The world(s) of Maurizio Elettrico Artist with multi-component artistic vision

The exhibition ‘Imago mundi’ by Maurizio Elettrico organised at the Centre for Polish Sculpture in Orońsko has just come to an end. Referring to the overarching archetype of the garden, the Neapolitan artist proposed an alternative image of the world created in the interior of a neoclassical chapel situated in the lush park of Orońsko. Vested in a fairy-tale costume, Elettrico’s multi-component artistic vision originates from the cultural and political traditions of Mezzogiorno – the territory in Southern Italy often described as a historic melting pot which, over long centuries, stimulated the development of profound philosophical thought, as well as versatile and often cutting edge artistic productions. This complex heritage opens Elettrico’s practice to diverse areas of research, concentrating on the possible scenarios concerning the future of our world which is about to approach its limits. I visited the artist during his summer residency in Punta della Campanella at the cape of the splendid Sorrento Peninsula, where immersed in the bucolic landscape of olive groves, facing a breath-taking panoramic view of the magnificent gulf of Naples, he is working on his next projects to be realised in Turkey and Korea.

Marta Wróblewska: Your complex body of work, combining diverse artistic media like painting, collage, drawing, sculpture, as well as various creative disciplines, among which not only visual arts, but also literature, music, film and performance, reflect your wide-ranging approach to art.

Maurizio Elettrico: My art is based on storytelling, mostly related to fantasy. It starts with writing and develops its manifold forms into three-dimensional renderings of my literary world, using every possible artistic medium and material.

MW: This unity of arts sounds like a contemporary reading of the ancient Greek notion ut pictura poesis.

ME: You may say that, although my visual works are not simply illustrations of my literature. The drawings and paintings I create become storyboards for potential actions, while the sculptures constitute the sets on which I assemble my little theatres where tales are materialised in images. I’m interested in generating scenic effects by offering multiple sensory experiences extending from visual to tactile perception, also including audio and olfactory components, even the presence of living animals and plants at times. The seven-volume science-fiction saga I wrote, ‘The Squirrel and the Grail,’ always remains my point of reference. Its plots and characters enter the world of my visual art, making it self-referential most of the time. A bit like a labyrinthine, it unfolds a parallel reality dominated by a new powerful human species, the bio-aristocrats, endowed with extraordinary creative abilities, whose main purpose is the aesthetic remodelling of nature.

MW: What you just said makes me also think about the Romantic idea of Gesamtkunstwerk which meant recreating a certain model of the universe in both a learned and visionary manner, through the use of an integrated system of arts.

ME: Indeed, the concept of a total work enables the search for the possibility to (re)create the world, but on one’s own terms. In fact, my goal is to find the right mode of comprehensive artistic expression that would enable me to design worlds produced as a result of an imaginative process, however, based on various hypotheses of existence and the laws of verisimilitude. I guess I wouldn’t be very wrong to assume that this research is strongly connected to the place that shaped me most – the city of my birth, Naples. The roots of the stirring eclecticism of the local culture and heritage go back to the formative philosophical schools of Magna Graecia and the Italian Renaissance which – blended with art – allowed the perception of the world as a complex totality, similar to the Tower of Babel, however, understood as a metaphor of creative chaos. I tried to contain it in the ‘Imago mundi’ exhibition which concluded my three-week residency at the Centre for Polish Sculpture in Orońsko, realised in collaboration with the Neapolitan Fondazione Morra and the generous support of my patron Giuseppe Morra. By arranging artificial combinations representing a theatricalised concept of nature, I created an immersive oneiric setting that embodied a vision of celestial gardens inside the neoclassical chapel which I had at my disposal, at the same time remaining in harmony with the surrounding Romantic park, reminiscent of 18th-century English style gardens.

MW: Would you agree that there is a certain analogy between the installation you arranged inside the Orońsko chapel and the naturalistic cabinets of curiosities assembled by the collectors of the Renaissance and Baroque era?

ME: I certainly would. Actually, I have already applied this concept in my artistic practice. In 2018, I started an on-going project which I called ‘Wunderkammer.’ This permanent installation occupies over 100m2 – the surface of a grotto very common for the underground architecture of historic Naples, which I adapted to a kind of a sumptuous crypt. It functions for me both as the point of departure and the culmination of my practice (which perhaps eventually will also become institutionalised), relying on the creative appropriation and transformation of spaces into alternative entities. This chimerical and partly autobiographical visualisation of the world I described in ‘The Squirrel and the Grail,’ around which I am now configuring an open, long-term project charged with philosophical, artistic and humanitarian objectives, also opens me up to the reflections and debates connected with the concept of transhumanism and bio-art.

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MW: Have these two already entered your art in some way?

ME: I like to play with a vision in which real places feed surreal geographies. The micro-worlds I’m creating in my site-specific installations are, in fact, symbolic settings intended to inspire a more complex reflection. For example, the exhibition presented in 2020/2021 in the Rosa Luxemburg Kunstverein in Berlin, titled ‘An ephemeral banquet for the invisible guest: waiting for the bio-aristocrat,’ curated by Chiara Valci Mazzara with Susanne Prinz, was based on the idea of a waiting game for a creature from the future. It evolved around a table full of sculptured objects representing exquisite but inedible alien dishes poetically described in the attached menu suited for the non-human palate of the bio-aristocratic guest who never arrived. With this quasi-futuristic metaphor I wanted to challenge the paradigm of time and address its inevitable paradoxes, which seemed especially compelling during the lockdown period when the show took place. For me, the moment poetry becomes reality, its meanings become functional and operative. I believe that suggestive and well-elaborated symbols have the capacity to activate our conscious and subconscious choices and thus, condition the existence of humanity. The use of tools which help me achieve multi-sensual and multi-layered representations with the potential to develop into reality, is my way of entering the transhumanist discourse, the confrontation of which is necessary when we think about the future of our planet, but might be difficult and painful at the same time.

MW: Why is that?

ME: Because it is obvious now that the survival of humanity means abandoning its hitherto ways which have caused the alarming state of the Earth.

MW: Is your research on the materiality of art a way to investigate these ecologically and ethically charged issues?

ME: You may say that my art is polymaterial and thus reflects my idea of the convergence between the natural and artificial – the latter understood as the incarnation of the former. Having studied biology prior to art, I’ve always incorporated natural components into my artistic production, remaining very receptive to the surroundings I work in. Take, for example, the painted textile works I have been creating during the summer residency at Punta della Campanella near Naples, organised under the generous patronage of the Neapolitan collector and art lover, Alberto del Genio. The rare beauty of this marine protected area, full of archaeological remains dating back to ancient Roman times, endows it with unique, penetrating energy, which in the past inspired residents such as Hermann Nitsch or Jimmie Durham. Directing your thoughts towards more general philosophical and ecological questions, it doesn’t leave you indifferent. It always seemed to me that art challenged nature. But in the end, if you look at it closely, nature itself resembles an immense work of art. Let me once again refer to ‘Imago mundi,’ presented in Orońsko, as it was intended to illustrate this mutual contamination between the natural and human-created components. Through this exhibition, I also had the opportunity to start working with an entirely new eco-plastic material called oera, which is derived from polystyrene and can be filled in with any type of substance, from fibreglass to tree leaves, from aluminium to garden soil. Oera represents an attempt at aesthetic recycling and by blurring the borders between the natural and the artificial, it proposes an alternative transformation cycle which could offer creative, regenerative solutions oriented towards the future of our existence, supporting the examination of new possibilities to retrieve the nature we destroyed.

MW: Are you saying that the future of art and humanity relies on scientific experiments?

ME: In order to answer your question, let me refer once again to ‘The Squirrel and the Grail,’ where transgenic art facilitating the creation of new living forms, as well as bio-robotics, constitute the highest forms of creation practised by the super-artists. In their world, the artificial breaks into nature in order to recreate and reprogram it and to produce new ecosystems. Hence, in the end, art and nature converge into a single identity in which the biological limits imposed by the original creation are overcome and remodelled. This idea of surpassing the traditional concept of the mimetic copying of nature and replacing it with more creative poiesis would be my version of a utopia for the future.

MW: Thank you very much for this dip into your extraordinary world.

ME: The pleasure is mine.