Livio Stabile: RAW MARKS
Livio Stabile beside “Bearings” in his studio, Hollywood, Calif.
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Notes, intuitions, markings on an extroverted surface of clay.
In these dramatic assemblies of clay tablets, the raw greenware acts as a seismograph recording signs, icons, lacerations, and caresses carved in liquid blue engobe.
Studio Exhibition | On view July 26 – 27, 2024 | Opening reception Friday July 26th, 5:00 pm – 8:00 pm
July 26, 2024, Los Angeles, California—The exhibition Raw Marks by Livio Stabile explores the corporeal context of the creative act. The three works invite meditation on how the body orients itself in space: Bearings opens to the multiplicity of directions and choices, Eyes witnesses to the otherness in ourselves, and My Right Hand demonstrates how the human body intervenes in reality to alter things for its own purposes.
BEARINGS
81 ENGOBE CLAY TABLETS [H 53 1/2, W 54 3/4, D 2 1/2 inch]
The blank clay slabs act as seismographic registers recording field forces, compression, and rarefaction in three-dimensional spaces behaving as two-dimensional. The everchanging relationships between three prime elements – Y, Arrow, and Blue Engobe – inform and orient each clay tablet face one after the other. Through repetition and seriality the viewer intuits a transition from signs to symbols to language.
EYES
81 ENGOBE CLAY TABLETS [H 53 1/2, W 54 3/4, D 2 1/2 inch]
In continuity with Bearings, Eyes is a clay mural made of 81 engobe tablets defined by a few basic elements: crude slices of clay, blue engobe, and the icon of the eye. But in contrast with Bearings the blue engobe is applied in a more controlled way with continuous brush strokes crossing each tablet from side to side, establishing a horizon, a boundary, a territory, a zone for the “wide shut” eye to observe and be observed.
Obsessive variations of the eye icon are carved in the context of an everchanging blue engobe horizon creating a syncopated rhythm, a discontinuous reality, like so many clicks of an imaginary camera shutter. In some tablets the eye icon is so fiercely carved that the clay rips open a gaping cut allowing light to pierce through, evoking the mystery of vision, seeing and being seen.
The composition of the tablets is a metaphor for the sentient body, as the plurality of concurrent visions form relationships going beyond classical mind–body dualism. The oculocentric paradigm of sovereign vision is no longer the reigning medium of knowledge. The whole body contributes to the thinking process, moving in a dense reality in which there is no adequate knowledge without interactive plurality. Each clay tablet “sees” and “feels” only in active relation with the others. Knowledge is achieved through empathy. The tablets mirror and echo each other’s individualities in a process in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Seeing ourselves in others coincides with recognizing their otherness in ourselves.
“Being human is an open question: . . . what makes us human is precisely the fact of being a producer of meanings: the human is the animal that asks itself “what does it mean to be human?” [Gallese, Morelli (2024), Cosa significa essere umani? Raffaello Cortina Publishers]
MY RIGHT HAND
36 GLAZED CLAY TABLETS [H 36, W 36, D 1 5/8 inch]
As in the two larger ceramic murals Bearings and Eyes, clay tablets are the registration medium for marks and intuitions. But My Right Hand is a more intimate work consisting of four 18 x 18 inch wood boards, each supporting nine ceramic tablets, focused on the body of the artist, specifically his right hand. Here the corporal context of the creative act is asserted as the human animal intervenes bodily on reality to alter it for its own purposes.
A single governing principle is in play: the pristine surface of the greenware tablets partially brushed with an expressionist glossy-deep-blue glaze can be altered only by the lacerations, scratches, punches, and caresses directly imprinted in the clay by the right hand and its gestures. The registering surface of each tablet with its specific materiality and sense of urgency is the essence of the work and its substance, eliminating the need for any other interpretation.
Each of the 36 tablets displays structural elements of the condition of being an artist today – including “mutability, temporariness, contradiction, and love for the detail,” to quote art critic Bonito Oliva on occasion of the 2008 exhibit La Mano Decapitata.
A native of Italy, Livio Stabile has lived in Los Angeles since 2008. His formation as an architect in Rome carries the influence of Italian post-war polymaterialist experimentation and the 1980s Transavanguardia movement into his contemporary artistic practice. In 2006, he worked in the planning department of architect Paolo Soleri’s urban laboratory Arcosanti (in northern Arizona), exploring the conviction that architecture is a practice incorporating all the fundamental spheres of living. His drawings and gestural paintings seek to bring emotion, figuration, and mysticism back into art. To ensure the integrity of the moment he works with rapid calligraphic strokes in an essentially two-dimensional space. A density of signs reminiscent of medieval art and baroque spatial relations remain strong determinants in his work.
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General Information
Location: Livio Stabile studio is located at 6646 Hollywood Blvd #205, Hollywood, California. The studio is on the second floor of the historic Hollywood Cherokee Building. Public transportation: Metro B line Hollywood / Highland. Parking: street parking.
Opening reception: Friday July 26th, 5:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Exhibition hours: Friday and Saturday, 5:00 pm – 8:00 pm. Free and open to the public.