Paolo Ceribelli

BRINGING THE GLOBE INTO THE WORLD

By Chiara Canali

 

Introduction

Mettere al mondo il mondo [Bringing the world into the world]is the title of a set of works in ballpoint pen by Alighiero Boetti symbolizing the idea of the “totality of the world”, present in all of the artist’s works and expressed in various different ways within them.  Mettere al mondo il mondosymbolizes the long, complex process of the creation of the world and the birth of civilization, characterised by the development of writing and language and also traditions and cultures of nations.  The reference inMettere al mondo il mondois purely linguistic because it presents a particular coincidence of form and content that thematizes the discovery of language and the understanding that conventionality exists as the foundation of communication.

This same convention and arbitrariness is encountered in geopolitical classification as a system for interpreting the geographical situation.  Following on from his Planisfero Politico[Political Planisphere],a geographical map on which the artist marked out the national boundaries of each country with the colours and designs of its national flag, in the Mappe[Maps]series, Alighiero Boetti had tapestries woven in which every territory was embroidered with the colours and symbols of its flag, updating it with changes produced by the altered political situation.

   

First step: World Flags

Almost half a century later, world maps are once again protagonists on the contemporary art scene in Paolo Ceribelli’s World Flagsseries, which uses the subdivision of space in a cartographic scanning of the hemisphere, but with radically different intentions with respect to its predecessor.  He starts with the aesthetic, two-dimensional suggestion of the map, which has shown its continuity and vitality in Man’s visual heritage in a range of elements including scholastic studies, board games, road use and Alighiero Boetti’s recent iconographic reproposal.  The same can be said of the flags and standards that have symbolically identified nations and factions with their shapes and colours since ancient times.   As Boetti rightly highlighted, "For me the work of the embroidered Mappa is the maximum of beauty. For that work I did nothing, chose nothing, in the sense that: the world is made as it is, not as I designed it, the flags are those that exist, and I did not design them; in short I did absolutely nothing; when the basic idea, the concept, emerges everything else requires no choosing." [1] Paolo Ceribelli could say the same thing about his World Flags,which came about in homage to Boetti’s work and study and are reproposed today according the assumption of Renato Barilli’s[2]theorizing on “different repetition”, recalling the perspectives of someone who wants to revisit the past and history using a mutated conceptual key.

Similarly to Boetti’s Mappe, having outlined the shape of the planisphere on a monochrome background, Paolo Ceribelli then colours the different countries with the designs of flags.  He doesn’t use their actual flags; he uses other flags, selected arbitrarily in a liberal association of ideas and models.  Correspondence between territory, states, artificial borders and the respective colours of the flags is replaced by different breakdowns, which apparently have no critical purpose or intentions, but are aimed at contemplating the aesthetic emphases in casually matching shapes, colours, lines and symbols. 

 

Second step: Toy Soldiers Era

After initial observation from the front, at this point it’s a wise idea to get close to the artist’s canvases in order to observe the material and substance of the work’s composition.  It is actually not just about chromatic backgrounds or blocks of colour.  A constant element constituting the artist’s trademark comes into play, whether alone or repeated in lines, columns, groups and rows: the plastic toy soldier.  Selecting and repeating a component or objective frame giving texture or patterns that create particular geometric shapes or allusive figures is one of the most important ciphers of the most recent trends in contemporary sculptural art, calling on some extremely common elements such as chewing gum (Maurizio Savini), sliced bread (David Reimondo) and fabric (Michele Giangrande).

Playing at plastic toy soldiers has long been an innocent pastime for little boys, then turning into an adult hobby, collecting, which translates into seeking out different brands and articles.  Ceribelli himself has not escaped the passion for collecting, passing down the obsession with sticker albums and subsequent memories of buying, swapping and collecting, from childhood days to our present day.

Another connection stands out immediately; a connection with the strategic board game Risk, which stages a planetary war of groups of armed forces identified by the colour of tiny plastic tanks.

There again, nowadays we live in the era of a new militarization.  We all have TV and film images of the ongoing deployment of military forces to the most far-flung corners of the globe under our noses.  How can you not then introduce a “Toy Soldiers Era” atmosphere into the sphere of artistic speculation?

For Ceribelli the exterior character of an era becomes the distinctive sign of his private period and of his work.  The series of styles, appearance and poses of the toy soldiers (in some cases even tanks and aircraft) and the vast assortment of unvarying colours and shades (obtained using a proper colour dip) distinguishes the very subject matter of Ceribelli’s work, which contemplates the toy soldiers not in the individuality of the single piece but in matching rhythmic sequences that create objective, sculptural bas-reliefs, which in some places highlight the monochromatic painted backgrounds and in other places mark out different motifs, as in the case of the flags of the countries that follow the movement of the cartographic profile.  Just as tone and timbre alternate on the canvas, light and shadow lending movement and plasticity to the mimesis of reality, the technique of placing toy soldiers alongside each other thus exploits the aspects of tone and timbre of the object that arises from the alternating of different forms and shapes, and sets off variations in lighting through the modulation of structures that follow alternating routes and arteries.  The result is strongly pictorial and expressive, despite being achieved through a strictly mechanical and mathematical procedure, manually performed by the artist sticking one soldier after another onto the canvas.  Unlike what occurred with Boetti’s work, Artist and Artifice in Paolo Ceribelli’s work correspond in a process whereby, once created, the image becomes the source of a game, a playful expedient in the hands of the artist and which is made concrete with those hands.

 

Third step: Globe-Global

 

Paolo Ceribelli therefore does not want to follow the route of the artists “In the Style of So and So” where the act of homage to the great past master is united with the pride of challenging the master in order to bend his or her poetry within the rules of one’s own style.  Going back to Barilli’s discourse on “different repetition”, Ceribelli’s work presents a different feature with respect to the teachings of the original text, in that the positions of the imitated and the imitator are clearly distinct.  The process takes place via phases of condensation and shifting that become real in the assimilation of a concept and in its varied, critical and analytical repetition.

As in Boetti’s Planisfero politico, Ceribelli’s World Flagshave different proportions, and in some cases the surfaces of the countries have been extended from the globe to the level.  You can, in some respects, see an enlarging of the territories of North America, the Ex-Soviet Union and China, the nations with relationships of force and military interests.  In other respects you can see an upheaval of boundaries and extensions of certain nations which could ideally fulfil an alternative role like Cuba, Japan, Great Britain and Switzerland.  To further emphasise the emerging of new balances of power that often overcome geopolitical boundaries themselves, unlike Boetti, the colour of the flags does not mark out the colour of the states below it; free associations have been reworked, giving rise to different meanings and interpretations.  For example, one of the World Flags is reworked according to the question of the formation of the state of Israel, while another shows “little Italy” squashed up between the USA and the Ex-Soviet Union, reminding us of the Cold War era.  Other times the subject sets out symbologies that lie beyond the reference to the designs of the flags themselves in order to put new models of social, economic and ideological reference into circulation: from the increasingly prevalent presence of McDonalds (Mc World) to the skull and crossbones pirate flag that unexpectedly pops out on its own (Pirates Flag) or between one flag and the next.  Or once again it is a playful, demystifying and irreverent attitude towards common legends and customs, above all with reference to American subculture.  From the graphic representation of the Confederate flag, which occupies an entire planisphere entitled Hazzard (after the American TV show Dukes of Hazzard,whose protagonists’ car sported the Confederate battle flag on its roof) to Marvel Comics superhero Captain America’s shield, defender of freedom and democracy, whose concentric circle design takes up an entire map.  It goes as far as the caricature of the famous Harlem basketball team, with USA Globetrotters, uniting the spectacular with the comic.

Lastly, the criteria of aesthetic reception and visual suggestion, which are immediately evident in the succession of graphic signs and symbols at the centre of the flags (stars, dots, crosses, moons, leaves), in the alternation of vertical and horizontal stripes, can be the concentric and cuneiform motifs and chromatic elements that are repeated in flags belonging to states that are fundamentally very different and often in conflict with one another (the red, white and blue of the American, Cuban, British, Australian and French flags).

In conclusion, the basic state of the “Globe” that is shown in Ceribelli’s maps should bear witness to a concept of “globality” that we keep talking about in an often misleading way, but which doesn’t always correspond to the reality of things and which doesn’t take into consideration so many factors regarding politics or cultural difference.

The apparent objectivity of the maps, corresponding to the different colours of the countries in the identity-making emblem of the national flags, is overturned and negated by Ceribelli, highlighting the problems and crises that impede the emergence of a worldwide, global and absolute way of political thinking.  The earth inhabited by men is a creation that functions by means of complex structures.  For this reason in the field of art one may play at “bringing the Globe into the world” using the toy soldier, as if it were a slightly riskier form of Lego, in the attempt to change and shift the territorial boundaries of the nations (just as it is arbitrarily possible to stretch a state out of proportion in France Globeor Italian Globeor change its form into animal shapes in Chinesepigor Americanpig), but in truth the artist is telling us that this is purely for entertainment, a sort of game with coloured toy soldiers that should alert us to any real attempt at manipulation not designed to favour the process of growth that unites nations.

 

 

 

 [2] Renato Barilli, La ripetizione differente, Studio Marconi, Milan 1974.