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Andrea Balzola
Johannes Pfeiffer: visionary architecture
"And Darkness then begot the Earth and the immense Heavens, brought them
out from their hiding place where they were waiting to be born".
1. The builder artist follows in Orpheus's footsteps to bring us his 'deep-down'
installations
The most ancient cosmological beliefs from the most varied and faraway
places have it that both nature and man spring from the earth, that the
works of man come out of darkness and from those pregnant nights when man
dreams with his eyes open. The earth is the house of darkness, but it
turns its face into the sun's light and the moon's reflection. To pluck a
work of art out of darkness, and draw shape out of earth and stone is the
sculptor's mythical, and yet extremely practical activity. An ancient
activity, yet ever renewed and up-to-date if the artist is capable of
exploiting the shapes of his age to tell the story of that which escapes
time. Johannes Pfeiffer is just such an artist, who is an integral part of
his age, but who, unlike many of his fellow artists, has not lost his
ancestral memory nor his mythical memory. As Aristotle once said, "a
friend of wisdom is a friend of myth".
Pfeiffer, builder and blacksmith, creates installations and symbolic works
within natural and artificial environments, using traditional building
materials: bricks, steel rods, synthetic fibre cables. The bricks,
preferably hand-made, constitute the cellular base to his sculptures,
while the rods and cables are the structural elements that bind and give
strength to the metamorphoses worked on these organisms of shape. I use
the word 'organisms' because their basic element is simply clay, earth
baked hard by fire, and given a geometric shape, earth that is both
modelled and modelling in a visionary architecture that is without doubt a
designed artifact, but which nevertheless sinks its roots into the mystery
of nature. Once Pfeiffer had learned the traditional skills of marble
sculpture in Pietrasanta, he then discovered he was a 'builder artist'
rather than a sculptor artist, as he prefers to illustrate space with
matter instead of acting directly upon the matter itself.
At the beginning of the Nineties his work appears to proceed upon two
fronts: visions of air and of earth. On the one front, Pfeiffer's typical
Germanic titan verve constantly challenges the force of gravity: in one of
his works that seems to foresee the fall of the East-West Berlin wall in
1989, two walls face each other at a dangerously slanting angle, held up
only by a strip of nylon lines resembling rays of light blazing from an
iron ring embedded in the ground. Then in 1991, Pfeiffer used the same
principle to set up an alter ego of the famous leaning tower of Pisa in
Piazza dei Miracoli, his 'lyrical solution' to the problem of how to save
it. The same year he produced 'Deichwächter' ('Guardians of the river
banks'), where a square forest of rods rises up to support a brick
platform to create a figure that sweeps its weight upwards, and in serial
replicate seems to be the march of absurd sentinels.
On the other front, opened up in 1992, Pfeiffer set off in another
direction with 3 particularly significant works - a journey to the depths
that embraces both the act of immersion and that of emersion following
Orpheus's footsteps to the Underworld and back again. 'Omaggio a Orfeo' ('Homage
to Orpheus') is, in fact, the title of one of his installations set up in
a Tuscan meadow (Etruria being the ideal background to these journeys),
where he opened up a deep gash in sloping terrain with 2 parallel brick
walls gradually cut down to form a sort of staircase joined together with
grids of iron rods. The result is amazing and far-reaching for anyone
looking at it, as he finds himself looking at a staircase whose metal
steps seem to sink into the darkness of the underground, but which in fact
do not; they reach out towards the darkness and run through it without
actually penetrating it. A lyrical journey to the centre of the earth, but
also the revealing of its mysteries, because as said at the beginning, the
earth is the house of darkness and out of that darkness comes man's works
of art. One of these underworld mysteries in fact, seems to emerge with
his work the 'Das ungenannte Tier' ('The unnamed beast'): the basic brick
elements are put together to make a triangular shape embedded in the
ground, from which the ominous 'head' of the triangle rises up on rods.
The ground becomes brick and the earth's skin turns into a nameless
creature with a clay back and steel soul. Pfeiffer's intention to create
an apparently insoluble paradox within a concrete structure shines clearly
through in this work; the weight and immobility used to portray tension
and therefore movement. The invented structure gives the construction its
nature of a living organism and as such it is something that grows and
blends into the natural elements and there is therefore no contradiction
between natural generation and artificial construction. On the contrary,
the movement of the idea may be sometimes deliberately blocked and
imprisioned by the structure. This, in fact, is expressed with great force
in the work enclosed in the hippopotamus pool in the former Turin zoo,
entitled 'E la nave va' ('And the ship sails on') dedicated to the memory
of judge Giovanni Falcone. Here the stylized hull of a boat peeps out of
the water, caught by and trapped between the bars of the cage, the journey
downwards turns into a shipwreck, the passage through truth and freedom
stopped, annihilated by the hellish vocation of men and fallen angels.
The moral tension of many of Pfeiffer's works seen, for example, in the
series of emblematic coffins representing the absurd tragedy of Yugoslavia
('zu Lebzeiten...', 1993 - ('When they were alive')), is also part of the
more intimate motivation behind the work. The builder artist builds
visions of the world and visions in the world, and inevitably creates
metaphoric monuments and supports for collective reflection, which are
real means of questioning reality and its various aspects. In this,
Pfeiffer once again shows 'traditional' sensitivity in the sense that he
avoids the narcissistic and formalistic pitfalls of contemporary artistic
individualism, and manages to restore the value of shape and performance
that is part of artistic research, and bring the symbol function, that
visual and plastic arts have gradually lost to the forced communication of
the mass-media, back to the centre of attention of both individuals and
society as a whole.
2. Work of darkness: blind visions and designs made of light on sensitive
film.
When we said that a work of art has its roots in the dark we were not just
using a metaphore; Pfeiffer's works are, in fact, born of the negative
vision that the artist develops in his mind's eye as he visualises the
budding project with his eyes closed and then immediately transfers it
with sure strokes to photographic film. Always with his eyes closed. The
orphism of his visions of the earth and the underworld is the
manifestation in space of an original conception of the whole artistic
process, from its sources to its final outcome.
Pfeiffer sees in the dark, because his artist's mind opens up the spaces
where he will physically build the work. His mind's eye sees through his
vision to fertilise the space dedicated to creation. He sketches the
outline of the shape in the virtual space of his ideas. He closes his eyes
to concentrate, to prevent the images of the outside world intruding and
affecting the idea or shape that is forming, his body helps by capturing
what the mind sees on the mind's screen until it can be used for building.
Design and construction: these are the two opposite aspects of the tension
that Pfeiffer incorporates into his installations; the installation, in
fact, corresponds to an architectonic idea of sculpture; the work occupies
physical space and regenerates it so that it becomes symbolic space. But
while the work regenerates physical space, it is itself generated in a
mental space, and therefore physical space and mental space reflect each
other through the external and internal appearance of the work.
According to Pfeiffer, 3-dimensional works of art are the architecture of
ideas, and it is here that the constructive significance of the aesthetic
idea takes on its ethical dimension. Construction becomes metaphore and
metaphore turns into construction, as can be seen in the apparent
fragility of the nylon rope that Pfeiffer often uses to support extremely
heavy structures. It looks like a ray of light from a distance, but it
counterbalances the weight and force of gravity of the brick to conjure up
an extremely dramatic tension. A structural and ideal tension where design
challenges the solidness and compactness of the materials employed. Image
and matter wrestle with each other for a common cause.
If the design is a vision in the dark, the material used to realise it
must be light, and in fact Pfeiffer tries to fix the budding images that
are the basis of his installation designs on photographic film. He cuts
the film with his eyes closed to imprint the ephimeral traces of his ideas
on it, and shuts his eyes to look deeper inside himself. The black film
lacerated with flashes of light is simply the mirror to his mind. Pfeiffer
inscribes his forms the moment they appear; his way is not the automatic
writing of the surrealists, direct reportage of unconscious chaos, but he
directs his concentration at a target, an exercise aimed at mining his
mind for the map of the future work. Blindness is symbolic of profound
vision because it brings one to look inside oneself and see beyond the
appearance of things. In the realms of wisdom and mysticism, one need only
think of the Greek Tiresias and the Nordic god Odin, the meditative
enrapture of Buddha and St. John of the Cross, and as regards artistic
perception, the slashed eye of Bunuel and Dali, the sublime blindness of
Borges.
The etymological meaning of the word 'Photography' is 'writing with
light': as Pfeiffer writes on the film with the light produced by his
graffiti, he takes snapshots of his creative mind, photographs of the
mental genesis of the work. Enlarged and displayed on the wall, these
images make up sequences of luminous ideograms that project the work out
of darkness into space. Pfeiffer uses the photographic media in this
original way, combining the new visual qualities of this technological
medium with the most ancient of techniques, graffiti drawing, to produce a
motivated and conscious artistic process. This just goes to show that the
instruments of art - be they ancient, new, or of the future - , only have
value and meaning in the clarity of the design and the force of the
artist's motivation, as no material or technique can be used without
conceiving its transformation.
Pfeiffer's luminous graffiti close the circle of his work and, in two
distinct but complementary phases of the same artistic process, illustrate
the mental space and physical space of his work. Yet Pfeiffer's vision is
also a challenge, as he cannot be sure until the last moment that his bet
will pay off, that the tensions in play will support the weight of the
material. Just as in the case of the builders of cathedrals of yesteryear,
the mind-boggling design never guaranteed the result, but was merely the
seed out of which everything was to grow. Each stone that was chiselled
and laid stood for both a visible material action and an invisible
symbolic one, both equally necessary and inseparable: to ensure that the
temple built for the world is built with truth and force, the interior
temple must also be built. Artifice of nature.
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