Critics

Solve et coagula
What we take out of dreams ... is all to the surface. Depth is in the invisible connection; and it is working with our hands on the invisible connections where we cannot see, deep in the body of the night, penetrating, assembling and differentiating, debriding, stirring, churning, kneading – this constitutes the work on dreams.

James Hillman (1979),
The dream and the underworld.
Perennial Library, Harper & Row Publishers,
New York, p. 140.

Perhaps it is because of my Jungian background that I do not hesitate in defining Davide Tirelli’s work as alchemic, because the way in which he produces it is inseparable from the spiritual thought that surrounds it. It is therefore clear that the work of art is within the materials, the color and the process, and it would be inappropriate to seek “meanings”.
It is better to look at Tirelli’s sulfurous yet snow-white work as a phenomenon of the underworld, knowing that – in volcanology, as in psychoanalysis – all which is below will, sooner or later, rise to the surface. Tirelli’s canvases, beams and cubes are objects that uphold the depth of the unconscious, and thus of dreams. Raw, yet fertile materials are used, such as bread dough, clay or fused metal. Substance.

In order to use this substance in alchemic work, it is necessary to distort the materials. It is damaged, boiled, flayed, dried up. Its vocabulary of images recalls this distortion: nigredo, mortificatio, solutio, separatio, divisio, putrefactio. Terms that diabolically turn up in academic vocabulary describing psychological processes: projection, sublimation, fixation, condensation.

When we consider the psyche, that which is natural is no longer enough. There’s a need for a continuous process, of solve et coagula. All that is permanent and part of our routines, is dissolved by heat, and all that is volatile and uncertain is solidified and hardened.

Once again, psyche and chemistry converge in the substances Tirelli makes use of: sulfur and rage, salt and bitterness, lead and heaviness, mercury and lightness. And even more so in his use of colours: orange, grey, red, blue, white – which of course need no explanations.

It is no coincidence that these techniques have chromatic names (the black, red, or white works, nigredo, rubedo, albedo, or why not use the names and the substances – tar, molds, combustion, “cretti” and cellotex – of Burri?). Tirelli builds a language of disfigurement that explodes and boils in almost resonant forms.

This is not just about transforming “vile” material into “noble” material, as in the ancient chemistry of lead and gold, but about transforming impure, raw materials into something more human. Perhaps Tirelli’s use of color and shapes, discovered and invented by him, in his burnt lacerations of unapologetically lavic, intestinal or cerebral substances, are intuitively grasped as a part of the journey towards the “Segnal Etica” (a previous series of his works) of human nature.

“They are a part of me,” he says. I think Tirelli should be seen “at work” to show us the physical movements that are essential for him to set fire to his material, to glue it and colour it in those “radiant knots”, to use his own expression, “into which all ideas are continuously drawn.” I did not see him at work, but I saw him handling his works when he brought them to my studio. Calm, like a labourer, notwithstanding the incandescence of the objects. The calm of someone who has (for the moment), with his creation, settled a score with life and death, and can stop and observe the order of his composition. Until the next fever. A fever that can dismantle the world in search of spare parts, separating, destroying connections, which life then melts into new unity.
In the language of alchemy, the term “transformation” means reaching the fullness of secret essence, liberating it from impurity and corruptibility. Tirelli attempts the opus contra naturam of a transformation that shows these impurities, and without hesitation arranges the organic vitality of the material in forms of obscene beauty.

Vittorio Lingiardi
Professor of Psychology
La Sapienza University - Rome