Ettore Spalletti : the minimalist maximist

Ettore Spalletti, the minimal maximal.

‘Ettore is about capturing the light – the sky.  Trapping it and giving it to you’.  These are the words of collector Giulio di Grapello as we stand in front of his work by Ettore Spalletti, Italy’s most venerable minimalist artist.

I had seen works by Spalletti, at art fairs but had missed his large show in Milan when Lia Rumma had chosen to open her new gorgeous space with his work.  A strange choice I had felt as Lia Rumma also showed Anselm Kiefer, William Kentridge and Marina Abramovic, all bigger names on the international market place.

His niece Benedetta Spalletti has Vistamare,  a gallery in Pescara and had arranged for me to be collected from Rome -so how could I say no.  I was exhausted from an intensive series of studio visits and meetings in Turin and sitting in a car seemed the least strenuous activity.   Driving almost due east from Rome is an experience in itseld as one traverses across Lazio into Abruzzo and the landscape of Italy, the rugged semi mountainous terrain, passing long chains of spinning wind turbines and little else barring pine forests, save the occasional medieval village clinging to the inhospitable rocks.

By the time we arrive I am exhausted but perk up as the light changes as we get near the sea. I am unprepared for the intense heat though when we arrive and meet the charming Benedetta.

She suggests a light lunch first and we The restaurant though brings back that Italian spirit with a lunch of sea food so fresh it is actually breathing on the plate. 

We linger over our lunch enjoying the large lumps of watermelon arranged like sculptures on the plate – they know I am in the arts after all -and crisp white local wine.  It is late when we drive up into the mountains alongside Pescara into villages that are old fashioned in the way that only Italian villages can be. 

Spalletti has only been in his present studio for two years, a large industrial shed on the outskirts of another small village near to his home.  He moved in initially for more working space and then started to install it into a quasi museum, crowding his working area into a small space at the back Benedetta says as we swing into a drive way past an enticing open door. 

The outside window frames are painted a bright blue the only clue that there might be something different inside than a shed of goods for some retail shop.  Inside one enters a totally different retinal world. 

Having thought that all Spalletti was merely about columns of colour – in the same sensibility that one thinks that all John McCracken is only about steles, one is soon disabused of this prejudice.  Here is a room full of subtle ideas and experimentation.  Yes, colour is essential to all that Spalletti does, but it is about surface that he is thinking, and it is colour like no other.  Unlike McCracken the surface is not shiny but smoothly textured, capturing the light and its nuances.  It recalls in some ways those wonderful pure pigment works of Anish Kapoor from a distant past.

We settle to chat in a small office. I am facing a small painting that at first glance looks blue like the sky.  While we sit there for over an hour, I observe it changing in hue constantly, going from a glowing blue to a glowering grey and back again as the light varies through the near by window.  It is a barometer to the eyes, but also when my eyes relax within its surface I start to discern nuances, discovering forms that leads to that realisation that Spalletti is not merely a minimal painter but also could be considered a figurative painter.

On a shelf nearby a wonderful small work, a cross, the upright in pure gold shining brightly the perpendicular elements short in rose.  I ask about the work and Spalletti  says it was commissioned  for a show in a museum in Bologna that has a bishop on the board.  He asked several artists- Paladino, Kosuth to do works with the cross. I love the piece.  Its simplicity with the vertical gold  element rising strongly in the centre,  the rose receding.  It is about power and beauty and in its simplicity is deeply moving.

On the whole Spalletti uses several signature colours, blue, gray and rose.  I ask about the rose and he says that ‘it is the colour of skin and now’.  And he needs to say no more, especially in another room when I later see an early work, a painting of a nearby mountain in rose and rose, which when I look at it dissolves into the profile of a sleeping woman. 

When Spalletti walks me round the room he shows me sculptures, one a floor piece that is the length of a stride, another a column which again relates to height.  There are experiments in groups of columns of varying heights playing on their installation in a country of antiquity.  Upstairs on a balcony I come across an early work, shiny black pebbles- circular like stepping stones.

Downstairs are a group of marble works, several of which are onyx works, two slabs laid simply on top of each other, seemingly different from each other but the same, only the light penetrating the works highlighting their difference and the properties of light.

It is the daring simplicity of the work, the allowing of the materials to literally shine through that is so beautiful.  Within these narrow parameters is continual exploration. Recently Spalletti has been using gold to frame the works. More recently the gold has entered into the inside of the work.  Gold and its reflective qualities is something that he tells me he has ‘only been using since 1992’ and it is a material that he is constantly discovering with.

Spalletti is investigating the breaking of the painterly surface as it ventures into sculpture.   This is clearly defined in a room that he created for a show earlier.  It is like entering a Turrell installation, a total experience as the thickness of the wall panels change around us and each is cut into a different shape and thickness.  Standing within this, one becomes suffused with the colour of the sky and the sea and pure aliveness.  When I ask about the relationship with someone like Turrell he smiles and says some collectors have him near to their Turrells but that as far as he thinks.  He is not interested in his relationship with other artists. 

I ask if he has been to the Venice Biennale and he says that he does not need to go.  ‘Venice is beautiful but it is for the young’.  He is happy here in his studio where he works because he wants to.