The b-uncut blog

b-Loud: Simone Boscolo: past meets present

// January 26th, 2010 // b-loud // Jane

The artist in the spotlight this week is Italian appropriation photographer Simone Boscolo. Boscolo lives and works out of Milan and creates  work that is “research between memory and oblivion inspired by the history theories of Walter Benjamin and others.” His work is ephemeral and hauntingly familiar. Using images from the past the artist manipulates his medium, superimposing his own emotions, fears, and hopes on the photographs through his unique technique. b-uncut caught up with this talented illustrator turned artist for the scoop on his inspiration:

b-Loud!

b-uncut: What was your very first artwork?

SB: My first artwork was “Famiglia Deluca di Pozza di Fassa” (Deluca family from Pozza di Fassa), three years ago (2007).

b-uncut: Describe the one you love the most—why?

SB: My first, ‘cause in this work there are the aesthetic directions that I’ve tried to develop in all my works including my last work’s series.  However it’s difficult for me to love my works after too much time. When I finish a work I feel that it’s not mine anymore and when I see what I have done I see all the things I could do to make it better…

b-uncut: What are your methods? Your inspirations?

SB: It’s hard to talk about your own work because the picture is always incomplete. First of all I have to find a narrative starting point, then equally important is the choice of the pictures on which I plan to work. I get inspiration from historical and social changes that took place during the 2oth century, and more specifically within the context of a 2oth century Italian–very complex, controversial, and with the point of view often being one of countrymen. I work on survivals, on unsolved tangles of a sort of “historic unconscious,” or resistance in loss and persistence in loss deriving from changes that began in the 19th century and accelerated during the 20th. This was the century that produced junk and dizzy dreams destined to fail.

I have found in Walter Benjamin’s “Angelus Novus” a good starting point to channel this research. All this trying to set aside unjustified nostalgia and regret. I think that from my pictures emerges a kind of obsession for death but I believe  this belongs somehow to the dynamics or to the origin of the creative process. I also need a “soundtrack” when I’m working and it becomes part of the same creative process. Generally I work listening to Arvo Pärt, Fauré, Schubert, Einstuerzende Neubauten, Die Form or sacred music from 17^th and 18^th century. The soundtrack is vital for me.

b-uncut: What did it take to make it to where you are now?

SB: Some years working as an illustrator and three years as an artist. It’s a very short time and this has been a long way to walk.

b-uncut: Who has helped you along the way?

SB: The Art-Director of the gallery in which my works are in permanent exhibition (Galleria Zamenhof in Milan). Until three years ago I was an illustrator only. He suggested me to try to find an artistic way for my projects. And I have tried to do it.  Also my family try to support me and, over all, my wife that believes in what I do. Sometimes more than I do.

b-uncut: Do you consider your personal and professional life one and the same? Does your art define you, or do you define your art?

SB: This is a complex question. I can answer that what I do in the way I do is what I love to do.  It is a basic part of me. I must do it. But the artistic way is only a part of the symbolic representation codes through which I try to define the world and my role in it. I can affirm that in many ways my art can define myself, my perception of life, history, society, my personal fears and obsessions, my expectations, mistakes and illusions too. My “Weltanschauung” in other words. Perhaps art is the final product of every side of my life but I don’t live my life like an artwork.

b-uncut: If you were to design the ultimate dinner party, what 5 artists (dead or alive) would you include for stimulating conversation?

SB: Well, these fives could be it (not only painters or visual artists): Joel Peter Witkin, Peter Bruegel “the Elder”,  Jorge Luis Borges,  James Ensor  and Werner Herzog or Pier Paolo Pasolini (not very fun party indeed! I think I will also include five porno-actresses…)

b-Quick!

b-uncut: Your favorite swear word?

SB: I have a latin motto: “Nomina sunt consequentia rerum.”

b-uncut: Most attractive/least attractive quality in a significant other?

SB: It’s not a quality (I think) but in others I’m attracted by their contradictions. And I love the ones who can take themselves and their life with a touch (or a lot) of irony. Too much seriousness is not for me. But normally I don’t ask too much of other people. They are not born to entertain me and I’m not born to entertain them.

b-uncut: Your biggest (albeit endearing) flaw?

SB: A lot on the same level: like a human being I’m irremediably unreliable, often lazy, with a tendency towards selfishness and reasonably vicious.

b-uncut: Your parents advice you should have followed, but didn’t?

SB: My mother desired for me safe employment like every good mom but…

b-uncut: The superhero power you wish you had?

SB: ESP powers…

b-uncut: The celebrity you’d like to meet?

SB: No one, it is a very dangerous thing.

b-uncut: Your least favorite interview question?

SB: All good questions, really.

b-Honest!

b-uncut: Where do you see yourself in…..

One month? In Milan to finish the second and the third part of my Emanuele Gudester’s series.

One year? In Milan with some good exhibition and some more money (I hope).

One decade? I hope to be alive…and if it will be I should like to live with my wife in a cottage on the Hebrides, in Scotland, and, honestly, with a solid artistic career (not only in Scotland, obviously).