Magma
Cecilia Canziani
Painted for William IV of Bavaria in 1529, when the painter, who was by then famous and at the peak of his skills, had curtailed his artistic activities to dedicate himself to political appointments, the Battle of Alexander at Issus is Albrecht Altdorfer’s best known work. The landscape in which the action is set dominates the picture: the historical events occupy the lower part of the large panel, while nature seems to be fighting a battle on a different plane. The bird’s-eye view lends the scene a sense of circular movement, with the various elements – forests, mountains, the sea, clouds, the sky, the sun – revolving ad infinitum. The story takes place on a plane of forces and times different from nature’s geological ones, and yet the two planes interconnect, and one mirrors the other.
(8121) Altdorfer takes a section of the landscape, reproduced to scale (whether Benedikt Hipp is citing this or another of the German master’s works is perhaps not so important), and isolates a detail as if it were being viewed from a window. The “window” is in turn framed by an oddly-shaped form that morphs from stone to flesh – a finger with a blue-painted nail. The painting’s surface is slashed by a horizontal line about a third of the way from the bottom, and above this line, against an azure background, is an arch, within which a cloud-filled sky hangs over an evergreen forest. Below, on an orange plane – earth and fire – is an anthropomorphic figure which I would venture to guess represents Hipp. The title, as is typical of Hipp, is an indication of a proposed reading, in this case pointing not to a generic landscape, but to an artist who interpreted it as an ideal plane, a fantastical place where something real is staged.
Indeed, the little painting on panel seems to offer a rather specific key to interpreting the exhibition as a whole: it is a window through which to read the works that make up Magma, a further development of his previous two shows this year in Basel and Munich which, along with the current one in Rome, comprise a story in three acts.
Landscape is thus a central element of the three exhibitions. But this landscape is a living, changing force field, shaped by natural energies and by human actions (and just to clear the playing field of references Hipp has always considered erroneous, definitely not surreal), that rearranges human and geological time and finds a balancing point between the two.
In this cycle of works, the titles of the paintings – like those of the exhibitions – often allude directly to the birth and transformation of lands: Diapiro, Nascita di un’isola, Hotspot and Compound evoke the phenomena of lava, rock salt, chalk and clay pushing up from the subsurface to create intrusions of lithoid masses in rock formations above. Often, the paintings, which are always vertical, are constructed around the contrast between an organized, geometric conformation in the lower half and a mass of organic shapes that seems to emerge from the subsurface in the upper half, grouped into compositions by resemblance and spontaneous aggregation. In painting terms, a modernist grid versus a color-shape. Sometimes these compositions can become still lifes – objects on a plane -, as in Ossidiana or poT of the World (a decidedly Morandi-esque work), but petrified, rocky. In other cases, the composition can be read as a portrait - with a figure in the background -, and the mineralization seems to collide with the body, as in Olympo and Acquarius. Hipp’s technique of constructing shapes in transparent layers gives way here to the use of a thin, chalky type of oil, and his customary colors – blues, greens, azures and bright oranges – are replaced by earth tones and grays. Illustrating the process of autopiesis that the world is undergoing required different material.
The sculptures – tongues, heads, limbs that do without bodies and have their own autonomy – can likewise be read as figures and as landscapes: AEON 5FGR is a vertically-climbing coralline concretion, but at the same time, if you simply look from a different viewpoint, it’s a hand, or a big toe. AEON QFbl5 is similar in color, shape and texture to a block of basalt, but one side of it ends in fingers or tentacles. AEON ZuNO is a tongue, but also a mountain generated through a fold - a diapirism, as a matter of fact. It is worth noting that Benedikt Hipp fires his sculptures himself in a kiln he built in his garden. And that the firing takes several days, and the fire must be watched over. And that the form may be sketched out by the artist, but is determined in the end by a temperature between a thousand and thirteen-hundred degrees – the same as magma. And finally, that the color is due to the rising to the surface of metals in the clay chosen for shaping, and reaction with the wood used for the fire. Ceramics is, more than anything else, a sort of cartography (literally a landscape), but also the repetition of a rite that transmits and institutionalizes the myth of creation.
Magma offers us the image of a world in the process of transformation, in which new organisms and systems are brought to life and create mutual relationships with one another. An ecosystem in which everything is kept in equilibrium because energy is a wave that passes from one element to the next. So in these works, fluid material constructs a primordial landscape, a wild nature, a ruin, an element of art history (Morandi, Giacometti and Guston seem directly summoned), and the sculptures and paintings seem to be models (or archives) of each other, molecular aggregations that come together and break apart, where the human presence is just one of many things.
Seen next to one another in the exhibition context, (8121) Altdorfer and AEON ZuNO seem to communicate with one another, and to conjure up another landscape, unspoken but certainly in the artist’s mind: Monte Verità, where in the early 20th century artists and philosophers experimented with a different way of living. During the meaningful and intense period of time he spent at the
Accademia Tedesca at Villa Massimo, Benedikt Hipp painted in the studio, but was also part of community and contributed to creating a vegetable garden based on the principles of permaculture. And the garden of his home, in Bavaria not far from Munich, is also a place around which a community gathers when the kiln is operating.
An exhibition, the artist seems to be telling us, is a world, from which other worlds are born – it is inseparable from the social and political context we live in and contribute to shaping, because creating a painting or molding a ball of clay in one’s hand means reconstructing a universe.