Luigi Lineri between adventure

In other previous occasions, intervening on Luigi Lineri’s research work, I paradoxically predicted that the many years past on the Adige river-bed picking up stones and pebbles were decisive for the expressiveness of a plastic sequence of extraordinary formal and poetic incisiveness. And this to the prejudice of a significant theory on the scientific themes that finds are not “found objects” but works of art of far off and primordial inhabitants of the plain and the watres which Zevio and its environs are.
As a matter of fact so an exorbitant and even colossal imaginary operation is so lined up with the poetics of “modern” that it certainly doesn’t need the confirmation of the insiders of naturalistic sciences; on the contrary, as I said, the confirmation, fortunately still a good way from coming, by scientists would, according to me, deprive the personage Lineri, the poet Lineri, of a wonderful fascination charge that scientific “finding out” could never give him back against the gold and the heroic, on the other hand, consonant with art adventure.
Ulysses, Promethium, Icarus are some of the most relevant mythical references of modern culture. And Lineri’ fantastic journey inside Adige heaps of stones, his desire of recovering or “stealing” shapes-images of the river and the time, his imaginary and abounding in images flight inside the abyssal mystery of past-present (the supposed archaic, the physical reality of finds...) easily fit together, once again, memorable history in the lonely daily emphasis of finding oneself and life with the obstinate tension of a new museum conception, as a collection of cyclical facts and inventions,but felt to the point of giving them back a breath and a leaven near the seasons, individual and human hours.
One can object that it’s easy to play the devil’s advocate, and that in this way you loose in advance the defiance at the archaic; while, from poet to poet, I’d rather try to “raise” Lineri up to the most symbolic and incisive line of modern sculpture, maybe on the heels of Brancusi, Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Arturo Martini or to the nearer, from a geographical point of view, venetian Viani.
Therefore not a “giving in” but an almost savage precise definition and as stubborn as Lineri’s monumental and articulate “world” in his immense stone library with stones that are tools, animals, organs; that is to say vital expressive allusive experience and finally precise and inextinguishable gestures of poetic provocation and syllabification.
Coming to the art exhibition, it’s worth noticing how its didactic “scientific” sequence is, at the same time and on purpose, a method research, a non-historical and meaningful procedure communication on language and expressive language. Lineri, in fact, puts the “key” in primis, that’s to say an axe shape, a blade, but polysignificnat, rich in openings, almost a circle angle, inside the tension which unifies the physical and dialectical development of images and shapes, of meanings and their expressive and physical fullness.
And so it happens that the “key” in its development assumes, or suggests, the look of the animal snout of the dog and the sheep that, in plain terms, is also the “a-b-c” of the infantile expressive beginning, therefore even in the imaginary the expressive beginning of the beginning. But the sequence keeps up its dance and the movement spurts in the snout turning up, in search for air and sky or, better, space and unknown; Icarus and Ulysses again? Suddenly the earth animal snoutturns into the possible look of the bird, its thin head drinking air and, almost in agreement or together, phallic symbols as well, that mean life, continuity; or, maybe, Promethium stealing fire from gods, in other words life, birth, warmth?
From “key” to “key” come out objects, pebbles, smooth stones, still ambivalent, and they’re all the possible snouts in the up and down movement even if in a ferine and maybe dangerous reading: the dog, but the fox and the wolf as well...
Lineri’s speech runs and chases itself, like a lyric tale or a series of discoveries that are always, in any case, expressive language and narrative film but in a non-rectilinear and cyclical movement just like man from time immemorial.
If tension calms down and comes back in ordinary and known space, in the river-bed, image turns recurrence, habit, caressed and caressable, soft and intimate motive: the sheep snout with all its tactile, use, warm intimity implications.
And then another jump occurs and the linguistic process passes from unconscious to conscious because out of somatism, copy, mimesis you go into invention, in the structure of geometric synthesis.Knowledge isn’t merely symbolic, considering that there’s also the supposable discovery of other more unusual animals as, for example, deers.
At this point Lineri performs a creative deviation and finds a new forward escape in his hard attempts of representing animals like elk, bison or the more usual goat that have the novelty of the beard, the underlying tuft, very averse from becoming stone or closed block.
The representable event or the natural processes of wind and water are manifold and in itinere while the methodological language gives them an identity, a provenience, an aim, a memory. Synthesized in X-shape animals come out; images referable to equines, so near and far at the same time as to speed, tameness, intelligence.
Finally, after terrestrial animal, after the birds – masters of the sky – here are the fish, that repeat simultaneously a riedition of phallic hypothesis but overcoming the simple mimesis with a difficult operation, that tries to identify, as the protuberant beard before, the high eye, so evasive from expression and its “design”.
Swimming in the liquid; phallus; eye; three very different hypotheses which mean, Lineri would say, another identification with other natural and expressive elements even as a real figurative investigation inside water that makes uneasy and different every shape and semblance.
To sum up, but only from a theoretical point of a supposed expositive scenery and not explicative identification of the immensity of the proposals of the sculptor or stone entomologist Lineri, here are the previous shapes, now “cooked”, summarizable in the metal season: as a confirmation, Lineri says, of method and its scientific quality but also, I think, of liberation in the sense of arriving to the shape-image with the sophisticated poverty of other natural materials, less antural since man subjected them to an evident and use trouble. The discovery of physicities, surface, weight, greater new cellular aspects, of life inside life and the happening also astonishing (fire), taking us slightly to Promethium, puts Lineri in a sphere of modernity already acquired by the contemporary expressive climate of significant or autosignificant material, as an appeal not to the shapes but to their internal and never subdued vitality.
At this point the option of poetry and art can fascinate with the art exhibition a fundamental component of Lineri’s work, but it can also impoverish his bold purpose of having memorized the past; my task was this and notwithstanding all the doubts I’ve got on the authentic and not casual elaborate of shapes and images, I don’t intend to invade fields, mined for me, like the scientific ones to which alternative hypotheses are tied. Anyway Lineri exists and I believe that it’s not only a “case” or a nice but fortuitous accident.
Therefore adventure or investigation? Poetry or discovery? Here they are, always together as human realities, human news, and hardly divisible, hardly lined up as in a sport race, most of all if you consider the epos they represent in both of the eventualities, possible or impossible, they aspire to.