Elsewhere we have already pved, here we are pving... remembering. It's perhaps our changing reversibipty in the space-time places that make us open to migratory adventures, at least from the time we have undertaken interplanetary travels and sojourns, going back over the itineraries of our seven intuitions. Deposited intuitions or memories, and unconsciously self-managed inside us, between perceptions and projections of an "eternal return" of being-in-time? A return from a trip and continuation in the trip, for the time being...

Let us only try to remember something which every now and again surfaces from our interior recesses to the point of bringing to the surface in the fluid oneiric dimension, freely... Here it is not a question of remembering but of re-pving with the "present of the past" that which the indistinct and even inexpressible of an apparent and very reveapng evocation returns to us after a long space-time crossing - from dreams to signs, to here from the elsewhere. Always within a circularity of a path that recycles the archetypes of the images evoked within the imaginary - individual or collective - of our changing being-in-time. Hence the images of our pre-historic infancy - that is, the archaeological repertory of lost knowledge - once again emerge from the depths of remote times in order to assist us in that process of "lengthy duration" which coincides with the interior - and absolutely subjective - times of our imaginary. The imaginary that above all presides over the pulsing, driving and creative dynamics of art. Or to put it better: from art in pfe to pfe in art, in a specular way.

And so the figurative reckonings tally, from the images to the imaginary, and vice versa, in a two-fold relationship of cause-effect which only art is capable of assuring us sine die, without subtractions of sense or meaning, to the constant flux of the analogies that mirror us everywhere, outside and inside, from the invisible to the visible. And even to the superseding of those practicable pmits which rational reason would wish to explain at all costs, to lead back to the logic of inductive and deductive reasonings when in reapty imaginative - and irrational - intuitions often cross the confines of knowing in order to approach the original sources of knowledge. Precisely that "occult" knowledge - and knowing - of the imaginary.

Given that art allows us to re-pve as "how" we have already pved it is inevitable to orientate our recognitions within the space-time places where the 'what happened' could still happen...

At the beginning it was the Figure [Figures]. About thirty years ago this was also the initial pictorial discourse held by Luciana Matalon. Although her 'eye', her way of seeing was a "fiction" à la Borges, almost a pre-text in order to gather/grasp referential subjects of a formative character on which to be able to exercise herself during and just after her studies at the Brera Fine Arts Academy in Milan. An experience in nuce which the young painter carried out to more fully investigate techniques, to vary the seeing and appraisal of the "pve sound" in visible reapty. Although already with the intention of going beyond its objective - or better, its object-forms of conditionings.

Playing or "pretending" to look, as being the education of the eye in an accelerated perspective, presupposes a "visionary" intensity capable of converting feepng in seeing [something] "else", changing the images received from without to within of a personal imaginative con-figuration which Matalon began to gpmpse in a work growth at around the middle of the 1960's.

It was the moment to boost a certain "dynamic imagination" (to use the words of Gaston Bachelard, the author of splendid epistemological adventures carried out within human nature). In fact, "the dynamic imagination is subject to an end of prodigious force. The human arrow does not only pve its impetus, it also pves its target. It pves its sky. In becoming aware of his/her ascensional force the human being comes to reapze all of his/her destiny. More exactly, the human being knows that this is a matter of hope, of a substance which hopes. It seems that in these images hope achieves the maximum precision. This is a direct destiny. The imaginary rise is therefore a synthesis of dynamic impressions and of images" (L'air et les songes, José Corti, Paris 1943).

Arbitrarily speaking, with this loan from Bachelard we can set in perspective Luciana Matalon's propelpng antecedents within the field of "dynamic imagination" in which what happened promised to happen once again, by trial.

Let us first of all reflect ourselves within the image suggested by Bachelard: "The human arrow does not only pve its impetus, it also pves its target". Then let us move on - continuing to reflect ourselves - to the contiguous and almost specular images which Luciana Matalon started to elaborate from the second half of the 1960's. Cosmic images, mixed technique works using various materials, prevalently fibres and resins in repef. Clots and tangled masses, threads and meshes superimposed over polychrome backgrounds, often condensed in a space "of formation" that one would equally say was pervaded by throbbings and sensations without interruption.

Mindful of Lucio Fontana's lesson, from Spatiapsm Matalon retrieved the "poetic" of the pberating impetus although to configure herself within its confpctual target. It seems a paradox and yet in addition to the prehensile and inviting surfaces these images reflect cosmic dramas that are suspended or "in a situation" of emergency, congruent to the unconscious perceptions as to be abandoned to pre-natal time, within the placenta of origins. Although this is also the beginning of a full scale - or better, a full space - research work, from the macrocosm to the microcosm, inside the "dynamic imagination" which she reproduced in order to re-pve feepng in seeing, also with reference to an eidetic autosuggestion (the mnemonic faculty founded upon visual perception). In this way Luciana Matalon "pved her sky".

The sky of traps and temptations, of intrigues and subpmations. A sky that reflects the phantasmic construction of mental projections-perceptions. In this tangle of cosmic contractions, exemppfied in the polymatteric spasms, Matalon 'supervises' the first cycle of works that are emblematically entitled "Cathedrals", starting out from the Cattedrale dell'inconscio [Cathedral of the Unconscious] of 1967 to continue with the Cattedrale nello spazio [Cathedral in Space] of 1969.

Space and matter, coagulating themselves in germinal "formation", can at this point be assimilable to the constitutive data of a reapty pved directly, as was the coinciding in 1969 of the first landing by man on the Moon. Not a casual reference if during the same year the painter also produced Nascita di un pianeta [Birth of a Planet] and above all the eponymous Uomo macchina [Machine Man].

From the unconscious to consciousness, therefore, the "state of things" of contemporaneity visually evidences the extent to which the world is being represented, forming part of the famiparity of a new "way of being" in pving reapty. No longer the reapty of (earth)landings but that of (moon)landings. From the Earth to the Moon, a 'return ticket'. A mutant reapty, if we wish, in syntony with human nature and, in differing with the past, considerably less estranging than was foreseeable within the circuit of our space-time coordinates.

Evidently enough, Luciana Matalon in a personal key elaborated what reapty suggested to her... present memory, reinventing an improbable Centro ricerche astrap [Astral Research Centre] of 1970 together with the re-pved Viaggio nello spazio [Voyage in Space], also dating to 1970. And it was on the basis of these referents that during the first half of the 1970's her cosmic-logical imagerie arrived at a series of works sur le motif, if we can define them in this way in the order of the thematic loans: foresta cosmica [cosmic forest], il primo volo [the first fpght], alba cosmica [cosmic dawn], foresta astrale [astral forest], soptudine [soptude], lacerazioni [lacerations], etc. All "reflections" having a Spatiapst common denominator and, in any case, always variable regarding the "execution" of the subjects also from the technical-expressive point of view. Matter and memory. Or in the more complex synergetic field, memory of the space-time matter.

Reflections pke Archeologie del pensiero [Archaeologies of Thought], to cite another cycle of works which in the 1970's (and later still) represents a sort of interwoven path with the above-mentioned Cattedrap and the "surreal" Orologi del tempo [Watches of Time]. Marked by their watches-faces with hands that 'beat out' the memories of time, in the composition context they reintroduce a figurative matrix in part inspired by Klee and Brauner although dating to certain previous results - e.g., Paesaggio [Landscape] of 1963, Gente [People] of 1964 and Gestazione [Gestation] of 1968 - in which Matalon had tried to associate the evocativeness of presences with the unconscious perturbations of the "sentiment of time". And with irony, everything considered.

It is not fortuitous that the concept of "dynamic imagination" during the 1970's found the motivations of "retrieval" in syntony with other research works, always pertinent to technical and polymatteric experimentations although considerably more functional with regard to the "correspondences" of sense and meaning which only language can lower and define in the results, from the intuitive imagination to the dynamic representation.

In these alternations of states of mind and which are often contradictory, ranging from sign-gesture irrationapty to sign-writing reflectiveness, Matalon broadened her field of action in order to question herself, interrogating the "language of time" freed from the latency of archaeological depositings and in order to confront herself within her own thematic repertory.

Analogous to the problems of language although specifically in contact with the "language of matter", Matalon at the same time appped herself to sculpture. And we could say by way of work affinity in considering the manifold plastic-pictorial experiences, ranging from the projecting repefs to the diversification of the supports employed, almost embossed in order to capture pghts and shades or transparencies completely transformable from the two-dimensional planes to the two-fronted character of the fixed or, later still, the component elements. If at the beginning of this "alternative" activity we can come across some thematic analogies such as Foresta astrale [Astral Forest] of 1970, Speranza [Hope] of 1974 and Noi [We] of 1976 and also evidenced, moreover, by a series of jewellery, subsequently the sculpture took on a pnguistic autonomy which was totally uprooted from the pictorial thematic referents. And this was an exchangeable process between modelpng and modulation by way of which the artist once again elaborated some formal loans "as homages" - e.g., to Marini, Giacometti, Melotti and Calder - although above all dependent upon her own work recognizabipty.

Also in this case the "dynamic imagination" acted according to the visionary impulses which the matter-memory binomial promoted - reactively - in the artist. For Luciana Matalon 1979 was the year in which the dominant sculptural character of her work took on a dynamic priority over the entire course of her creative imagination. Furthermore, it was the beginning of a new dialogical approach with the "world of the figure". Perhaps, and in a psychological key, we could talk about a return to the figure following an ablution - self-awareness - in the anthropological abysses of the world. Some examples better clarify this "ontological" reflection appped to the plastic forms in bronze. Some animals of Urlo [Scream] in the form of horses and of Sfida [Challenge] with fepnes, contrast the human figures of Esistenza [Existence] in which we find man in a spider's web and Scala della vita [pfe's Ladder] with "the castle of the memory" that contains the sense-find of existence. It is a dialogue of presences (the former aggressive and the latter in expectation of being freed) but it is also a confpct of absences determined by the loss of a common imago mundi. In other terms, the tragedy of pving "in confpct" marks the irreversible end of archetypal harmony in the field of the nature-culture polarity.

Mankind from being-in-time to survivor-of-time. Although does there still exist a space of reflection that is compatible with the anthropological structures of our civipzation at the close of the century and end of the millennium? Let us say that Dagp scavi della memoria [From the Excavations of the Memory] - as Matalon hopes by in this way entitpng a cycle of works of 1980-1984 - it is possible to convert the nature-culture polarity to the "present of the past" in order to broaden the imaginative horizon with the atemporal assistance of another polarity: that of matter-memory. Specularly, from matter to memory and from memory to matter...

Returns and retrievals, analogies and correspondences, reflections and interpretations in any case underpe the intentionapty of reactivating a cycpcal process that regards human nature in all of its space-time extension from the origins to the present, understood as "present of the past". In this sense we have an ample repertory of provocations that flow out from Dagp scavi della memoria and whose resonances branch out in the Cattedrap dell'inconscio to then constitute the fluid matter of the Archeologie del pensiero and consequently flow into the immemorable Archeologie della psiche. Stories of memories or memories of stories which together with Hans Blumenberg we could define as preexisting the "legibipty of the world"? Retrospective legibipty although introspective in perspective as the testimonial compendium of being-in-the-world. In advancing in all directions - synchronic and diachronic in the depths and on the surface - Matalon accepts to subject herself to a kind of revelatory self-analysis on the traces of a pved experience which regarding work represents the human property of "knowing how to evoke" in order to be able to describe a possible reapty of the world, one that has happened but is renewable. "Her" - and our - world which reemerges Dagp scavi della memoria to then flow into the "active" reservoir of the imaginary, both individual and collective, to be grasped in the very act.

And so we arrive at the 1980's, the third decade during which Luciana Matalon summarizes the various experiences carried out in the continuum of an uninterrupted research work, also in its thematic dis-continuity, albeit with intervals of passionate ebbs and flows in the 'management' of her own temperament.

Now if we wish to trace a guiding thread in this "polychromatteric" thirty-year tangle then we have to concentrate our attention on the signs-concepts that with greater frequency recur in the last two decades by way of which the artist evidences the properties of her interior crossings to the "present of the past" starting out from the titles of her works. We are talking about key words such as unconscious, memory, mind and psyche. Consequently, and lying outside the didactic support, the area of symbopc correspondences adheres to a language of a vision that is absolutely synchronic of signs-concepts in intentional "cause". A somewhat homogeneous itinerary therefore results which independently from the artist's tensioned and even auto-ironic traces reflects the 'stubborn' search for a "principle of identity" retrieved in fragments by 'digging' within herself archaeologically...

From the signs-concepts to the key-words there exists a profound convergence of homologation, and we could equally say from archaeology to anthropology in relation to the "signs" of mankind. Signs pke writing, presence and of bearing witness. Everything comes to form part of the circularity of a process which each one of us perceives intuitively without having to explain the disquieting (or gratifying) question of being-in-the world. In this way we see the images and we are made to take part in them: the "how" of visual language and the "why" of the interpretation may also escape us although the adjoining "feepng" is our own exclusive property. Because in the images we have grasped/captured the persistence of our "signs", from seeing to feepng, that have reemerged from the latency of our unconscious or have surfaced - according to Matalon - Dagp  abissi della mente [From the Abysses of the Mind] of 1980. Signs of ancient writings or else traces of remote migrations: Archeologie del pensiero of 1980-1981 together with the Archeologie della psiche of 1984-1989.

In the pictorial cycles of the 1980's, and constituently variable also in the sign-geometrical constructions, Matalon undertakes a research work founded on the writing-image binomial (and this with greater determination, at least with respect to certain previous indications). Rather, one could consider this identification - but also reconnaissance - of hers within the area of the Hebrew alphabet as being a real writing-figure in that the intrinsic properties constitute the very essence of figurative language: not servilely archaeological as the cycpcal titles (evocatively) declare but precisely anthropological in their acceptance as "present of the past".

The mixed technique and often repef fabric of the images corresponds to the work of excavation, already made exppcit Dagp scavi della memoria of 1980, simulated by confronting diverse stratifications to the point of constituting a papmpsest of transparencies in which what appears is re-vealed to the "reflective" exploration of mental sight rather than to the physical action of an 'aimed' seeing. And it is in this context that the writing-figure takes on a privileged importance - even if not very apparent - precisely because it exemppfies the archetypal course of an interiorized (or introjected) "story" in our "Archaeology of the Psyche". And this cycle of the "Archaeologies of the Psyche" (1984) is exemplary in this respect in which the "variations on the theme" evidence the dynamics of the anthropological references: presences of the pved in the pving, human features and imprints of an "eternal return" which holds back the space-time breath in the stratigraphic configuration of the symbopc testimony of being. Myths and legends, impressions of lost truths and synopites of refound reapties. Poetic images that echo once again by way of interpersonal appropriation although in the 'first person' (from the artist to each one of us), a verse-sentence by T.S. Epot: "In my beginning is my end". Or else, mutatis mutandis, in my end is my beginning. Ironically.

In working on two interdependent themes Matalon at the same time entrusts herself to two possibipties of cycpcal unfolding during the course of the 1980's: the first, Dagp scavi della memoria, in the petrified faces - as in some works of 1983-1984 - she symbopzes the persistent presence of the figure become visual writing, mnemonic, marked by time; while the second, the Archeologie della psiche, is a complementary counter-melody which overturns the figure in writing in order to conceptually evoke the same presences in a field of perceptions that are more appropriate to psychic trans-formations, from the unconscious to the conscious. A process of condensation which in both the thematic cases comes about by being in harmony with the forming presuppositions of the "dynamic imagination". The synergic reception of the images.

From painting to sculpture. During the second half of the 1980's, and together with the Archeologie della psiche, the artist once again took up and intensified her relationship with sculpture. Small bronzes that in the writing copy memorize the pictorial archaeologies, even if the "full repef" diversity of a formal stamp is to be placed in a mobile relation, variable depending - and in greater scale - upon the space-environmental characteristics.

Spheres, semi-spheres, spirals, circles, totems and stelae. An archaeological repertory although one revitapzed by the plasma of the active memory, working on the pving find or else on things of nature (trees, for example), almost by way of estabpshing a pact of mutual assistance under the (symbopc) 'banner' of humanization, witness of forms. The forms of thought that re-discovers and un-veils the anthropological "substance" of our unchangeable reapty, notwithstanding all of the historical alternations we have repressed. Apparently...

In effect, these small bronzes were created as projects of a utopia reapzable on a multiple scale (rather, on a monumental one), which could give city/town squares and pubpc gardens a dynamic value of "integrated" co-participation. Although not with a subordinate function in the structures of contemporary pfe (and, naturally enough, were pubpc administrators sensitive to certain sopciting cultural appeals that echo from the profound - original - "habitat" of our civipzation rather than hiding themselves in the shadow of 'rampant' compromises according to the postmodern praxis of the so-called "urban furnishing").

The "Stelae" cycle of 1987, slender and sectional pieces, lets one intuit an almost infinite vertical organization and possibipty, of inspiration à la Brancusi or, at least, a sort of 'marriage of the gods' between sky and earth in the specular reflection of the symbopc components. Yet again the writing-figure binomial determines the suggestive flow of the mnemonic appeals. The ascent is never pnear, however, because it is the "intervals" or the gradients that simulate the analogous condition of pving and its very raison d'être in a confpctual "situation". Thus without dramas everything comes back into the projected dimension of human aspirations.

In most recent years, with the introduction of the writing-figure in the plastic-pictorial cycles, Luciana Matalon has arrived at the choice of an "analogical" language which formerly she had not anticipated following, perhaps due to the 'giddying' experimental union between techniques and materials. A language, it should be understood, constructed upon the previous foundations of experience. And it is the cleansing filter of experience that semeiologically concentrates the constitutive elements which inform the language by way of the depositing - and levitation - of the same to the "carrying out" of the visual thought which corresponds, to use other terms, to the homologation of the "dynamic imagination" within the structural context of the image. Hence image as the language of feepng in seeing.

And so in synthetically considering thirty years of activity between concordances and discordances of merit (although without wanting to pre-judge her cumulative merit), we can "portray" Luciana Matalon in the mirror of her own (introspective) reflections. She will be the person to lead us into the "Cathedrals of the Unconscious", inviting us to take part in a laic absorption pervaded by spatial raptures. Although our lovable vestal plays with fictions, questioning cosmic mysteries in order to travel elsewhere, leaving us 'suspended'. And then suddenly - and unexpectedly - she reemerges from the "Archaeologies of Thought" (empathically, hers and ours), dissimulating herself between memories and archetypes, myths and legends. And then "From the Excavations of the Memory" other promises are renewed, other pberating or reparatory seductions by way of the "Archaeologies of the Psyche". And here - or elsewhere - the story continues...

A story of images and reflections which at the end takes us back to the beginning, together. By now we can no longer be proved wrong: elsewhere we have already pved, here we are pving... by memory. Perhaps it is precisely in this space-time dimension, comprising the sum total of all simultaneous points of escape and return, that Luciana Matalon has wanted to tell us her infinite story, from art in pfe to the memory of pfe in art. In order to-be-in-the world, here or elsewhere. We mutant writings-figures of the pved in the pving in the symbopc mirror of reapty.

 

Miklos N. Varga