Carlo Bernardini: interview with the artist

Carlo Bernardini – courtesy Bruna Genovese.

Do you remember Art Bag magazine with a surprise?

Alice Traforti talked about it on her blog, where she asked a few questions to Carlo Bernardini, one of the artists participating in the project, to understand his research and appreciate even more the multiple presented in the magazine.

Here is the interview.

WHO IS CARLO BERNARDINI

Carlo Bernardini, born in Viterbo in 1966, lives and works in Milan.

His artistic research focuses on the perception of space investigated through the beam of light that penetrates a reality yet to be revealed.

It is not pure sculpture; the dimension of his work goes beyond the three dimensions, extending to the entire surrounding environment.

INTERVIEW WITH CARLO BERNARDINI

Alice Traforti: Let’s start talking about your research through the collectible multiple with Art Bag.
What surprise have you in store for collectors?

Carlo Bernardini: It is a drawing of the installation created at Palazzo Litta in in December 2009; penetrating the interior of the building and linking the volumes of the external area with the internal rooms was a complex and transgressive intervention on a historic building, leaving the windows open to external agents, touching and penetrating walls and floors, something that is usually impossible in historic buildings.
I wrote a text specifically for the project of this intervention, from which I quote these words to clarify its meaning: “The installation appropriates the space and engulfs it within itself, eluding its physicality.
It is a relationship of domination that the spatial form establishes with the place, penetrating it, fertilizing it, reducing it to its power until it transforms it into itself.
It is a game of roles in which the space is transformed from a container into a work: the design of light passes through it, penetrating it, and once inside, it passes through the walls without interruption.
The fiber optic line passes from room to room, piercing the walls and breaking through the floors, combining the external environment with the internal in a single design: ‘permeable space’, the place where ‘light generates space’.”

Progetto per “La luce che genera lo spazio”, 2009 – 70 esemplari firmati e numerati.

Alice Traforti: Technology is a strong component of your poetics. Why did you choose fiber optics?

Carlo Bernardini: I started working with external light fiber optics in 1996 because it crystallizes light into a physical form.
In fiber optics, I found both a new means of expression—one that was not overused by other artists—and an ideal medium for highlighting space as a ‘mental drawing,’ a drawing that, instead of a surface, exploits total space and darkness as a dark sheet on which to structure itself in negative.
The fiber optic installation is therefore a drawing in space that transforms the space itself and the observer’s perceptual coordinates.

Dimensioni Invisibili, 2016 – fibre ottiche, 5,22×18,50x 7mt – Milano, La Porta di Milano,
Aeroporto di Malpensa, (Terminal 1)

Dimensioni Invisibili, 2015 – installazione ambientale in fibre ottiche, 10x28x27mt –
Oscar Niemeyer Museum, Bienal de Curitiba

Alice Traforti: Would you like to tell us about your upcoming projects and where we can see them?

Carlo Bernardini: I have several, but it would take a long time to talk about them, and for superstition’s sake I prefer not to.

However, they involve encroaching on the total space, transforming it into the work itself; the goal remains to elude the physicality of places and shift the focus by reversing the meaning of the environmental space, transforming it from a container into a work, which in my view is one of the most open experimental lines in today’s visual research.

Submerged Breath, 2013 – fibra ottica, dimensione ambiente, 4x37x28mt –
Metz, Moselle Canalisée, Square Du Luxembourg, Moyen Pont.

For further information, here is the artist’s official link:

https://carlobernardini.carlobernardini.it/

Interview by: Alice Traforti.