Around the world in fourteen artists’ houses
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Home like me is a book born by chance. Scrolling idly over some volumes, the author’s eye stopped at Penultimas resistencias, a collection of interviews by Juan Manuel de Prada. The Spanish writer made his debut in 1994 with Coños (Fiche), an editorial case. Assuming that D’Ercole owns it, one inevitably wonders what he would have written if his gaze had fallen on that volume, where the Dionysian description of a cellist goes as far as the image of the clitoris-metronome. However, the gaze stopped on Penultimas resistencias, where each interview is accompanied by a photo: the usual melancholy image of the writer in front of a bookcase. Hence the idea of bringing out a less clerical domestic backstage. This presupposed, fortunately for us, a negation of the premises. So no writers.
Among the artists who suffered the trespassing of D’Ercole, Miquel Barceló in Paris, Francesco Clemente in New York, Mimmo Paladino in Milan, Pedro Cabrita Reis in Lisbon and Luigi Serafini in Rome. Then we have the gallery owner Rafael Jablonka in Warsaw; as well as a couple of musicians: Paolo Fresu in Bologna, as well as Rava in Chiavari. As can be understood D’Ercole, mother from Madrid and father from Puglia, born in Spain, raised in Rome and moved to Milan, where he practices the profession of lawyer to maintain his vices – such as writing, collecting books and works – , is not affected by the taint of Italian provincialism.
Effortless ability to synthesize fragments
If he had overwhelmed us with a flood of words, if he had exhausted us with ecphrasis, D’Ercole would have denied the premises of the book, linked to the joy and epidermal nature of the meetings. On the contrary, he has found a casual capacity for synthesis by fragments without however giving the impression of a period scattered with sharp edges and cuts. After this “world tour in fourteen artists’ houses”, the visual mind of the reader is crowded with visual splinters, like the night of San Lorenzo with shooting stars. Francesco Clemente lights up a Nat Sherman. D’Ercole as he looks at it so as not to overwhelm “a stool by Frank Gehry with Hindu and Buddhist ritual objects arranged on a carpet, this one unmistakable, by Boetti”. The Hammurabi code published by the Vatican in the Roman house of Serafini. The Orthodox cross built by Mimmo Paladino with the A and T, the initials of Andrej Tarkovskij, a pictorial director to whom several interviewees say they are related. Thus Pedro Cabrita Reis, met in Lisbon: “A masterpiece that has always enlightened me is Andrej Rublev by Tarkovsky. The film follows the journey of a church-commissioned icon painter. A story that echoes the myths about Giotto. Rublev travels, gets drunk, fights, makes love with a woman he meets, gets scared, cries alone, eats. He can be seen doing everything but paint ”.
A cow skull in Miquel Barceló’s house
And finally a cow skull in the home of Miquel Barceló, which belonged, like other totemic objects that pass from artist to artist, to François Augiéras, author of an even more striking debut book than Coños: The veillard and the child, where he tells of the journey he made to Algeria to join his uncle Marcel, a former soldier who will host him to sleep in a tent and abuse him. In this perhaps the writer has a few more points than the artist: in not needing anything to create, in being able to transform himself occasionally and simply from a monad into a nomad as still happens. Of him, however, only a cow’s skull will remain, or a photo with his head in the clouds like the one Scianna took of Borges and hangs in Paladino’s Milanese home.
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