Shouting it from the Rooftop

Varini, who grew up in Locarno – an Italian-speaking city in southern Switzerland near the Alps, has been making works at built locations since 1979. His quest for three-dimensionality, liberated from the two-dimensionality of the canvas, is partly indebted to Italian artist Lucio Fontana. Fontana’s slashed canvases, Concetto Spaziale (Spatial Concept), impressed the 12-year-old Varini, who marvelled at the perceptual impact of the incisions. “Discovering his work was a big shock, a novelty that changed my thoughts.” In 1978/79, he began making in-situ interventions inside an apartment in Paris, where he painted a yellow diagonal cutting through the space and a yellow circle in a corner. The result of the latter bore an uncanny resemblance to a James Turrell light projection. By 1983, Varini was making geometric paintings in churches and on rocks in the countryside, working intuitively in his “field of action”. The in-situ nature of his work aligns him with artists such as Buren, while his geometric, ar- chitectural concern finds an affinity with François Morellet. Varini cites Niele Toroni, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Krijn de Koning, Dan Graham, and James Turrell, artists he feels are “in the same family”. Varini always visits a site beforehand, strolling round, reflecting on what kind of intervention he could make. He works with a team of 8-30 assistants, de- pending on the size and complexity of the project. For an outdoor piece, he uses light projectors at night in order to beam his drawing onto the surfaces. Early in his career he made preparatory drawings by hand but now makes them on his computer.

Commissions have poured in from galleries, museums, private collectors, and municipalities. His large scale projects have seen discs hopping over roofs and façades in Provence (2013) and ellipses looping over the rooftops of Hasselt, Belgium (2014). While most projects have been temporary, there have been permanent ones too. Among these are such diverse places as Cardiff Bay in Wales; a square in Paris; a plaza in New Haven, USA; Aichi Commemorative Park in Nagoya, and Sapporo Dome, both in Japan. The largest project is a suite of zigzagging triangles spanning a horizontal line 2km in length, along the Saint Nazaire port in Nantes, France. Does Varini ever feel any nostalgia when he returns to a place where one of his works used to be? “My works aren’t less ephemeral than a painting, even if they’re taken away after two months, because the certificate remains”, he says. “It’s comparable to a piece of music or a play – the work can be reactivated in the same place or in a different place, but the details of my certificate must be respected.” Rather than looking backwards, Varini is forward-looking. In September he is going to Perth, Australia to find ideas for a project in Fremantle Port that will be realised next year. Another project is planned for a 12th-century abbey in Ardèche, south-central France. He also has a private commission in San Francisco and an exhibition planned for an art centre in Beauvais, near Paris. “I defined my working rule in 1978, and what interested me was finding an independence”, Varini recalls. “Today, I still construct by this rule.” Isn’t there an inherent paradox in how independence is demarcated by architecture? “Reality is always paradoxical, but the architecture is more of a reality than a constraint”, he replies. In the case of MAMO, Le Corbusier’s architecture is a heritage-reality upon which Varini’s joyful work sings to the heavens. À ciel ouvert was at MAMO in Marseille until 02 October 2016. An exhibition on Felice Varini will take place at the Quadrilatère, Beauvais, France, 21 January – 02 April 2017. Felice Varini: Place by Place is published by Lars Müller Publishers.