Memory games are truly unpredictable. Something that doesn't appear for years and years, something that doesn't cross your mind, you just need a moment and there it is, a fleeting image, which suddenly brings you to a present, from a time you imagined lost, and which suddenly seems like an eternal present, as if it had always been with you. Last Sunday, at the start of lunch, in the best room, I was struck by the remnants of a very beautiful table setting, and in the desert of a moment, there was Daniel Spoerri (1930-2024). The visual immediacy of his works under plexiglass follows that of his tableaux pièges, in the arena of the “Restaurant Spoerri” and the “Eat Art Gallery” above it, where his name, after being associated with those of his mutual friend Pierre Restany, Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Arman, Martial Raysse, and I'll stop for brevity... became contaminated with those of Lichtenstein, Beuys, Niki de Saint Phalle; a testament to his infinite curiosity, which led him to great mental, rather than physical, nomadism, because he thought he could find both fables and toys everywhere; and thus, he embraced and squeezed every estrangement, every coincidence, as if it were an intimacy, a necessity.
His way of being so many things, from dancer to choreographer, from painter to assembler, might seem amateurish, but it isn't, because it's his serious way of engaging with a choral poetics of the concrete, of the mutable, which leads him to a suspension of gesture and taste, in an eternal form of heterogeneity. The continuous, metamorphic is the hallmark of his profound modernity, which is necessarily post-stylistic and aimed at contaminating everything, with a paradoxical metaphysics, whereby physicality, the more it is insisted upon, the more it evaporates into the pretext that everyone is good for turning the wheel of time, in an inescapable destiny. The ready-made has thus taken centre stage in his artistic life, which is the sign and realm of his contaminated universe, where the already-made speaks a language of reification and alienation, to which he opposes his pail for emptying oceans, with great stubbornness and gentleness. His artistic psychology is so absorbed by a paradoxical objectivity, because it is entirely mental, conceptual, all the more so as he seems to want to absent himself from his works, to encourage them to come alive and become artefacts in themselves, children of chance and opportunity. But chance is he himself, Romanian like Cioran, Ionesco, Eliade, Brancusi; he has penned artistic pages of absolute conceptual richness, imbued with irony and cosmic pessimism, but of great theatricality, which are mirrored in his mediumistic and Duchampian nature, found in his signature on the Nouveaux Réalistes manifesto and in his Eat Art, which is what brought me to him, allowing me to wander through his “Daniele's Garden,” at the foot of Monte Amiata, of radiant Castel del Piano, all sausages and porcini mushrooms, and in martinian Arcidosso.
KLESSIDRA | EDITED BY FRANCESCO GALLO MAZZEO
Italiano 
English (UK)