Paolo Coteni ‎– Nel Corso Del Tempo, A tribute To Laura Grisi LP

Edition of 220 copies. Conceptual artist Laura Grisi (1939-2017) was mostly know for work with natural elements and phenomena such as fog, water, wind, air & light. Quoting Germano Celant “Your work, from the beginning, has presented a certain theatricality. The spaces revealed by your works are more like excursions into the artificial, into fiction.” The first works of Laura date back to 1964-1966. In this period, she met and married Folco Quilici, a well-known documentary filmmaker. Together they travelled to faraway lands where tribal and primitive cultures still existed, like the Andes, South America, Africa & Polynesia. Long periods, up to six months at a time, in which she experienced the overwhelming power of nature and its laws.   “I didn’t want a painting, a sculpture containing air, earth, or water. I didn’t want air, earth, or water to become objects. I wanted to recreate the experience of natural phenomena.”  in 1968 she began to work with natural elements and phenomena such as fog, water, wind, air & light, artificially reproducing them in enclosed spaces. Drops of Water includes a drip system and a white fiberglass basin two meters wide.   “I wanted to create the natural effect of the sound of water falling into water, to create an environment where one might meditate, listening to the noise of the rain.”  In 1969 she made the video The Measuring of Time, a single spiral shot in which the artist repeats the infinite and unfinishable gesture of counting grains of sand in the desert. In Pebbles (1973) Laura Grisi arranged and photographed five small stones in all of their 120 possible combinations. A scientific approach to nature, apparently explicable and finite, about which Laura Grisi, through her works, formulated her own hypotheses. Grisi’s nature is powerful and evocative, emotional and intense, but also ordered and composed, governed by the laws which the artist, fascinated since childhood by her father’s passion for physics and mathematics, always glimpsed and grasped.     Paolo Conteni:  Nel Corso Del Tempo is composed from a series of tapes recorded over time by me in the 70’s and 80’s, where concrete sound is experienced as a document of the reality of time that investigates nature. To me it’s an informal symposium, like a multi-sensory sound immersion experiment, between the sacred and the profane in the chaos of current sound art.  For this piece I was inspired by Laura Grisi and her sound works. When she made me listen to her work Sound, a series of audio cassettes with emblematic titles like Dieci Pietre Cantano (Ten stones Singing) and Il Rumore Della Vita (The Noise of Life), for the first time I immediately understood the importance of her research. It influenced me and I began to study the simple but effective techniques she used. This LP is a recognition of Laura’s innumerable artistic abilities including working with sound. Nel Corso Del Tempo wants to give a new dimension to the artistic world of Laura Grisi.  These two compositions of concrete music are the result of experiences gained through various electronic works I composed over time. Either as natural acoustic sound researches or as sound art pieces for which the research consists of a study of various sound arguments. These recordings are transformed into a repetitive and constant sound dramaturgy, a mix of various temporal and harmonic situations of time. Used as an acoustic process, these sound elements create a harmonic refraction like a cycle that repeats itself over and over again.  These natural phenomena are used as languages of sound art, a direct connection with the reality of sounds and with the intrinsic balances that artificially reproduce them. In the random and purely conceptual sound actions, like an invisible portrait of the work, the sounds are reduced to the space of a space/time context. An autonomous place where a sound journey is staged and where a concrete listening research develops.    Who is Paolo Coteni?  An anarchic, visual and sound desecrating artist, a visionary who overturns the sense of art, an independent sound painter and a theorist of the sounds of silence.  “Paolo is an artist who escaped the reality of art. He’s always busy with the history of the avant-garde and he’s a pioneer of minimalist music since the seventies. He works on sound installations and interactions between sound, sart, music, records and ambient music.” Giuseppe Chiari  “The importance of Paolo Coteni in the Italian context consists above all in him being constantly different from the system and the world of contemporary artists. For Paolo, art and music express themselves totally because the vision the artist has of the world is total. Art can thus move from being the production of objects to being the production of experiences.” Enrico Pedrini