The Soft Bubble Room

PHILIPPE DAVERIO
JEAN BLANCHAERT

The worker who sheates time

When an artist has a last name that sounds artistic, he was born lucky. «What are 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 usic, 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 wich the artist can wrap and set forever all that fascinates him.

Errante is like a volcano in eruption, he covers and sets in place. His works, born from this process, seem compact, but upon touching them they bend, because Errante captures the soul, not the body of things, leaving th 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, beacuse 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 cathable, taht roams and guides us in the world of the artist. Outside, a black wall makes a mass of lumber, scraps and engines, come out of the eternit roof. 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 meditation room, from the white walls emerge trombones, saxophones, violins, cane thickets, doors, bottles,fruit crates. Everything can be sheathed. The ceiling is composed of apples, 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 wich it gave water;the dark engines seem to still have the light of the lubricating oil on them and it still seems to breathe the smell; the pumpkins, generous and sensual, are there, handly; 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 used it. This worjer is an artist. He’s there, but you can’t see him. His name is Errante.

by Jean Blanchaert

* written in 2011 on the occasion of the solo show La Guaina Molle (soft bubble),
at MyOwnGallery by Superstudio Più in Milan,
with a presentation by Jean Blanchaert for Philippe Daverio