⁰¹ Renato Nicolodi, DEAMBULATORIUM I, 2007, concrete and wood, 294 × 240 × 180 cm
⁰² Renato Nicolodi, BELVEDERE 0I, 2008, reinforced concrete, 1200 × 1400 × 620 cm
⁰³ Renato Nicolodi, OBLIVIO 0I, 2008, concrete, cement and wood, 700 × 480 × 380 cm
⁰⁴ Renato Nicolodi, PANOPTICON 0I, 2006, concrete, cement and wood, 500 × 500 × 160 cm
⁰⁵ Renato Nicolodi, CIRCO 0I, 2007, concrete and wood, 512 × 325 × 137 cm

Introducing the work of Renato Nicolodi means going back to ancient times and coming fast to the present. The recent-past times have influenced our idea of aesthetics in relation to the concept of place, space and architecture. I must admit that I have always been fascinated by the regime or empire buildings, particularly their linearity and austerity. It is very interesting to discuss with an artist who, working on this kind of context, suggests new reflections and speaks about true collective memories.


Francesco Lucifora: Looking at your works one feels like travelling through ancient times and spaces. It is a kind of solidification of universal visions and feelings about what the world had been in the past. What is the starting point of your projects?

Renato Nicolodi: The past seems to often repeat itself, either by manifesting itself or forcing itself upon you. This is certainly true when we look at different cultures that are driven by particular religious beliefs and/or ideologies. Many of these cultures have in the meantime disappeared, although they have left fundamental traces that have materialised their ideology or religion into superhuman disproportional constructions. Through their monumentality and splendour they house a sacred quality that gives access to the ‘sublime’ or the ‘absolute’. Over the years these constructions have lost their functionality or context so that now we are able to put them into perspective and to step back and look at them objectively as if they were grand sculptures. This distance is very important for me since it allows me to personally appropriate the ruins of the past and place them in a context that determines my world view and my thinking. Within this way of thinking of collective awareness, the ‘great stories’ of my grandparents, related to the Second World War, have had an enormous effect on the development of my artistic career. For instance, my grandfather Alessandro Nicolodi, who lived in the north of Italy, found himself dragged from one absurd situation to the next. His father was Italian and his mother Austrian. At 16 he became an orphan, with no family at all. When he was 19, World War II broke out and he was conscripted into the army under Mussolini’s regime. In 1944, after the fall of Mussolini’s regime and Italy’s surrender to the allies, the German army captured him made him a prisoner of war. In 1945, on his way to Germany, he managed to escape in Belgium where he joined the resistance. His stories, in which the context and the spaces were always described in detail, always fascinated and inspired me as a little boy. The stories came into being within metropolitan architecture, military defensive bunkers and gloomy spaces of imprisonment. They taught me to look from the same objective distance and made me see that ‘power’ is very ambiguous. On the one hand the stories were great to listen to and created a feeling of amazement and fascination for all that happened, but on the other hand, there was no denying the danger and feeling of disgust. That’s why it has been a major challenge to create spaces or sculptures in which these individual stories dissolve in the collective memory. A memory that implies the loss of the past and that sets off in search of the meaning of preservation and conservation nowadays.

FL: In some way your idea of space and structure could be close to the black holes concept: entrances, dark doors and exits lead to a new relation with mental buildings. I would like to know what kind of rapport you expect between the viewers and your projects.

RN: The ‘black holes concept’ is indeed a reflexive theme that plays a central role in most of my works. Although it’s difficult to give a specific answer, I can only hope that the spectator feels either drawn, or has a sense of being invited to stop and reflect in this very subjective space that is presented to him. It’s important to realise that the dark space is only accessible in a mental sense, in that the spectator has to imagine what it must be like in the dark space. Through this mental exercise and the absence of sensory information, the space can be interpreted in a variety of ways.

On the one hand the space can take on the function of a space for reflection. A space where the spectator can step back, allowing him to objectify or give a meaning to the emptiness that is being presented to him. The space can, as it were, be regarded as a house for thoughts and memories in which the all-embracing can reveal itself. A place where time and space coincide and the immaterial is given a place. It could be the space that one observes when one looks at Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square as a window. In that sense, this dark space, personally speaking, can be a spot where I can listen to the stories of my grandparents. On the other hand, the dark space can be looked at in the extension of the severe architecture that envelops it. There is a clear reference in the architectonic shapes that I use to totalitarian power that does not tolerate dissent. This austere ruggedness that holds a certain beauty becomes visible and tangible through its shapes but becomes intangible when the shapes appear to grow faint in the darkness of the space and all control on these particular shapes disappears. From this point of view the entrance to the dark space functions as a doorway between what is visible and what is not, namely nothingness and the emptiness that implies fear, oppression and death. It can best be compared to the experience of the ‘sublime’ that reaches its end point in the ‘uncanny’. These two terms have corresponding characteristics such as a shivering or terror, but in the case of the ‘sublime’ when this shivering is transformed into aestheticisation, there is no way back with the ‘uncanny’ and the spectator is stuck within his fears and torments.

FL: Working on archetypal architecture you dig into the depths of the human soul with great rigour and — almost military —discipline. It is as if you erase the distance between ancestral places and society. Is there something you want to make the world remember?

RN: It is abundantly clear that in the course of our history the longing for classical architecture has resurfaced more than once, and here I’m talking especially about classicism and neoclassicism, with visionary architects such as Etienne-Louis Boullée and Claude Nicolas Ledoux, as a high point to which I refer indirectly in my work. However, under the influence of Nazism during the Second World War, archetypal architecture or design suffered a fascistic connotation, that due to Albert Speer’s architectural development will always be omnipresent. Regarding this last fact, we no longer look unconditionally at a new archetypal design after World War II without connecting it to power and ideology. Neither is it one’s task as artist to act as if nothing has happened when one makes use of this archetypal architecture again. The danger lies in being misunderstood. However, by in fact making the forbidden or detested design topical once again with constructions that refer to historical facts through their shape and material, it’s interesting to create a platform for discussion that has affinity with the issues of today in relation to what we already have or have not learned. Because it is within the shape that cannot possibly be detached from the material which it is made of, where the links can be made to a past that puts a brake on our present thinking. I would like to add here that the material, which I use to make most of my sculptures, strengthens this idea. The fact that I use concrete for developing my sculptures has to do with the seriousness and the weight which it eludes to, namely the radiation of power and invincibility. However, nothing could be further from the truth because time determines that everything is relative and our urge for power could well be fatal for us one day.


For more info on the artist you can visit his website: www.renatonicolodi.com