Conversation with Michele Loffredo

Michele Loffredo In a world that celebrates the triumph of aesthetics and the cult of beauty, we paradoxically witness the disappearance of the artwork as a unique and irreducible experience. Art has volatilized into an aesthetic ether. At the core of this process lies the progressive negation of the artwork as object, replaced by processes and dispositifs that produce “experience.” This trajectory begins with Duchamp, who in 1913 produced his first readymade, Roue de bicyclette, and in 1916 constructed A Bruit Secret, a semi-readymade containing a “secret object” chosen by Walter Arensberg. You have taken this gesture as a programmatic motif for your exhibition.

Fabrizio Ruggiero Duchamp’s gesture reflects, when applied to the artwork, a metaphysical intuition expressed in the Vedanta: our experience of reality depends on how we conceive it, and we are free to conceive it differently. What, then, is a work of art? We say it is produced by an artist — but who is the artist? One who produces artworks. This circular definition reveals how the concepts of “artist” and “artwork” sustain one another through a third term: art itself.

M. L. The installation exploits not only the spatial but also the symbolic potential of the deconsecrated church of San Lorenzo. Stripped of liturgical signs yet retaining its architectural memory, the space becomes both gallery and stage for a secular reactivation of the sacred. The ten portraits function as icons of modern art, converging on the central image of A Bruit Secret & Pandora’s Box, placed within the former altar niche.

F. R. When one shakes Duchamp’s A Bruit Secret, a sound is heard, yet no one knows what produces it. This ambiguity makes it a powerful metaphor for art itself. In 1987 I had the opportunity to hold one of the limited editions produced with Arturo Schwarz. That tactile encounter with the object made its metaphorical potential immediately tangible to me.

M. L. The painting A Bruit Secret & Pandora’s Box becomes the conceptual axis of the installation, a metaphor of presence and absence, of concealment and revelation — the possibility of perceiving “something” without being able to define it.

F. R. The myth of Pandora itself is instructive. In Italian tradition, Pandora’s vessel is imagined as a jar containing all evils, released into the world when opened, with only Hope remaining inside. In Northern European traditions, following Erasmus of Rotterdam, the jar becomes a box — a shift that also altered the iconography. Pandora’s container is thus already a mutable symbol. To place Duchamp’s A Bruit Secret within Pandora’s vessel is to stage a koan: listening to the secret sound of a painting as a way of leading the mind beyond the mechanism of thought.

M. L. Your portraits are never complete; they exceed the frame. A part of each face remains outside representation.

F. R. I prefer to call them effigies rather than portraits. In ancient Greek culture, the kolossos was not a likeness but a symbolic presence, mediating between the visible and the invisible. The face exceeds representation because what is truly at stake is always “too large” to be contained within the frame. De Chirico spoke of the mystery of the world residing precisely in its lack of meaning — a poetic intuition that resonates deeply with my own practice.

M. L. Painting, then, does not speak in words. What, finally, is the “sound” of painting?

F. R. Painting has no sound; it concentrates perception through the gaze. Yet through color and sign it alludes to what cannot be said. To “see the sound of art” is to allow perception to move beyond the prison of inner dialogue, opening a threshold of awareness. The artwork becomes a device for interrupting conditioned perception, even if only for a moment.