Interview with Quadreria Romantico Seriale

q)Please tell us your name and where you practice.

a)Quadreria Romantico Seriale is an impersonal name: the use of the "we" is related to this choice. Our project has an european identity with deep roots in a mediaeval pilgrimage route named Via Francigena, in the apennine mountains of the north Italy.

q) Why do you make art?

a)Above all, we make art for the aesthetic pleasure to affirming our conception of being between tradition, myth and symbols. Our artworks want to be an evidence of this "act of will. Then, we make art to mark our radical, anthropological diversity from this anemic and "civilized" system of life. Each artwork by Quadreria Romantico Seriale is a relic of a re-appropriating ritual, performed among serial images and indirect perceptions generated by this immense narcotic entertainment.

q) How do you work ?

a)The oil painting is the technic more used by us. It's a discipline, a mental gymnastics, a cultural choice. We work only on pre-existent images, often taken from agencies or archives. The pics are "sampled" on computer, projected on the canvas and painted in the "obscurity", with only a directional light illuminating the surface. In these conditions, we are more concentrated on the interiority of the work. Also our progressive chromatic reduction has this same finality.

q) What´s your background?

a)We have an Indo-european backgruond, originated in Urheimat. This information is much more characterizing than to list artistic experiences, schools or academies.

q) What role does the artist have in society?

a)Usually, the artists are only entertainers. They are good citizens or "lounge rebels" perfectly functional to the actual value system: relativism, universalism, market. Maybe, the only one possibility for an artist to be more incisive is to define an integral culture. Art as social sculpture. Philosophy as spiritual strategy. Politics as aesthetic realization. Every aspect of the life is "material" to be shaped. The Doric world, as described by Gottried Benn, is an important reference.

q) What was a seminal experience for you ?

a)We don't have a "seminal experience" but we have a "seminal system", erected by ourselves day by day through actions and ideas. It creates our destiny.

q) Has your practice changed over time ?

a)Quadreria Romantico Seriale is a uniform realized for a specific mission. But sometime there are actions that require a camouflage.

q) What art do you most identify with ?

a)Where we are living it's a wasteland. Our concept is part of a perennial tradition, but our works don't identify with anything. This condition is also represented by our symbol: an hyperborean swan that cross obscure waters.

q) What´s your strongest memory of your childhood ?

a)We prefer don't talk about our private memories. We are here as artistic project: we want to be only masks.

q) What themes do you pursue ?

a)Sacredness and Oblivion. Purity and Decadence. Discipline and Apocalypse. At the end, the Quadreria Romantico Seriale pursues a form of elevation.

q) Describe a real life experience that inspired you.

a)It's our opinion that a single fact, more inspiring than others, doesn't exit. There are only different planes of perception and elaboration. Also, we believe that every kind of experience is an element of the real life.

q) What´s your most embarrassing moment ?

a)The entire modernity, with its system of relationships, is an embarrassing moment. Our daily life has become a frenetic magma where it's very difficult to find significant episodes. For many existences, often, the death is the only one moment of authentic vitality. This kind of civilization have lost the sense of Tragic, supplanted by anxiety, sense of inadequacy and "embarrassments" among an infinity of irrelevant facts. We live in a panic at low intensity.

q) What jobs have you done other than being an artist ?

a)We are all "contractors". It's curious, but this aseptic term is used also to indicate "mercenary". It's not a moral judgment, it's only an observation about the inconsistence of our language. Surely, "mercenary" is much more literary than "contractor".

q) What responses have you had to your work ?

a)We are very satisfied with the support that we receive from persons near to our activity.

For us they are the fundamental reason to continue to make art. We are proud of them.

q) What do you dislike about the artworld ?

a)Directly, nothing. The artworld is only an organism generated by anemic post-ideologies, nothing else. There is a legion of promoters which producing a mass of erudite vacuities as meetings, studies, stages, exhibitions. It's the paroxysm of the empty. Everything is undifferentiated, fragmented, "without a center", as Sedlmayr wrote. This is the cultural relativism, that's all.

q) What research do you do ?

a)Our activity is not concentrated on formal questions. We are searching to realize a symbolic style without intimacies. The QRS works are devotional objects related to an Idea above them. They are "tensions", sometime obsessions, between order and nihilism.

q) What is your dream project?

a)The extinction of the actual alienating form of civil society, supplanted by territorial communities with a strong and defined cultural identity (Ferdinand Tönnies could be an important guide). The extinction of the actual meant of "art" (as "art of the artworks"), supplanted by the Art as form of existence. Each of these events is a consequence of the other.

q) What´s the best piece of advice you have been given ?

a)It doesn't exit. There is only a long process of awareness, very often with bloody spiritual battles.

q) What couldn’t you do without?

a)Light.

q) What makes you angry?

a)Nothing makes us angry. But in aesthetic field (for us an aesthetic is also an ethic), we don't like what is shapeless and slovenliness: both these features are lack of style, boldness and spiritual rank. Then, we don't like the human activities without identity and ideality; what is cynically wordily, conventionally incorrect and formally friendly. This "weak ethic", aesthetically ugly, is typical of the liberal societies.

q) What is your worst quality?

a)Anyone can decide it reading these answers.

q) Dogs or Cats ?

a)Wolfs and Lynxes.

q) Making art is a lot like being on lsd. Know what I mean ?

a)We don't know. The acid imaginary is completely different from our nature. Quadreria Romantico Seriale is influenced by the gnostic cultures. For us, making art is like to ordering a legion of obscure and luminous interior creatures. It's care and rule. About lsd question, there are important exceptions near to our sensibility, like Philip Dick and Ernst Junger: artists, mystics and soldiers who lived on superior levels of consciousness.

q) What does “copy” mean to you ?

a)This modernity is founded on the "copy". As the situationists known, this time prefers the "copy" instead the "original" and the truth is a moment of the fake. In this form of civilization, it's an illusion to create new "originals". Conceptually, also QRS artworks are fakes, deviating copies. Apart from that, the important and crucial point is to realize new senses of interpretation, new methods of diffusion, new synthesis, not "new" images.

q) What´s your favorite cuss word ?

a)Liberal.