ALESSANDRO RINALDI

DMAV_social art ensemble

Borders in free fall – the evolution in the work of Davide Grazioli –

Borders in free fall in Grazioli’s work.
At the beginning, it was the journey that guided Davide Grazioli’s work. And as so often happens, the journey soon brought along the themes of the Other and the Elsewhere. An early encounter with the painter Aldo Mondino (Torino, 1938-2005), to whom Grazioli became assistant and with whom he went on the first painting trip to India, was also crucial. “Mondino has always portrayed a fantastical Orient as a dreamlike and magical place,” the artist recalls, “but soonafter falling in love with his way of making art, I realized that he would be the last of the Orientalists, and that there could be no more like him in our times.” Rather than searching for that suspended quality of oriental time that is often impossible to find in the West, it was time for him to travel to the East and look for a more contemporary side. That is how Grazioli initially started to travel as an integral part of his work. The idea of an atelier always on the move, always in new places and ready to immerse itself in new materials and themes was born. ”Found”, “accidentally encountered” — these words are recurrent in his work. “Dieux trouvés” is in fact the title of one of the first works in which the Gods “of every brand,” as Grazioli calls them, exchange places in a digital collage that reveals apparently improbable symmetries. That work took shape almost by itself after he compulsively collected paper icons from street temples in India. Those little postcards and stickers portrayed the hundreds of little figures of the gods, “with so many more forms of the divine than I was actually able to contain in my mind,” he says. Perhaps that is why he started to feel the necessity to simplify them. Instinctively the work had become “being available” and in doing so, time after time something relevant would happen. “Paintings happen,” Mondino used to repeat in his atelier, and that’s exactly what Grazioli started to experience on his own journey. The work had to be done constantly: the deep listening, being open to the here and now. For this reason, Asia has remained so vividly present in Grazioli’s work. “In Asia, what to our western eyes often seems like the ultimate techniques of concentration and revelation of the Self, have actually been considered as daily routine for thousand of years. This is how the work evolved, allowing the many themes that fascinated the artist to be introduced one by one, or all together. At the beginning they appeared like the naive imaginings of a typical westerner’s quest for a better and more authentic form of spirituality. After that phase, something started to stir. The borders between the many concepts began to wear thinner until they disappeared. That’s when Grazioli’s body of work, which seemed rich and varied thanks to the inclusive and assimilating character that is typically Indian , over time began to reveal itself as deeply interconnected and flowing into a single macro theme. “All the brands of spirituality that danced around me like in a Hermann Hesse dream became one, without borders or Icons” says Grazioli.

This process, which started in the first years of 2000, enabled the blossoming of what would later become the central theme for the artist : the Environment and life on the planet as the only possible true object of worship. The environment and the miracle of life blends into like that “oneness”that is so recurrent in the Oriental way of perceiving the universe. An idea that initially seemed so distant and so alternative – the Whole- all of a sudden had become a clear presence in the artist’s perception. With that early intuition and the love of authors like Tiziano Terzani, he set out on a journey as a means to free himself from conditioning. He discovered that borders between cultures are never as marked as they are often depicted, but rather, porous grades of change. In Grazioli’s work we see borders in free fall, borders that dissolve the more we look at the work in depth. “True sacredness can be found in nature before it is found in culture,” the artist is emphasising, and “true blasphemy is challenging that.” Even the war theme that appeared in his work in recent years in the embroidered uniforms and military canvases is a twist on this same idea. Every war scars mankind and nature, destroying every form of interdependencies in the biosphere. Grazioli works deeply on the concept of “healing” along a trajectory where ethics and aesthetics are joined back together with the urgency of a rip that needs to be restitched.

The result is an invitation to a collective meditation in order to come back to that inner vibration of our Self that the artist recognises as a true expression of the Sacred, as an element of resonance with the energy of the Whole. A meditation as unique and urgent healing, an antidote to the emergencies the planet is facing. It is through this process that the incense, gold, and myrrh burnable sculptures saw the light. They are powerful art pieces, but at the same time they are impermanent, able to evoke the illusory sense of possession. These are works that carry within themselves the ability—literally—to go up in smoke, which makes them difficult to possess. They hang in the balance between two dimensions, between what is here and now and what’s gone up in smoke or unravelled forever. The metaphor is that of being poised to photograph the present. The challenge is to generate that empathy that can save the delicate balance between ourselves and the planet. Grazioli tells us through his work, whether it is sculpture, paintings or unravelled embroideries, that we are neither guardians nor rivals of nature, but an expression of it.

Throughout this journey, the artist in recent years has connected with the idea of the therapeutic effect of the artistic process with the concept of “social art.” This has manifested itself at times with in his cooperation with some collective social art ensemble, but even more so with the idea of global trauma healing as a form of art.
It is another step on the path to the deconstruction of the centrality of the ego in favour of a dialogue and an exchange in which art is placed in a concrete manner in the service of the community in order to enable change. Once again, the intention is stitch back torn fabric and look for a common thread.

Today Davide delivers his work mostly in the form of trauma resolution counseling sessions using a tool called Somatic Experiencing.

Alessandro Rinaldi