Giusto Pilan Interview

Giusto Pilan is an Italian artist, based in Venice, whose paintings, engravings and sculptures echo ancestral memories of mankind…

Giusto Pilan – Trionfo Della Morte

Mixed media on paper, 2017 (300 x 150cm)

What was your experience of studying at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia?

It was a very beautiful and stimulating experience, which allowed me to deepen the conceptual themes of contemporary art and above all to be able to compare myself through painting with other young artists.

The Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, founded in 1750.

You’ve described your art as ‘principally addressed to the recovery of a lost memory which finds its origins in the birth of mankind and the first rock’. When did these ideas first interest you?

It is something recondite in me that I have always felt and perceived irrationally first, then more and more conceptually until I understood that it was the only possible way. The example I like to cite is the writing of the philosopher Walter Benjamin’s “Thesis on the philosophy of history” which comments on the painting ‘Angelus Novus‘ by Paul Klee: this is the angel of history with his eyes turned to the memory of the past and the its wings open which it cannot close, as if dragged by a stormy and unstoppable wind towards the future. This image sums up my idea of art.

Angelus Novus, 1920 monoprint by Paul Klee.

What does prehistoric art & cave painting mean to you?

It is the primordial sign that interests me. The archetype of form. The sign stripped of decorative or formal tinsel.

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Giusto Pilan – Angelo

2018, Mixed media on canvas (170 x 143cm).

Which artists have most influenced you?

Surely Jean Fautrier through informal painting, Jean Dubuffet and Art Brut, Antoni Tàpies with his graphic code and “walls” and Mario Sironi an Italian painter perhaps little known abroad who lived and worked under the Fascist regime for twenty years.

Jean Dubuffet in his studio, 1967. Photograph by Luc Joubert.

Your archetypal depictions of horses, fawns and skulls could almost exist at any point in history. Do you strive to make work that appears timeless?

Even if I use a language that I consider contemporary, I am interested in creating a work that cannot be ascribed in a given historical period.

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Giusto Pilan – Skull

Oil, monotype on paper, 2017 (193 x 198cm)

Your painting technique utilises marble powder, wax and pigments before using a blowtorch to penetrate the materials. How did you develop this approach to painting?

Oil painting no longer satisfied me, I needed materiality, Fautrier and Tapies opened the way for me as did the ancient Romans with their encaustic painting technique where they heated wax mixed with pigments onto the wall (see the Villa dei Misteri of Pompeii).

Villa of The Mysteries – Pompeii. Villa dei Misteri, ancient Roman villa on the outskirts of Pompeii. Photograph by Raffaele Pagani.

Your paper works are created by pressing iron profiles on paper, can you talk some more about this process?

It stems from the desire to leave a trace, an imprint as rarefied as possible using the chalcographic press. Iron plates and industrial materials are shaped in ways that engrave and retain the ink, creating monotypes.