PHILIPPE DAVERIO - JEAN BLANCHAERT
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
In March 2011 Philippe Daverio commissioned his collaborator Jean Blanchaert to go to Vicenza to see the work of Errante. A month later, Philippe Daverio, encouraged by Blanchaert’s favorable report, visited the artist’s studio to appraise the works in person. He immediately decided to support Errante and to organize an exhibit with him, believing him to be one of the most interesting artists in the contemporary Italian scene for the uniqueness of his work that not only is to be seen, but also touched. This is how a working friendship began, after several meetings in which today’s exhibit took shape. However, for health reasons, Professor Daverio will not be present. Jean Blanchaert will stand in for him, as he has followed the project with enthusiasm since the beginning.
PHILIPPE DAVERIO - JEAN BLANCHAERT
When an artist has a last name that sounds artistic, he is born lucky. «What are you doing, moon, in the sky? Tell me, what are you doing, Silent moon?» sang Giacomo Leopardi’s errant shepherd at night. Errante is also a wandering shepherd, but he doesn’t gather sheep, rather ideas. He gathers and materializes them to present his suggestions and his insights. His work is evocative and intimate inspired by music, industry and agriculture. Errante’s preparation of a complex “mestica” results in the creation of a magical material: the soft bubble. It’s plastic as soft as meat but as punchy as the lava with which the artist can wrap and set forever that which fascinates him. Errante is like a volcano in eruption, he covers and sets in place. His works that are born from this process seem compact, but upon touching them they bend, because Erranta captures the soul, not the body of things, leaving the imprints that we see with the task of describing what soul we are dealing with. An apparently concrete task, but in reality abstract and philosophical because the soul, like air and music can be felt but not caught. Instead, Errante allows us to touch these spirits: if we push his work with our hand, the shape flexes and, for a second, we can enter the essence of the sheathed object. In this way the artist is able to create a sort of spiritual biography of our time that often gives dignity to forgotten rubbish. An installation is also on exhibit. It is Errante’s poetic room, but it is also the room of Errante’s poetry, wandering and catchable, that roams and guides us in the world of the artist. Outside, a black wall makes a mass of scrap and engines come out of the lumber roof eternit. It’s industrial archeology, it’s the memory of the factory’s soul, it’s nostalgia for the plant. One seems to still hear the noise. Inside, instead, there is a sort of bedouin tent, a mediation room, from the white walls emerge trombones, saxophones, violins, cane thickets, doors, bottles, fruit crates. Everything can be sheathed. The ceiling is of apple, ready to be gathered and the floor is dark, also soft. As Carlo Scarpa said «a floor can be judged by the feet». The passive sensation that it transmits, in fact, makes you think about the meaning of walking. In the room with nine works of art, the following are gathered: tubes and siphons seem like a tangle of light and pure shapes; the pile of reeds of watering pipes has involuntarily become the rose to which it gave water; the engines that are dark seem to still have the light of the lubricating oil on them and even seem to give off the smell; the pumpkins, generous and sensual, are there, within reach; figs are chaotically entrapped. There is also, of course, a tribute to the egg and the romantic tribute to a ruby colored Vespa. Finally, an elegant green grinder on a black background that has at its side the machine worker that worked it. This worker is an artist. He’s there but you can’t see him. His name is Errante.
Jean Blanchaert