Arte Povera and the resonance with it in my own work.

"I associated the idea of making new art with that of 'the voyage' and its formalisation, as far as it concerns meis a mixture between the desire to know and the desire to act, between expressing and reproposing the eternal drama to which the exhibition, a contemporary labyrinth, gives shape and physical form, as well as tracing upon the surface the final destination"

Jannis Kounellis 2002. from Arte Povera p57




" The artist was seen as one who 'mixes himself with the environment, camouflages himself...enlarges his threshold of things' and who, unlike his over theorised American counterparts...draws from the substance of the natural event-that of the growth of a plant, the chemical reaction of a mineral...the fall of a weight. In many ways the exemplar for this neo-romantic construction was Joseph Beuys, and the german artists symbolically energised fragments of stone and lumps of wax or metal would find their way into works by Arte Povera's main practitioners..."

David Hopkins on Arte Povera p170


There are some things that are difficult to express and so I have included the above quotations which put well into words my own sympathies in the seeing of Art as a'labyrinth' or a place of examination, revelation and restatement of fundamental relationships. I have been struck by janis Kounellis's interest in alchemical hints and in boundaries-see above Civil Tragedy 1975 and the charcoaled Sanza titulo of 1967. Also by the insistence upon bringing life into institutionalised situations see twelve horses in a Rome gallery 1969 In life there is always the inrush of the eternal and the magnetising/ energising of the immediate object- I am very interested in these issues from a catholic perspective. In my own experimental installation above-Vaughan Cooper's shiny shoes Dec 2007- there can be seen the same interst in energising objects, in boundary and in the transcribed eternal. Also in 2007 I approached Walsall Art gallery with the proposal of running an Anglican service in the gallery-this was refused by the curators. In the same way that I have found kindred with the Impressionist/Expressionist painters so I find a kindred with what has been termed here by Hopkins the Neo Romantic practitioners of Arte Povera.