lost in myth, and what I always seek to represent in my work, is a long journey that travels through the centuries and influences everything that it meets, giving life to new languages.
Today man has more choice about how to live in this global world, where there are millions of globalised men, who go about every day on business and travel the world where there are exchanges of experience of all types. And men ever less globalised, stationary, tied to that poor part of the planet. I think that a more rapid evolution of humanity is occurring in the world.
One who travels at high speed and another left ever more to manage for himself. Very often these people are fleeing famines and conflicts, they seek to emigrate, entrusting their lives to precarious boats to cross seas . . ., sometimes becoming just a memory.
Certainly I am not one who only looks at the world through the television and internet, even if a journey first occurs in the mind, even though it’s invisible it is not less real.
Russia, a big country, with contrasts and contradictions, that on one side is European and on the other has Siberia. And then we must not forget that the last chess game between the most powerful nations of the world is taking place in the centre of Asia, with its resources of every kind both positive and negative as well as the great atomic bazaar; so I think that Russia, because of its size, over that huge area, will have great weight.

PF: Tell me about your experiences of sculpting in wood that you undertook in Russia, the country of great conifer forests, where you were often invited to participate; the last one you took part in was in the city of Archangel on the White Sea, where you sculpted a statue of an archangel, three metres high. Just now there is a return to wood sculpture in modern art with the German artists Georg Baselitz and Stephan Balkenhol who do sculpture in wood. I would like to know if in your new style of wooden sculpture you are inspired principally by Baselitz or if it is the result of your personal research.

PM: I find the wooden sculpture of George Baselitz very interesting, but he is inspired above all by African sculpture. In St.Petersburg I came to know the wooden sculpture of central Asia, that until 1960 was made in Nuristan in Afghanistan and the Chitral valleys of Pakistan, in the Hindu Kush area, where the Aryan Kafiri people sculpted these figurative wooden sculptures for thousands of years and where they represent their divinities and decorate their houses with ‘totem poles’. In 1895 these high valleys of the Hindu Kush, isolated for centuries, were islamicised by Sheikh Abdur Rahman who put an end of this ‘pagan’ culture, sweeping away the history and culture of these people and destroying their works. For centuries this wood sculpture had been influenced in its figurative and decorative expression by the Greek art of Alexander the Great, who had reached these valleys. The little that remained of this art was destroyed during the Afghan-Soviet war that took place in this area; finally the iconoclasticism of the Taliban has completely removed every trace of this art which for centuries was linked to these mountain people, that today are on the way to extinction together with their sculptures. I find this figurative art very interesting and in some aspects I find traces of Brancusi. As you see, Paolo, art and culture undergo reciprocal influences and in my researches I would like to revive this sculpture, which has nearly all disappeared.

PF: Returning to your ongoing work on memory, your collection of old pictures that you buy from antiquarians, from stalls, old bookshops, both in Italy and abroad or old family photographs; let’s say that you have a passion for photographs taken with the gelatine-silver method.
With these old pictures that you collected in your village, and others given to you by the same families, when you went to America and made a video-collage called ‘Born in San Giuseppe Jato’.
The reality that emerged was that generations of people, born in America, for certain aspects, and gradually for all of them, found the way of life much better compared to that of the generation that had left.
Can you tell me how you arrived at video art and about your video collage; about these pictures that you produce, what type of technique do you use?

PM: The Venice Biennale 49, international art exhibition, ‘Theatre of humanity’, curated by Harald Szeemann, was a Biennale with many video artists,
After this Biennale, everyone began to make videos; everybody roused themselves and got to know the videos of Bill Viola and in every gallery and exhibition space videos were shown; if you were not involved with video, you were not modern enough.
Years before, I saw Silvio Loffredo working in Florence with Super 8; as we were a lot of friends all at the Accademia, we made it with him between small restaurants and his studio, painting and searching in the flea markets for old films that we then mounted with an adhesive on cinema film to make frames which then became film collages, really interesting.
I must say that Professor Loffredo, really, with his Super 8, anticipated by thirty years many of the modern video artists.
I owe to Silvio Loffredo my education about early films. Truly extraordinary, when you could see in the films of Sergei Eisenstein and Alexander Nevski, in particular, pictures of sculpture, or the avant- garde architecture of the German architects in the 1920’s, in Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis’ and the medieval fresco of Ingmar Bergman’s ‘The Seventh Seal’.
And, as I said to you, when there was a race to video, while all the other artists got stuck into Time line computer programmes, very complicated to use and to get special effects, I returned to that very simple film-collage technique that I learned helping to create Silvio Loffredo’s ‘Le Courtbouillon’. This collage technique became even more straightfoward with the modern technology of new videocameras with an infinity of available material, short films, frames of Eistenstein’s films, animated cartoons, leafing through books, reusing rejected pictures from television, film, photographs, newspapers, all without changing the pictures from what I had seen.
At the end this is my video-collage, very rudimentary, going backwards and forwards with the play button, constructing a layering of visual elements, with a very manual technique, that reminds me of the old directors, of a return to the picture.
It doesn’t interest me at all doing elaborate things on the computer, because then we go to professional falsified images.

PF: I think then that the early cinema you love is very focussed on in your work, with directors like Eistenstein, Reneè Falconetti, Bergman and Fritz Lang, to Andrei Tarkovsky’s work showing the passing of time. Of these, how much have they influenced the construction of the fabric of your video?

PM: Well I want at once to make clear that I don’t intend in any way to compare myself with these great pillars of cinema, perhaps we have in common the same sensitivity in loving art, all of it.
Through the cinema it is necessary to convey the most complex problems of the modern world, at the level of those big problems that over the centuries have been the object of writing, of literature, of music and painting.
I myself still ignore many things; there are too many temptations, the temptation of the shared places of others’ artistic ideas.

PF: Your last work, Recto Verso, which completes the catalogue, is a mirror on the world, where picture collections taken from newspapers and the internet, about contemporary people and events are placed in contrast and contradiction to each other. What do you want to represent with this historic analysis of the world?

PM: Before replying to this question, I need to say that this catalogue is the conclusion of an entire cycle of my life. The process of what could be called self-definition is completed. Time constitutes the condition of existence of our ‘I’. Time is indispensable to man because it can be realised as a person. I don’t refer to linear time that determines the possibility of succeeding at something, of achieving some action. It is very evident that, outside time, memory does not exist. On the other hand, memory is a concept too difficult to define exhaustively as the sum of impressions that it produces on us. Memory is a spiritual concept. Recto Verso is an imaginary dialogue, in the etymological sense of the term, in the sense that collects contrasting photographs which depict our times, becoming at the same time, the origin of ethics, aesthetics and its negation. It is as though one sees at the same time a picture and its opposite, as if the world and all of us were enchanted and carried into a great dream that is also a nightmare. Events, characters, tragedies and ordinary stories enter a labyrinth that gradually transforms into chaos, involving the co-ordinates of language in a process where it is always more difficult to understand the way and direction of movement, always supposing there is a way and a direction of movement.
It’s hard to take the measure of the impossible sublime and make it become the route, the itinerary, after believing that this was the arrival at half-way but realising that it is once again the point of departure.

PF: ‘The Triumph of Death’ and ‘Guernica’, Picasso seemed to know about the Sicilian fresco before painting his masterpiece and was as much struck as inspired by it. They are two works that have a conceptual value that connects them and they have a similar apocalyptic source in man’s actions.
How are these two works connected in your work?

PM: ‘The Triumph of Death’ and ‘Guernica’ are icons of our time and are thus imprinted in history and actuality, so obviously I am affected by their presence, by their atmosphere. Even in those moments when foolish joy makes us feel far from every danger, tragedy and death are always there waiting for whoever does not resign themselves to the fact that imagination is the daughter of life and death, that they are indissolubly tied to us, in our essence of language, invention, art.