Valencian Institute of Modern Art exhibits Claudio Zirotti: Without Time

VALENCIA.- The IVAM’s exhibition comprising twenty one pieces by the Italian artist Claudio Zirotti in an intelligent reflection about the meaning of time, remembrance and memory. Claudio Zirotti’s pieces portray the instant. That subtle instant when the human being turns his eyes on his life and – like Camus’s Sisyphus –”returning to his rock, contemplates that series of disconnected acts that become his destiny, created by himself, united under the gaze of his memory and soon sealed with his death”. So speaking about the instant is tantamount to speaking about the infinite, for the instant is the continuous present and the “Time of the World” withdraws in a simple instant. From the moment we are born and learn to breathe, we are narrative beings, we are the temporality of the flesh. A temporality we must assume and accept, although it may not always be easy..

The “personal mythologies” of this artist based in Valencia are, to a large extent, far removed from the current critical and institutional panorama. His paintings do not challenge so much “interpretation” as apathy, that is, the present-day incapacity to enjoy detail, those subtle gifts that oblige us to set aside the usual. Against the narcosis of the banal, a line of resistance “without time” is fortunately drawn, despite everything.

His plastic attitude, free from trends and “orthodox” discourses, is as obsessive as it is coherent; aware of “what is happening”, he does not merely wish to toe the line but to give free rein to an imagery of folds and pleats, where variation is what makes a little difference, a subtlety that does not fail to have an imposing presence. Zirotti has shifted his aesthetics from stances akin to transavantgardism to a completely personal tonality where the abstract is, literally, writing, or rather a script in which he finds, as he has said on different occasions, “total freedom”.

Claudio Zirotti’s oeuvre can be understood as a seismogram of sensations, the result of seeing the event as a mixture of the conscious and the unconscious.

His works, his “rocks” remind us of a vital origin, pierce the epidermis and address us directly. They are not in the least narrative; on the contrary, they are a sort of sequence of instants or presences in which the mobilising symbolism is no more and no less than time, that thing that erodes or even sculpts. Zirotti’s pictorial “memories” are intensely abstract without thereby losing one whit of their overwhelming concretion. The dominant impulse is not melancholic but brimming with life as though he knew a secret way of escaping anguish in that untimeliness.

Zirotti’s painting introduces script and numerical insistence of the passage of time; the poetic takes on a concrete, reductionist dimension, as though the gestures and the imaginary condensations were lines of a poem or rather stanzas, in an evidently rhythmic process that permits us both recognition and loss, return and dissolution. The instant, the acts, the memories that we store in our mind like rocks cannot be stripped of time, cannot be deprived of what they are. Because they live within us, in our awareness. A desired and undesired awareness, which pleases and afflicts us, at times as necessary as it is unnecessary; in which the human being submerges himself to understand the illegible, to understand the reason for our eternal rise. Time for the human being has been a sweet and bitter gift at the same time. And Zirotti’s pieces are a perfect reflection about the specifically human and eternal that lives inside each of us.