A Conversation With Sara Enrico and Andrea Respino

By using different materials and visual references to construct their narrative, Sara Enrico and Andrea Respino created the exhibition «Mai un vestito dunque, adeguato» at Quartz Studio in Turin. A few days ago I met with the two artists for a glass of wine to talk about their idea of exhibition-making.

Sara Enrico & Andrea Respino. Mai un vestito dunque, adeguato, 2019. Installation view at Quartz Studio, Torino 2019.

Vincenzo Estremo

First of all, what’s the story of the Barbarello? I didn’t get which kind of wine it is. You are both from Piedmont – you know, or at least you should know, something more than me about wine.

Sara Enrico

You’re right, we should know something. Actually, none of us have any idea about what kind of wine this is and we don’t have so much to say about the stories behind wines… but I would be very happy to tell you something about I heard it through the grapevine. My favorite version is the one played by Creedence Clearwater Revival in 1970! I would add, though, that we should all agree on the fact that the name Barbarello sounds so peculiar – even sweet. A good name for a 1950s soft drink, perhaps.

Vincenzo Estremo

How was it to work together in a very tiny space like the one of Quartz studio?

Andrea Respino

It was impossible to wander. Once in the exhibition space, you are surrounded by the works, starting from the floor up to the three available walls, so there’s not too much blank space to use, and you can’t easily run from the role of spectator. This means that in addition to the showcase point of view, likewise important, the look was the central element, the one that guided us. The reduced dimensions emphasize the invasive, pervasive and ambivalent nature of the look. One who looks is not free from being seen in turn, it’s useless to presume your own superiority. We know that the one of cinema is a trick.

Andrea Respino
Rosa ritorto, 2019
olio su tela
136×110 cm

Vincenzo Estremo

Sara, you told me something very interesting about neoprene, you actually told me of this idea of synthetic skin and the fascination that you had with sewing this material. Searching online, I learned it is a synthetic rubber that is produced by the polymerization of chloroprene. But I have to be honest, there is another thing that impressed me a lot. While talking with both of you last evening, you mentioned someone who confused some reference regarding Andrea with your work… I know that this is totally pre-textual, but because of what you told me and while thinking of neoprene as synthetic skin, it came to my mind a reference to Saint Bartholomew displaying his flayed skin in Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment. It is just a suggestion, but can you (Sara) tell me something more about your idea of neoprene as skin and you (Andrea) something more about your interest in religious painting and votive art?

Sara Enrico

Vincenzo, such a powerful image you’ve brought in here! Going back to look at that detail, I got stuck on thinking about the skin held by St. Bartholomew, that is being considered as a self-portrait of Michelangelo, depicting him in the empty envelope of skin that hangs clumsily or even grotesquely from the saint’s hand, but on a completely unrelated note, you make me think about Peter Pan and his shadow.
We can talk about wearing or losing a mask, a double (alternate version) of ourselves, and about identity, in a process in-between embodiment, belonging and not belonging. Neoprene may be that flayed skin? Here crossed by an unknown silhouette, a drawing in oxidized bronze. It’s a translation, a passage from a state to another. And this feeling resonates the most to me when our body plunges into the water. The flayed body in the fresco could be transferred into the perception of a body seen through the water, or laying in it: there’s no linearity in the shape, and only the track of a movement. Maybe Michelangelo had the intuition of a fluid body, his flayed appearance held by somebody else who, actually, should be holding his own skin? So is it also about the projection and recognizability of an identity and distance from the self? Mirroring is the title of my work and it follows exchanging or reflecting images, shapes, fluids, alchemy, copies and deformations. Coming to your question, I would say neoprene here works as a double and reversible skin and appearance.

Andrea Respino

I’m attracted by ex voto, especially by painted panels. Of course, it’s a complex field, that requires experts, and it was widely revisited by great artists, even recently. Nevertheless, I consider an ex voto as an incentive for my ideas about representation, particularly for two reasons. The first is the specific quality of votive narrative, that required the gift of extreme synthesis; the idea, for instance, to concentrate more dimensions, the human and the divine, in one image only, but also and particularly more temporalities, thanks to the licenses and the freedoms that ex voto painters could allow themselves, too – but always respecting the necessary and unavoidable codification of specific structures and modalities. These representative modalities of the facts had to satisfy a complex narrative, and manage to re-enact an event with all its involvements and consequences that the same event caused. To me, it feels like something impure on the artistic level, and very compromised towards life, but important because of this.
In fact, the other issue, really bonded to the first, is the revision of facts from the people who commissioned the ex voto. Facts that were considered miraculous. This development not only confirmed the presence and belief in the divine, but it acted as writing of one’s own personal life, in the field of a very lucid social communication strategy. So, it’s about representing oneself through an extra-ordinary narrative context, that could determine us again on the social level. We could maybe define this quality as purely instrumental but it was also – it seems to me – a form of intelligence towards the miracle; although to quote, overturning its sign, the “unintelligence towards the miracle” that Manganelli attributed to Maestro Ciliegia, in his rewriting of Pinocchio. Maestro Ciliegia was completely unfit to feel the presence of the puppet in the trunk, because he was deaf and afraid with respect to the fantastic dimension. Indeed, he was ready to attribute the strange voices to his dementia. It seems to me a condition, this of the unintelligence of the miracle, that concerns us. For sure, in my opinion, it concerns the subjects that I paint.

Sara Enrico
Mirroring, 2019
bronzo, neoprene, filo di seta
20x130x140 cm ca Courtesy the artist photo: Beppe Giardino

Andrea Respino
I beati verdi, 2019
olio su tela
136×110 cm
Courtesy the artist photo: Beppe Giardino

Vincenzo Estremo

When I first learned of your work Sara, it bumped in my mind the strict connection with the theory of embodied, tactile, and multisensory visuality developed by Laura Marks. What is your personal definition of tactile or haptic aesthetic?

Sara Enrico

Yes, indeed, perfect reference. I’m trying to get a proper and personal definition, and I feel that maybe it could be something like an attitude: the idea of working on and observing surfaces (and through them) embodies a lot of things. Starting from looking at the painting, I realized that when you get closer, action and observation develop a physical, linguistic, and cultural systems and an interpretation of the world as an experience of “tactile proximity”. It’s a chance to translate complexity, its deconstruction and its co-existence, by working on the precarious balance and material resonance of its language. Tactile for me is driven also by reaching a kind of ‘low definition’ in the results, following different layers and meanings (and references if we think on the declination of the term across fields and disciplines), or a way for letting you read and feel something physical through an abstract or more narrative dimension. In this sense our experience of the haptic aesthetic I think began above all by looking at the images in the books. Always wondering about the consistency of those pictures and their relation with the environment somehow (both were objects, sculptures, paintings, landscapes, spaces) but when it happens that you have seen them in person, the direct experience twists, grows and becomes a new thing – still similar but different from the way you remember it, from the stories and references. The same happens when you know a person so well – their interests, background, rituals and attitude – but suddenly you begin dating and grow closer. You discover the other side, the intimacy, the “tactile proximity”, and you learn something more.

Vincenzo Estremo

Andrea, I think there is a relationship between the slippery, complex way you use painting and the iconography of your work. What I like about the paintings you presented at Quartz Studio is the way these cutter images are able to tell us a few things about an undetermined past. Is there any attempt to redefine well-established storytelling and theatricality? Can you talk about the ways you use narrative? Actually, I am quite impressed by the way your paintings disrupt a conventional sense of history; they are micro-phenomenological traces of absurdities, but also details of a possible reality.

Andrea Respino

I really appreciate your question, and it feels like there are already answers, beyond what I could add. I mean, this idea of the micro-absurdity is purely congenial to me. And then, if it allows me to build air castles about it, I agree to it entirely, and not solely for what regards the paintings. I’m devoted to looking, decrypting the signs and searching for the form, especially with my eyes – and here comes the tragedy of the look. Everything seems to lead to something else, everything reminds of another thing, and this woodworm that is the research of a logic, of a sense, just creates new roads, infinite possible realities that are dead ends, or better, ridiculous confusions. These words from Georges Bataille don’t sound so (or only) provoking: “It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form. […] Thus lead is the parody of gold. Air is the parody of water. The brain is the parody of the equator. Coitus is the parody of crime.”¹
You ask me if I would like to redefine the consolidated narratives and theatricalities. For sure I would, but I believe that’s one of the greatest ambitions for a painter, especially for the difficulty of relating, now, with a world where storytelling (of oneself, for example) and theatricality are renewed at fast pace on social networks. Painting has the advantage of building images very slowly and, in fact, the images produced with canvas and colors are rich and really concrete.
I think that my idea of theatricality – here I go back to a previous question – is in the look, in the rebounds from one to another. First of all, from mine, i.e. the look of one who can really manipulate the scene but is constantly spying it, the look of represented subjects. Lastly, the future looks, when the painting will find its place outside of the studio. Maybe it will be ignored, but it will look around itself.

¹ Georges Bataille, The Solar Anus (1931).

Sara Enrico
Mirroring, 2019 bronzo, neoprene, filo di seta
20x130x140 cm ca
Courtesy the artist photo: Beppe Giardino

Vincenzo Estremo

One more thing, can you tell us something more about this great title?

Sara Enrico

Glad you like it! We had fun, we wanted to use a kind of voice-over, like an off-stage element, so we played with a very common sentence we may hear somewhat often.