Ninì Sgambati/Paolo Puddu. Detto tra le righe is the second appointment of the project Materia di Studios, with which LET_Laboratorio di Esplorazioni Transdisciplinari initiates an intergenerational confrontation and dialogue between pairs of artists, played on the terrain of the archive understood as living matter plastically connected to research and artistic practice.
On this occasion, Ninì Sgambati (Marigliano, Naples, 1945) and Paolo Puddu (Naples, 1986) have reinterpreted the very definition of the archive, here understood as a context of interaction between conflicting forces perpetually at work in the processes of transmission of knowledge and thought. Starting from divergent positions, as if facing each other from one side of a circumscribed area – a playing field but also a combat zone, a ring, a tatami, a dohyō – the two artists have woven a dialectical relationship, developed through the imagery of clash and struggle.
Thus, acting by subtraction and synthesis, they arrived at the formalization of two opposing and complementary “movements,” as archaic, referring to founding cosmogonies and mythologies, as dynamic in the methodologies of ordering, understanding and describing the world still in existence: pushing and pulling. A place already predisposed to the function of an archive, the museum is configured, therefore, as a favorable space of application/suggestion/expression/narrative of those forces already expanding and contracting, vital and universal energies to be detected and controlled, to be brought back to image and form.
Presented in the three rooms of the Madre museum are as many works, conceived for this project, which constitute a minimal writing in close connection, like the three parts of a sentence, of a logical structure and meaning.
