THE MILD CERTAINTY OF THE ORDINARY...

Bresciani convenes the public not as mere consumers of the artwork, but as co-authors because each one on the surface of the ash can trace a sign, their own. You can't walk on it - this would presuppose a rug - because the volatility of the ash would dissolve it. This implies that no one can stand in the center, only at the margins, as at a table, with respect and conviviality. Instead, one can find again the emergence of the tactile gesture that leaves an imprint, that signifies with fingers, with hands, with a stick as their prostheses. It’s not possible to walk on it - as expected from a rug - It won't be forever because the support does not preserve but makes something appear, reveals something that was sealed and hidden inside us, makes the invisible visible (gratefully remembering Paul Klee's teaching) that we are when we think and imagine. Even the transience of this action is delicately but decisively insubordinate. We are used to thinking of the artwork as a 'monument,' a crasis of 'memento,' which is the Latin imperative corresponding to the exhortation to remember, to that which remains and knows how to remain uncorrupted, immobile, unchanged.

Ash is volatile, extremely light, unsuitable and unable to retain for long, but welcoming in receiving a meaningful gesture, which, together with others, becomes silent chorality, discourse, dialogue. No force or expressive talent is required, but trust. One needs to trust the environment and others present to trace a shallow but visible furrow on a light and extremely friable mantle like an ash rug. And it implies bending, leaning, and bowing to the artwork to actively participate in it.

This artwork has its future in our being there and participating, in the memory of our gesture, of that posture that only collecting something from the ground now belongs to us. In this case, instead of collecting, we deposit something to then let it vanish, like when children draw on fogged windows or on sand, on snow, without exhibitionism, without theatricality.

Ash is produced by burning. In this artwork, wood burned. Theodor Adorno in his Aesthetic Theory defines the artwork as a place of resistance, which certainly cannot be reduced to mere provocation or sensationalism for like collection, to actualize. The ash that becomes artwork is the emblem of resistance to nullification, of ulteriority to the corrosion of matter. A residual trace of heat, of light, of cooking food, the ash of this carpet is a voiceless thank you, a secular prayer recited not before but after eating, after warming up, after illuminating. Perhaps, even after burning ourselves.

Neither hot nor cold, neither liquid nor compact, ash is what is left from the claim of annihilation, it is evidence of a burn, of a fire, of an inevitable destruction, which, however, is brought back within a perimeter, inside a museum hall (at the Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan), to become an occasion for form, relationship, meditation.

Its very color, gray, in its anti-exuberant calmness, refers to silence.

Silence is an essential condition for the artwork to present itself and be experienced, even when it is musical. One listens when one is silent and makes space for the other. Gray seems to absorb and then return it. Utmost humble, gray is the only color, as Bruno Munari taught, that allows white to emerge.

It is the color of the shadow that testifies to the existence of bodies and resistance to their complete annulment, to oblivion. It is the color of what was not allowed to be destroyed by fire.

Cristina Muccioli

Art critic, Professor of Communication Ethics and Aesthetics at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera"