A Vision of the World - Interview with Nicola Verlato

Nicola Verlato. Installation view of "The beauty of failure", 2009, paintings, sculpture and architectonical elements. 53rd Venice Biennale, Italian Pavillion.

By Domenico Quaranta

This interview started, as often happens, a long time ago as an informal conversation, when I first realized that the work of Nicola Verlato, an Italian academic painter who seemed to be miles far away from what I was interested in at the time, had something in common with video games. I asked him about it, and was surprised when he told me that this link was something more than a frivolous resemblance; it was instead rooted in the core of his work. I was even more surprised upon discovering that Nicola shared, with many artists working in the “new media” field, an anti-modernist approach having nothing to do with Postmodernism. That is surprisingly fresh and challenging in an age when Modernism appears stronger than ever.

Finally, speaking of surprises, Nicola Verlato’s work was – for me – the most surprising in the least surprising pavilion of an underwhelming Venice Biennale. That is why we decided to put this interview on paper.

Domenico Quaranta - Are you a gamer? If so, when did you start playing? Which games do you like?

Nicola Verlato -I have to say that I’m not a great gamer; I’ve always preferred to watch other people playing than play myself. When I was a kid, what I liked the most were the aesthetics of video games, without being too involved in the play. The games that I considered the best at that time were the ones built with “vectorial” graphics, which reminded me of Piero della Francesca and Paolo Uccello’s perspectival drawings. However, over the years, I played some video games such as Tomb Raider, Castle Wolfenstein, Tekken, and Stalker. A couple of years ago I also asked one of my assistants to play City Life in order to use its urban landscapes as a background for some of my paintings.

VIDEO GAMES AND THE RETURN OF REPRESENTATION

D.Q.- Do you mean that you are using video games and 3D software as a source for your paintings? Wouldn’t it be easier to look at the world or to copy photographs as other painters do? Why did you choose video games? Is there any narrative or aesthetic reason beyond this choice?

N.V. -Yes, absolutely! I don’t care about reality itself; I’m interested in the way we perceive it and manipulate it through models and representations. Thus, the aesthetic environment that video games shape is very akin to somebody working with my methods and intentions: drawing as the painting’s constitutive principle, images as the result of a model’s construction instead of as a document of reality, etc.

Moreover, I think video games are the best proof of the return of representation, fostered by digital technology, in the Western world after almost two centuries of images as documents. Thanks to 3D software and the entertainment market, we are getting back to an aesthetic-cognitive path of representations and models. When a video game is successful, it’s able to spread a specific vision of the world. For example, the way a leaf is designed is determined by the software used: that software can set an aesthetic standard, changing the way I paint a leaf. In the same way, when Piero della Francesca painted a leaf or, let’s say, a mountain, he was sharing a vision of the world supported by the cultural system in which he was living and working. In short, video games are producing new aesthetic standards and models, and I’m interested in these standards.

D.Q. - What about from a narrative point of view?

N.V. - I have always liked non-linear narrative structures, complex and layered, from polyphony and counterpoint in music to the most involved compositions in painting. Thus, I have never liked opera and prefer a Mottetto by Josquin Desprez to a Notturno by Chopin, a Sacred Conversation by Bellini to Constable’s landscapes. I don’t like to be led along a narration by its author – instead, I need to stop and come back as I want.

When I saw a video game for the first time, I immediately understood that it represented the possibility to get out from under the nineteenth century aesthetic of novels that (through movies and romantic music) has been the dominant format in art for the last two centuries. During that phase painting suffered a lot, to the point that it almost disappeared in the twentieth century: in such a context, it couldn’t help but be the weak link in the system.

AVANT-GARDE AND KITSCH 2.0

D.Q.- To tell the truth, there is a lot of Toryism in video games. Some weeks ago I was on a panel with some conceptual artists, those who design landscapes and characters for video games, and I was astonished when they told me that they drew inspiration from… John Singer Sargent. Anyway, I see your point: a video game is like a bomb hidden in a Vuitton bag. What’s really disruptive is its inner machinery.

Moreover, if low and popular culture – from cinema to video games, from comics to fantasy card games – inherited the traditional approach to storytelling, they turned it into something completely different. What’s your relationship with this low-brow approach to storytelling and image making?

N.V.- If liberal democracies and industrialism were what made modernity different from the previous models of society, the low and popular narrative forms have probably been the real cultural product of modernity: they were produced employing industrial processes and they were intended to reach as many people as possible with a clear and intelligible language in the spirit of democracy.

I’m not sure if the avant-garde was incarnating the progressive spirit of the twentieth century. Instead, I think about it as a cultural and social resistance of an old aristocratic order that needed, and still needs, the language of art in order to create social differences through the use of complex linguistic codes of difficult, and sometimes cryptic, interpretation. If the video game artists you met told you that they were inspired by Sargent (an artist considered conservative in a modernist perspective), it is probably because the language of the artistic avant-garde is completely useless in the process of making a video game. Furthermore, if video games are the artistic-technological avant-garde of our times, we should probably start looking at the relationship between Sargent and the avant-garde in a different way: while Sargent is still extremely influential, Malevich has already exhausted his role in shaping our times.

This situation reminds me of what happened in the music field. In the last forty years we have faced the complete failure of avant-garde music in shaping our cultural landscape. For the old high musical forms, the only way to survive has been by reconsidering what was thrown away by the avant-garde: tonality, rhythm and harmony. “One day the postman will whistle my melodies,” said Arnold Schoenberg. It never happened. What happened instead was the invasion of rock and pop music in every recess of our lives thanks to the industrial processes of production and distribution and the use of a kind of “conservative” language that Boulez, not so long ago, called “a fascist product.”

Young composers today, especially in America, are trying to combine the language of pop music in the complex structures of high music. This is what I’m trying to do in my paintings, as well as what other painters are doing in this country.

D.Q.- Nonetheless, your polished, cultivated style has nothing to do with low-brow imagery. In your work there is a sharp contrast between your subjects – from James Dean to rock and rave culture, from hooligans to burlesque divas – and the way you paint them, with references to altarpieces and mannerism. Are you deliberately pursuing this contrast?

N.V.- Not really, I’m just painting what excites my imagination. My work is about bodies and narrative and so forth, about mythologies, specifically mythologies of our time. I like to gather visual information about these phenomena and combine them together in a new and more complex kind of representation, a very finished painting in which all the information is organized in a coherent and structured way. This is thanks to a very articulated process that passes through drawing, three dimensional models in clay, 3D software and finally painting.

Even the use of altarpiece typology is not a reference to a specific historical period of Catholicism, but rather to something deeply embedded in our brains, which neurologically, connects these kinds of shapes with mysticism. Catholicism just used these formats for their ability to create specific emotional reactions; however, the same shapes were used in neolithic times in cult structures, and are still used by the Barasana tribes of the Amazon River for the same purpose.

REGENERATING PAINTING (BY MEANS OF A LAPTOP)

D.Q. - One of the problems with your kind of painting is that, no matter what your conceptual approach is, you are always dubbed conservative. As an example, while visiting the Venice Biennale this year I couldn’t help but notice that there are a lot of consonances between your work and that of the Russian collective AES+F: similar maximalist aesthetics, similar cult of beauty, similar allegorical approach. Now I discover that you both use 3D software… but you create paintings and they make huge video installations. You were next to Sandro Chia and they shared the space with Marina Abramovic. How do you deal with this?

N. V. - Maybe one day somebody will understand that it could be interesting to have us both in the same show, but for now just a few people are able to understand something beyond the use of a specific medium. Actually, I like their work but I’m not a big fan. I always feel the limitation of collages involving different media. I think this resource is not enough to produce what I want to see in a work of art.

Honestly, I consider both Abramovic and Chia part of the same cultural environment that, I hope, we are finally getting out from under. Painting has always been dubbed conservative, above all in conservative countries like Italy where the supposedly progressive elites are trying to get rid of what they consider an embarrassing past. I think that painting is still a very important medium, if not the most important, in art, and I also think that today painting could have the possibility of regenerating and enriching its potential with a strong alliance with digital technologies, 3D and the Internet.

We’ll see what will happen, but I think that we should reconsider our definition of what is conservative and what is progressive in art, and probably in other fields as well.

Domenico Quaranta (http://domenicoquaranta.com) is an art critic and curator based in Italy. He focused his research on the impact of the current techno-social developments on the arts