Interview with Michele Morabito
Michele, considering the interface between machine learning and human creativity, what is your approach to new technologies and how do they relate to your skills in using traditional painting techniques?
I am interested in studying new technologies to understand how they work. In any case, I care a lot about maintaining a strong artisanal component in my creative processes. Instantly generated images do not have much of an impact on my imagination… I think that a fundamental issue in artistic creation is the ability to integrate errors, understanding transformations to find a particular balance without excluding chaotic elements and apparently useless parts. You might think that there is an idea at the base and that this idea is transferred directly into a work but in reality ideas are formed through dialogue and this dialogue continues in all phases of the creation of a work. However, I am fascinated by studying how algorithms work. Machines can absorb an immense amount of data and algorithms are designed to find patterns and regularities in relation to a goal to be achieved: they are trained and perfected through data analysis. There are schools of thought that consider the functioning of the brain comparable to that of an algorithm but from a scientific point of view we still know very little about how the human brain works. For me, art is like a great research on the unconscious processing of information, on the processes of unguided intelligence that we experience through the ways in which our states of consciousness relate to the unconscious, to the profound nature from which they emerge.
Certainly the strength of algorithms lies in the immense capacity to process data to find not so much a truth but to generate an order: to find a model that is functional to achieving a goal. I am interested in the functioning of AI as a whole much more than I am in the functions that can simulate a certain pictorial style and so on… The work of an artist is not simply to achieve technical skill but, as I experience it, it is a great research on how to elaborate and translate human experiences, life, the countless circumstances that make up a life. It is an effort to understand the formative processes of nature that sometimes, thanks to the empathy that is expressed with a technique, can express itself in a particular balance. It is precisely in this particular balance that I recognize a work of art: it concerns something with deep roots in the experience of life rather than a reproducible style or technique…
Over the course of your career, how has your technical approach evolved and how does this evolution reflect changes in your artistic identity?
There is an empathy with technique that comes from the need to give voice to experience, in this sense technique is always a discovery, an intuition of all those steps, sometimes very chaotic, that will lead you to discover a world that you did not know before. Each work contains many others. Sometimes I struggle to find the thread of each transformation because in the various phases there can be real upheavals… It is an experience that involves dynamics that are very distant from each other and in which consciousness communicates with the irrational components: it is a dialogue that somehow gives art a healing value... Of course, perfection has little to do with it because doing the wrong thing with the wrong brush can be as necessary as doing the right thing with the right brush. Technique can also be understood as a question of levels but it is better to avoid giving the impression of having so much technique that you don't know what to do with it... If we then talk about technique in reference to a particular medium, from watercolor to oil painting, from engraving to digital, while continuing to experiment with the most varied mediums and materials I could say that I feel a greater affinity with water and paper but that is not the point... There are countless strategies for applying technique and the comparison with this enormous potential represents a great effort to understand identities, a research effort. There are also works that must respect a certain pre-established order and that doesn’t allow you to experiment much with the technique. In these cases the challenge is to maintain a personal sign respecting the agreed order. In short, in one way or another, we always confront limits and techniques are born precisely from this confrontation with limits.
Your portfolio showcases a vibrant blend of abstract and figurative elements. How do you balance these often contrasting styles, and what does this balance reveal about your conceptual goals? Could you discuss how certain artists or movements have specifically inspired elements of your style?
I have always been inclined to an interpenetration between the abstract and the figurative, I think they are somehow complementary and that in life they find themselves interconnected in various ways. For this reason I try to integrate elements of chaos within logical structures. It is the search for a synthesis inspired mainly by the relationships between nature and culture. In our history there are relevant aspects that cannot be deduced from some mathematical or physical equation: the narratives with their presumed morals influence events as much as geography. Understanding the relationships and balances between the parts can help us solve many problems, to be more aware of our possibilities of choice. Certain artists and movements have certainly inspired some of my stylistic traits, sometimes directly as in the case of all those human figures in vertical flight in a painting I made last year called Ostalgie: those figures are clearly inspired by the work of Magritte and Surrealism but within the same painting we find a rationalist building inspired by the Metabolist Movement, a Japanese architectural and urban planning movement of the sixties. It is difficult to retrace the line of all the influences I have had over the years also because if there is a determining element it is not an artist or a movement but the relationships between many artists and movements that modify my imagination by entering into a relationship with many other elements that do not concern art. It is not a linear process but a continuous reformulation of the lines of connection. Now, for example, the words of Kandinsky come to mind in his famous essay The Spiritual in Art: “Every work is born like this, as the cosmos is born, through the catastrophes that from the chaotic din of the instruments go to form a symphony, the Music of the spheres. The creation of a work is the creation of the world.” I could mention Metaphysical painting, the visionary architecture of Antonio Sant’Elia, the drawings made for the first animated films by Emile Cohl, the representations of dance from Canova to the lithographs of George Barbier that inspired me for some dancing figures. In short, one thing seems clear to me, the issue is not copying from someone but being able to internalize worlds to the point of making them personal. Perhaps it is an unconscious, indirect attitude that forms over a very long time…
When navigating between commissioned works and personal creation, how do you maintain your artistic integrity and voice, particularly when facing external constraints?
In one way or another, we are always faced with limits and in many cases, the expedients needed to deal with these limitations are a strong stimulus to creativity. Even when I work on personal projects, there is always a relationship between my freedom of expression, which is difficult to contain, and the limits that I try to define to find a balance. Many things in nature happen through compensatory processes and it seems to me that over the years I have developed two very distant approaches that seem to belong to two completely different mental forms. On the one hand, I do meticulous work where I define precise rules to respect while on the other, I subvert those same rules, even drastically transforming the images that I compose. These two approaches are perfectly integrated but from time to time I decide whether and how to integrate them and this helps me to manage even those commissions that require very binding standards. There is a planning behind every image, in some works it is more predominant than others, I am thinking in particular of those projects that I follow as an illustrator, for example the Cascina Ca’ Granda project for which I created some illustrations last year and other more purely graphic contents. In those cases the planning is very strong and I try to find the best way to satisfy the client’s requests. I am used to dealing with limits and to working by enhancing external interferences without losing my personality. On the other hand, you are never so free when you want to do a good job…
Could you provide insight into how you conceptualize and then realize a piece of art? How often does the final piece differ from your initial vision, and how do you adapt your process when faced with such creative divergences?
When I carry out personal projects I always want to do research, to experiment: it is a way to understand how circumstances can change in the least predictable ways, to follow different lines of development trying to make the parts go together, to understand how even those parts that seem ugly or meaningless to us can transform themselves, bringing a fundamental contribution to the creation of something unique and wonderful. This method has deep origins in my way of feeling nature and its formative processes: they are not processes that occur in watertight compartments, there are very complex relationships between the parts, sometimes unfathomable, that reveal how every detail is the expression of a multiplicity. Then we must clarify the fact that in personal projects, even if I do not have to comply with a client's requests, there are always particular limits and freedoms that are redefined each time.
What are the underlying motivations that drive your artistic practice daily? Are there specific themes or ongoing projects that currently inspire you, and how do you sustain momentum over long-term endeavors?
Perhaps it is worth distinguishing between will and the sense of necessity: I remember a beautiful book of interviews with Italo Calvino called I Was Born in America, where in one passage the author underlines how will without the sense of necessity is in some way a halved force. I believe a lot in the sense of necessity because it is not the result of a specifically determined decision, it is not a simple act of will, but it carries with it all the complexity of a person's experience, their multiple forms of life, the circumstances that go beyond consciousness... All this can constitute an inexhaustible source of inspiration or perhaps it would be better to say of necessity. The need to confront the deepest dimension of our identity, to confront pain, death. We can invent a whole series of parameters and references to define artists but reality always eludes us, reality goes beyond our possibilities of conceptualizing it. The need to make art is the need to explore the boundaries of this dialogue.
Your decision to host your first solo exhibition in a bookshop rather than a traditional gallery is fascinating. How did this venue choice enhance the thematic elements of your exhibition, and what dialogues did it initiate among your audience?
Books have greatly influenced my vision of the world, from poetry to novels, from short stories to essays: narratives are fundamental in the formation of cognitive maps that help us reflect, change our perspectives on problems, suggesting solutions but also new questions. For this reason, it seemed natural to me to bring my paintings to an independent bookshop in Milan to present an exhibition that had migrations as its theme. This bookshop is called Verso. In that period, it was 2018, I had collected testimonies of ancient and new migrations by travelling around the ports of southern Italy, I had drawn many boats used by migrants to cross the Mediterranean: I tried to decipher the signs of these journeys that are still too often exploited today... So I created a series of works that also gave the exhibition its title: Linee di Fuga. It was interesting to witness the multiplication of possible connections through a dialogue between paintings, books and people. Some came to see the exhibition and found a book that seemed to answer questions evoked by the images, others came in looking for a book and found themselves reading a painting. This kind of contamination also inspires my work and in parallel with my projects as an author of images I carry on others in which I try to give narrative forms to visual ideas. If one day I will be able to bring together these narrative projects in a book I will have truly closed the circle of a story that began when I was very young, a story that goes from books to images and that will probably return from images to books.
With rapid technological advancements altering how art is created and perceived, how do you believe these changes are reshaping the identity of artists and the definition of art itself within contemporary culture?
Evaluating the impact of new technologies on art in general is very difficult, it can be interesting to highlight that not always having more tools and possibilities at our disposal helps us find a personal voice: sometimes a more contained, more limited space can favor a stronger development of creativity; sometimes an artist can be more inspired to work in a neutral space rather than in a place full of colors and images of various types. It is important not to have a naive vision of technology. It is necessary to understand the tools and avoid being possessed by technology. We need to maintain a critical vision especially when technology offers us models to which we are pushed to adapt too superficially. The way we use technologies can make the difference in implementing human voices as well as in flattening them on some models of power dictated by a certain use of technology. We must defend our possibilities of choice, we cannot forget that the developments of technologies, especially those of information, have made large-scale democracy possible but also large-scale totalitarianism. I don’t know what the future holds, but as an artist I am committed to ensuring that there will still be room for human voices, for their tragic and surprising complexity, for those meanings that still elude us and that cannot be reduced to data flows from which we try to extract models of order that are functional to the exercise of some power. We can use the potential of technologies to improve our lives only if we cultivate awareness of its negative potential, of its critical issues.
Travel seems to play a significant role in your creative process. Could you share how specific places or cultures have directly influenced your work? What are some examples where travel has opened up new avenues for creativity in your practice?
We experience forms of travel and life long before we are aware of them. If I think back to one of my earliest memories, when I was perhaps four years old, I can still recall the image of this whirlwind approaching the beach of the island of Samos, in Greece. Some things leave a trace, others seem to vanish, others overlap in ever-changing ways, allowing different meanings to emerge from time to time. Even the past changes and at times it can seem like that game of Chinese telephone where everyone reports the sentence that was passed on to them by another person and in the end the meaning changes… Basically, I would say that meeting people is always a journey that we have the possibility of intuiting. If we consider the world by moving from its periphery towards the center, we realize that we belong to a common history. I am very interested in the memory of those who travel and in particular that dimension of memory that does not resemble an archive. Travel, as I understand it, is not a linear reality. It is a continuous reformulation of one’s center in relation to a periphery, everything changes us and travelers love to get lost in order to find themselves, they love to question the sense of identity. This can happen even in a ten-minute walk, you don’t need to take a plane to go far away… But we must consider that very often we live in conditions that force reality into a language that imprisons us and then perhaps it is better to leave.
I remember a trip I took to Istanbul in 2013 that gave birth to a painting I care a lot about: Le Città Invisibili. After walking all day through the city I stopped in Gezi Park. Captivated by the trees, I sketched them fervently, reminiscent of the verse in a Pablo Neruda poem where these trees appeared adorned with human forms. Even upon my return to italy, the trees lingered in my drawings. It came as a shock when, a few weeks later, protest erupted against the removal of 600 trees to make a way for a shopping complex that would replace Gezi Park. Puzzled by the connection between my trip, the trees I had sketched, and the unfolding protests that commenced with the Gezi Park occupation. After years of uncertainty, I managed to give a definitive shape to the painting that I called Le Città Invisibili.
I also traveled in the Middle East as a photographer, I had a film camera, I left from Nazareth and the areas around the lake of Tiberias to get to Jerusalem passing through Jericho. Then I crossed the wall to reach the Palestinian part, I met some families who lived in the border areas, many children who often walked alone and with whom I tried to talk… Unfortunately, in the space of an interview, it is very difficult to recall the complexity of this experience. I can say that it left a deep mark on my memory, on my way of understanding and imagining. In one way or another, every journey is always present and relives in every moment, even when we go out for a simple walk…
Your work indicates a profound engagement with various artistic disciplines. How do you foresee your practice interacting with other fields in the future, and are there particular disciplines or technologies you are keen to explore more intensively?
As I see it, or perhaps it would be better to say as I feel it, there are no impermeable boundaries between disciplines. There are divisions for the needs of communication, order and power. I think that in human beings everything combines in a much less orderly way and as an artist I am passionate about these infinite possibilities of interaction. My basic elements are images, music and words. From time to time I can experiment with technologies that involve these elements but I always try to maintain a strong artisanal basis, a manual ability in doing things, a relationship with experiences that help me find a personal voice and reflect without taking preconceived positions.
