San Gimignano

Caption here for this picture

Caption here for this picture

Many years ago I was strolling through the hill town of San Gimignano when I entered what appeared to be a small gallery. Expecting the same tourist tat of the other shops in towns, painted bowls with the craggy towers in profile I found myself confronted with the work of French artist Daniel Buren. That started a love affair with this strange gallery run by three Italian men, Lorenzo, Maurizio and Mario, all different in looks and spirit but all filled with a passion for contemporary art. It is why I have chosen to come here this weekend for the inauguration of Chinese artist Cai Guo Qiang in Val Di Colle d’Else a small hill town near by, a large installation by African artist Pascale Tayou and a work by Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto.

What I love about Continua is the variety of spaces it allows the artist. It is an old theatre that has been brought and converted but every space every basement has been excavated and opened into a rabbit warren of spaces.

Pistoletto has installed a simple mirrored obelisk in a basement space where previously I had seen an installation by Subdoh Gupta. a work which had firmly convinced me that Gupta was indeed a world-class artist with his cascade of tail pots falling from the rocks in the space.

Pistoletto’s obelisk fits exactly, revealing the paradoxically lofty and claustrophobic space of the basement. It is an area calling for enlivening and this work does it perfectly. The viewer confronted with themselves and the rocks of the space simultaneously. It is like the magical ship in the bottle, how and why enter into the equation and the work is better for it.

The rest of the space has been taken over by an exuberant, over the top display by Belgian based, Cameroon born Pascal Tayou. I have visited him before in Belgium, writing about his work for the American magazine Art and Auction, prior to the last Venice Biennale where he showed in Daniel Birnbaum’s Arsenale space.

Pascale never conforms to space nit spills over in his determination and this is no exception. He has turned the downstairs floor into a party space, filling it with tables and chairs and the totems that have long been his more identifiable work. These made out of various materials, here crystal and pins and feathers and other accumulated materials are grouped in figures.

There are new works as well. Towering works made of wood, flattened in a surrealistic way reminiscent of the work of Magritte, the artist of his chosen home. ON the walls a continuation of his explorations of collages made with pins and corkboard. Here he has also made more traditional collages, which he calls ghost colonialism, named after the figures that seem to be in negative.

There are photographs of himself, dressed in African costumes in performative poses, experiments which Continua enables, no I say encourages. Not all the pieces are equally good but what I like to see is a new sense of confidence. There is an energy here that is palpable but with the experimentation is a new growth as well.

I sit in the garden surrounded y the mirrored tombstones of Algerian born artist, Kader Attia reminiscent of PIstoletto inside, not only in his materials but in his referenece to monuments and death also reflecting the garden of the gallery reading and waiting to speak with American artist Kiki Smith. I see Pistoletto arrive to be taken around the space by Lorenzo, the long haired glamour boy of the gallery. He and PIstoletto sit posed on an angle poise looking at Pascal’s tower totem made of colourful cooking pots, reflecting both Pistoletto’s obelisk and the work I had previously seen of Subdoh Gupta.

PIstoletto waves before they re-enter the space, to sort out the lighting of the obelisk. I sit there watching Pascal hustling back and forth at one point with a saw and a ladder where he proceeds to saw off a large portion of one of the trees that is currently shading my table. It is nice to watch the industriousness from a distance, a reminder that behind the finished opening is a hive of activity, with worker bees, here in the form of young people in the universal outfit of paint spattered jeans and tee shirts interspersed with other workers in more official outfits.

Kiki arrives and we start to talk, her long curly grey hair is freely flowing today, she is dressed in tones of gray and black but her skin has the signature tattoos in turquoise that indicate this is no middle aged middle class woman. . I have a long and strange history of Kiki. Over 20 years before I had assigned a review when I was the editor of Modern Painters to a writer self-proclaimed misogynist. He had reviewed her show at Pace Gallery with such viciousness that I had received a call banning all my writers from entering Pace or ever being offered help. Time had moved on and I was with a friend Sam Messer who asked me out to a dinner with ‘friends’. Much to my horror, his friends consisted of Kiki and her than partner an artist??. I sat there hoping to be incognito for much of the dinner until she leaned forward and said in her strangely girlish voice ‘ I know who you are and I forgive you’. I have never formally spoken to her since but seen her at private views and waved to her. Over the years I have thought back to that review and realised how horrible it was and how painful it must have been. Written from the perspective that it is behaviour that should be assessed in artists and that there are givens in the right material to use as well as the given that there has never been a great woman artist I sit embarrassed even in thought.

More than the Kiki review I blush with embarrassment to remember the review I also carried of Picasso as a ‘bad man’ who could not therefore make good art!!!! So trivial and so stupid. I recount this to Kiki later and we laugh together. ‘Kiki says simply, Picasso was a genius, who used all materials and was not afraid.’ A mantra that I would equally apply to her.

When she arrives I say hello and remind her of our history, She is very late as there have been problems with the installation in the nearby town and Kiki is nothing if not professional. We settle in and before we even get going Mario arrives to sweep us up and take her to the opening. The mayor is coming and we must be there before him. We sit descending the hill town on the corkscrew roads and Kiki says I will make you an amulet to Mario and you to she say to me in the backseat, glad I am not in the front. The site is an unprepossessing one. ON a hillside park under the arches of a bridge which bisects the town of Coll di val d’elsa. It is four simple arches which Cai has co- opted as a venue for his temporary museums. We sit through the obligatory speeches before Kiki says I am thrilled to be here and especially under a bridge named for St Francis as he is the patron saint of animals and I love nature and animals. It is simple and touching and draws attention to the beautiful reeds that have grown up in profusion behind the bridge. and now we will watch a movie. The movie is a long walk to the other side of town and we meander along looking at the beauty of the street, lined with crystal shops, as this is a centre of glass making.

We end up in a beautiful converted theatre surrounded with opulent boxes. Kiki admits she can not stand watching herself but there is no option so we settle down to an hour of Kiki. Watching her relentlessly working and thinking gives an insight into how the brain of an artist processes space. I am touched by her endless repetitive making and also her determination to make thinks right, this line is too sharp, that colour is too pink, move the silver girl on the bed, look at the embroidery and that moment of epiphany where she stands by a clothes line in Venice, fingering a beautiful table cloth saying that I want to make prints with this material it will be beautiful. It is materials that obviously attract her and it is clear that the materials of this quilt will appear at some later date.

There are also a series of beautiful flower drawings that look anything but pretty. She says in the same tone, I made this from blood, I went to the doctor and had it drawn and does not seem to realise the painful visions that this immediately recalls.

The movie ends and it is back to the slippery slope, which is now running with water. Kiki has created rainbow lighting for her little girls, who had previously been in Japan in a forest collecting wood in another iteration of Cai’s temporary museums. Here the ceiling is hung with glass beakers one of which she has donated to the local contemporary museum. I hold one surprised at its fragility, while Lorcan O’Neill Kiki’s Roman dealer comments on how it appears similar to a dildo. Trust Lorcan I fear.

Pissing with rain and I hitch a ride back into town and go to bed with cold pizza and a film. I cannot go to dinner and then walk home through pissing rain. I know my limitations after all is said and done. Besides that it is Kiki in the morning to finish our conversation. I arrive at 9 in the square near the gallery and already the tourists are pouring into the town. I spy Kiki sitting at a table with a bottle of black nail polish doing touch ups. We settle down to our chat and then all too soon she is off and there is that surreal moment of spying one of the most important Chinese artists in the world in town and then it is all onwards.

Lunch is in Bel Soggiorno with a view to die for. It is a buffet of deliciousness and in my present state I want to scoop some up for later but leave it all behind. Sob gulp. There is risotto which is so delicious I want to marry it etc.