River stones and their past

Marginal artists are usually painters, sculptors, draftsmen, puppets or toys builders. They privilege manual creation.
Luigi Lineri draws and sculptures too, but seldom only. These two activities, however are subordinated to his main work, the picking up, interpreting and cataloguing the stones he everyday looks for on the banks of Adige river.
Playing with a terminology non pertinent to outsiders’ world we could call him a conceptual-marginal. Conceptual because his artistic act, concentrated on a purely intellectaul effort, is an operation of attribution of sense to found objects; it is a question about the linguistic possibilities of objects which are normally supposed to be non-communicant.
Marginal because he works out of consolidated schemes of art and aechaeology.
Lineri was born in 1937 in Albaro, Ronco all’Adige. Nowadays he lives with his wife in Zevio (Verona). His research started in the sixties during some trips with a friend interested in flint arrow points. He preferred to observe stones and, step by step, penetrated in an unknown language that suddenly revealed itself in the finding of the first significant stone, the sheep head. In the 70s, when his first daughter was born, he left Adige for a while. But soon afterwards he got organized to have more time at his disposal.
His work presents itself in an incalculable series of panels hanging in order on the walls or piled up on the floor. In every panel are sticked from two up to eighty stones similar in shape or dimension. Panels occupy the two floors of a building near Lineri’s house. In the courtyard quintals of stones are piled up along the fence. His explanation is necessary for a right understanding. According to him, stones are fruit of human intervention. It’s not possible that shape repetition is casual. You can find them near Adige as near any other river. The subjects he has discovered, analyzed and arranged till now are: animal heads like sheep, fish, pig, dog, equid, bovine, male and female symbols, great mothers, alias acephalous and pregnant silhouette, human head. There are general characteristics on quality and quantity. Sheep is the dominant group and it’s the most accurately realized. Pig, on the contrary, isn’t well done at all. Human face isn’t frequent.
There are also strikers and smoothers that are tool-pebbles used by ancestors to make sculptures thanks to the rubbing with water and sand. Heads always reveal themselves in profile. Besides the above-mentioned ones, others result from the fusion of two or more subjects: phallus-snouts, snout-beaks, phallus-vaginas, striker-sculptures. The sheep head mingles with the fish since it shows at the same time bleating and gasping act. Human face hides behind animals’.
You pass from a sort of formal resemblance to the greatest indeterminateness. And this is what fascinates Lineri in particular. According to him, prehistoric man created these undifferentiated shapes because they lend themselves to various interpretations. The more they could synthesize, abstract, grasp the essence of a subject the more they got near to real art. He calls this minimal representative art “masking” and says: “I can see the face in so neutral and beautiful a shape. The mask is so well done that only if you are inside language like me you can perceive”.
The discovery of faces, snouts, hiding in every stone is given to a special “seeing art”. You should observe the stone under a grazing light beam and move it in order to catch on images, through the shadow mutability on their surface. So we’ll see, for instance, a head-beak set in a sheep, contained in a great mother. Or, turning the stone upside-down, you can see now a nose, now a beard, now a human face disguised as a caprine animal.
In his deciphring work he often makes references to puns and dialect. Double meanings of words like “bird” and “pig” and some exclamations such as “porco cane” (pig dog) strike him.
Lineri, soaked in the amniotic liquid of veronese province, has been unheard for all these years, but he never was desperate. On the contrary “the fact that nobody believed in me nor helped me was useful to my deepening”.
He self-financed a couple of art exhibitions and the volume “Adige, a river full of memories”, rich in photographs and explicative poems. His perseverance, materialized in the impressive quantity of the stones, is what mostly disturbs the sceptical observer.
Lineri has not certainly stopped at the reading of the subjects but he has inquired into the reasons of their existence as well. According to him people needed stones to cross the river with herds. For this reason stones were adored and shaped as they were protagonists of rituals and magic acts. They were gifts to water, houses fields. Everybody got them and they were everywhere. As a fruit of an oral culture, their repetitiveness was linked to endless and progressive rhythm of shaman songs and christian litanies. Pagan rites they were connected with run through Catholic tradition st they can be considered ex-voto as well.
Lineri is not interested in the archaelogical-scientific method. His is a theoretical-artistic “doing” based on a syncretism where his knowledge crosses all his visionary and imaginative faculties. He ranges, with no difficulty, over Jung’s and McLuhan’s work, over his personal deductions on eternal believes and prayers, passing through reflections on dialectal word.
Lineri inquires, thanks to his fulminant intuitions, into the game mechanisms, which all of us have done once at least in our life, of finding anthropomorphic outlines in inanimate objects. A game which is very often part of art and science. I still remember Ragghianti’s definition on rupestrian pictures as “manufactured-eyefacture”, Leonardo’s spot theory, Rorschach’s test.
Anyway, even apart from his suggestive theory, undoubtedly evidence of his long lonely research remains and it has taken shape in Lineri’s fascinating collection, rich in ancestral echoes.