“Carborundum, il suono del tempo minerale / the sound of mineral time” is the work that Roman artist Iginio de Luca realized for Litografia Bulla (founded in Paris in 1818), which has been active in Rome since 1840 in meeting generations of local artists or artists in transit from different parts of the world.
With the ability of a few to re-invent themselves, since 2020 the Litografia has opened one of its windows to the Project Passaggi, opening onto the street of one of the two historical rooms of the studio, where artists have experimented, and continue to experiment, with this particular printing technique. Openness, too, to experimentation with each generation of artists by Beatrice and Flaminia Bulla, the seventh generation to carry on the business together with their father Romolo.
Iginio De Luca was invited to create a work and to attune to the place. ‘An artist attentive to the conditions of the threshold, where moving boundaries take shape, the moments in which transitions of state occur, in which the perception of the observer transforms people, places and things into something else’.
This is how the artist Pietro Gaglianò portrays himself, and this particular sensitivity makes place come together in the lithographic process, particularly at the moment of the erasure of the stone, the passage from one work to another.
The ink drawing made of grease and resins, created by the artists and then fixed on the stone, is in fact then erased at the end of each work through an abrasive material, carborundum (of the title). The erasure is a moment of transition that his work returns in more than one image, all rooted in sound.
The sound is that which comes from the rubbing of carborundum on stone, with the use of different grains, from the finest to the thickest. Iginio De Luca engaged in this process in search of a tuning and rhythm, with an even physical commitment that could revive the memory of the stone.
When the sound, orchestrated in five tracks compressed in a vinyl record, disperses in the rooms of the lithography, an ‘esoteric place’, a ‘temple of the image’ as Anna Cestelli Guidi has photographed it in her words in the text accompanying the installation, the memory of the activity of hundreds of lithographic stones piled up in space is brought back to life.
Added to this image ‘played’ in the chords of empathy is the audio track of this process formatted by computer and hand-engraved by Iginio de Luca on the same stone to make a lithograph.
The echo of these images resonates in the material that entirely covers the covers of the twenty vinyl series and in the title, “Carborundum, il suono del tempo minerale”, which deposits in the abrasive material and its process, the matrix of this operation and visualises its future transformation in the experimentation to come. Meanwhile, outside the rooms of the lithographic workshop, the echo of erasure resonates in the political consciousness with the same poetic force that defines all of Iginio De Luca’s operations.
images: (all) Iginio De Luca – Carborundum. Litografia Bulla, Rome. © Luis do Rosario
