Gian Maria Tosatti: art must be democratic – Leonardo Merlini

Born in Rome in 1980, Tosatti – deep voice, anarchist beard and dark eyes – can be defined as “the artist of the moment”: after being selected for the Biennale, he was also appointed artistic director of the Rome Quadriennale, a public foundation that the task of promoting Italian contemporary art and organizes an exhibition every four years. Furthermore, in 2023 he will have a personal exhibition at the Pirelli HangarBicocca, in Milan, one of the most important private exhibition spaces in Europe.

Over a plate of lamb hunter, Tosatti tells me how he got here: “I was born in a semi-popular building, I built my path through work, I don’t come from a rich family. I started working in the fourth high school ”. Jobs that led him to become a journalist, but that did not prevent him from graduating in directing at the Center for Theatrical Experimentation and Research in Pontedera with a master of twentieth-century theatrical avant-garde such as Jerzy Grotowski.

“The lesson of the theater is later also found in my work with the visual arts,” he says. “Those were the years in which environmental art took shape, with Gregor Schneider, Mike Nelson. I had studied theater, but I was not a theatrical, I was looking for another home because classical painting and sculpture did not belong to me ”.

From this non-belonging, he continues, the installations of the early 2000s were born. For example the Madonna with child from the Devotions series: in a real squat a room has an open door, inside people, Italians and migrants, eat on a floor covered in blood, which comes from another room, from the body of a woman who is about to give birth. Initially designed to last a few days, installations like this then remained open for months as the public continued to visit them.

“The relationship with the public from the beginning has been very important in my work, much more than the liturgies of the art world,” he explains. “I build my works in contact with the communities, not because it is fashionable now, but because the public is the landing point of my works”.

Works that over the years have taken different forms, always revolving around the theme of space, as in the series of environmental installations Seven seasons of the spirit, a work carried out in the most difficult neighborhoods of Naples, where Tosatti lives today. Here, together with ordinary citizens, he took care of the spaces, sacralizing the environments outraged by violence and indifference. And when he tells me about the way in which, despite the presence of the Camorra, people participated in the project, I feel a note of emotion in his voice as an actor.

“Art is used to find things we had lost”, he tells me looking at me, “things that we need. Which allow us to rediscover on our own face the signs of who we are and what we have been through ”. During the lunch, Tosatti opens up to the story.

He doesn’t try to be nice, he builds his reasoning step by step, with a determination that reminds me of the one with which he carries out projects like the series. My heart is empty like a mirror, on the crisis of democracy: the latest episode took him to Ukraine, on Lake Kuyalnik, where he imagined the disappearance of human beings and a landscape in which only nuclear-powered street lamps remained. As I listen to him I realize that, even though he talks a lot about himself, he has the gift of hardly ever talking about himself.

However, I would point out to him that in recent times there has been a lot of talk about him because of the attention and the numerous assignments he has received. There have been protests and petitions: the biennial-quadrennial combination has made several insiders nervous.

“Every time I do a job”, he replies, “the meaning is to prove that it works. A career as an artist is based on results, like that of a scientist. There is a part of the art world that likes to discuss, argue, fantasize, and there is another part that likes to work instead. I work: if I do well at the Biennale, I will be happy; if I do wrong, that will be the data. And the same goes for the Quadriennale. It doesn’t matter how nice I can be or how supported I am, the work is the only value we can discuss ”.

When the chicory side dish arrives, he offers me a taste. It’s a nice gesture, let’s talk about sharing and share. “Art must be strongly democratic”, she repeats, “and the general public should be the first of our concerns, which does not mean pleasing it, it means going to meet it, to take it wherever you want”.

At the moment of the desserts we are still talking, the tone of his story is enveloping. While I wonder if this dialogue with a journalist is not a kind of performance, he utters a sentence that sweeps away all doubts: “Art must kiss you”, he says, sinking the spoon in a generous mont blanc, “it must fall in love with you, not he must tell you that you are good if you understand or ignorant if you do not understand. If your work is visited together by many intellectuals and many people of the street, then it means that what you have done serves them, that you have fallen in love with them ”.

That’s why I like Gian Maria Tosatti, I think: because he uses words like love and kisses with the attitude of a scientist. He uses them with a seriousness that makes them totally honest, almost uncomfortable. And I think the same form of radical honesty is felt in many of his environmental installations.