«One has only to gaze attentively at a certain point in the darkness, preferably a star of the third or fourth order of magnitude, for the observed point to become a luminous spinning sphere. The possibilities of such a sphere are almost infinite, (...) as the image expands, it reveals a baroque structure, wreathed with bouquets of petrified plumes, elaborate crests, and curls that constantly grow and shift with a pictorial radiance.»
J. Rodolfo Wilcocq, «La Sphère», in Le Stéréoscope des solitaires
For Maxime Rossi, artistic design appears to proceed by anadiplosis, resulting in unexpected ramifications and chance imbrications that eventually reveal - in the manner of the luminous sphere evoked by J. Rodolfo Wilcock - a rich constellation of logically interconnected ideas and forms.
Take, for example, the project Cheap Imitation, begun in 2009 and exhibited in various forms including drawing, performance and sculpture as well as sound. Perhaps the central pivot of this protean adventure is the series Père Lachaise, for which Maxime Rossi placed scores by Frédéric Chopin on the tomb of the famous pianist at the titular Parisian cemetery. The artist attached coloured felt-tip pens to the branches of a weeping willow overhanging the tomb; buffeted by the wind, they began to drip. In this "drip painting" orchestrated by the tree, coloured marks were created by chance, randomly spattering the composer's pages. The artist used these scores, which were thus rendered doubly mute, to reflect on notions of silence and anti-silence, as impeccably demonstrated by Cheap Imitation. Here, Maxime Rossi attempted to teach silence to a mynah, a bird in fact renowned for its ability to faithfully reproduce the human voice. This attempt to impose silence on a talkative bird was, of course, futile: the mynah began to imitate banal environmental noises such as a slamming door, a creaking floorboard, a barking dog, the noise of a drill, or even a flushing toilet. In complete contrast to John Cage's sacrosanct 4'33" of silence, these sonic outbursts were then recorded by Maxime Rossi on a picture disc. This project is the result of a process running counter to all logic, and in this sense questions the impact of noise transformed into sound, and of sound that becomes obsolete once recorded. Then, to what might have seemed a closed topic, Maxime Rossi added other elements, in the manner of spin-offs from a film or television series.
These works are thus joined by a comic strip covering the adventures of Superman in the issue entitled Clark Kent's Mynah Dilemma. In this adventure published in October 1979, Clark Kent's neighbours ask him to look after their mynah, which then discovers the secret of the superhero's double identity. Thirty years later, in 2009, Maxime Rossi asked an artist at Marvel Comics, publisher of the adventures of Superman, to draw a new panel - a sort of "dummy page" - to be inserted into the original story: the moment when Clark Kent, searching the Internet for a way to keep his mynah quiet, stumbles across Maxime Rossi's website and his project Cheap Imitation... Then, coming full circle, Maxime Rossi asked a mime, Ivan Bacciocchi, to interpret the mynah's sounds in body language, returning this infernal "score of noise" to silence. From this collusion between time, forms and space, the world of Maxime Rossi gradually emerges.
This approach enables the artist to create a world with almost infinite possibilities, where grand Art History meets popular culture and geographical areas begin to overlap. Maxime Rossi essentially seeks to achieve an intermingling of worlds that, on the surface, have nothing in common. Resulting in precarious but subtle balancing acts, this approach to his work, which unconsciously assumes the aspect of a constel-lation, enables him to develop a poetry of language, marked by a constant and often humorous brutalisation of semantics. Like the conductor of an orchestra, Maxime Rossi engages in a practice that is primarily collaborative, tending to surround himself with creators from various backgrounds: graphic designers, musicians, singers, film-makers etc. working as an ensemble. From this "cacodylic eye" comes a sincere desire for the artist to constantly extend the limits of his own constellation, to venture out in search of exoplanets, to create a joyful polyphony proving the extravagant solution to the equation 1 + 1 = 3. The Mita project, which he worked on with his studio partner Armand Jalut, took him from the pink walls of a hair salon in Barbès to an Oasis Mini Gym hotel in the Philippines, accompanied by a throng of artists and curators who responded to this invitation to present works in innovative locations, far from the beaten track of contemporary art.
Another of Maxime Rossi's projects that is global in scope, if not a "total" work of art, is Sister Ship. The real cornerstone of this multi-act operation, the eponymous film consists of a musical transcription of the book Come Alive!: The Spirited Art of Sister Corita,1 a biographical work on the art of Sister Corita, written by art critic Julie Ault. The film's soundtrack makes use of every element of the book: the front cover, back cover, biographical texts, reproductions of slogans from Sister Corita's silkscreen prints, footnotes and captions to her works all form the words of an improvised performance by a singer (Emma Daumas). The singer is accompanied by musicians from various backgrounds (Check Tidiane Seck, Kandia Kora, Aki Onda...), the rhythms of a tap dancer (Isabelle Dauzet), and an organist (Hampus Lidwall).
Each of the seven chapters of the book is thus transformed into a musical spectacle, its structure paying homage to the musicals of Hollywood's golden age. For the images, Maxime Rossi used the rushes from the 2013 documentary film Pygmy Blues, by Renaud Barret and Florent de la Tullaye. The film's soundtrack expresses the musicality generated by reading the book and by the rhythms of the layout of reproductions of Sister Corita's works. The association of shapes, colours and sequences creates synaesthetic sensations: the collages of texts and filtered images give rise to constant sonic and visual interactions. The banks of the Congo drift past in outline, a timeline tracing the course of this musical flip book. The long and meandering tracking shot of the river banks seen from the boat thus echoes the repetition of pop slogans and catchphrases devised by Sister Corita, as if chanted like prayers from the Gospel. Lying somewhere between offbeat musical, cinéma-vérité and unexpected biopic, the structure of Sister Ship also follows in the best Hollywood tradition: from the almost psychedelic opening, featuring abstract motifs, right up to the coda or epilogue, musical themes and leitmotifs punctuate this flowing film. This project explores the language of musicals and their gospel origins, paying particular homage to films like The Green Pastures 2 (1936), and, in another register, Steamboat Willie (1928), a cartoon film by Walt Disney considered to be the first with synchronised sound.
This long-term project took several years and was created in different stages that explored and expanded on Maxime Rossi's intentions. One of these stages is the piece entitled Wetn'Wild3 (2014), a synaesthetic sink that is at once a sculptural object, a musical instrument and the trace of a performance. Maxime Rossi essentially used the platform as a set for a female tap dancer to perform on. The resulting sound was recorded and then incorporated as a musical motif in the soundtrack for the film Sister Ship. Coated with dichroic film and a fine layer of water, the bottom of the sink reflects light while imbuing it with fluorescent hues; as the tap dancer's shoes strike this iridescent surface, each note corresponds to a colour, thus referring back to the colouristic games of the image.
The setting for the screening of the film forms an integral part of the project: a series of large canvas panels for silkscreen printing provide a structure for the space and for the visitor to wander through. At once a spatial framework and a projection surface, the panels extend the artistic world of the film Sister Ship while paying homage to Sister Corita's silkscreen print motifs. More than a simple film projection, the presentation is conceived of as an enlarged cinema installation that is embodied in space. Created in collaboration with the Parisian silkscreen studio Arcay, these panels, where the mathematical precision of Vasarely's studies is casually superimposed on the biomorphic shapes of Arp, are reminiscent of a film set while also suggesting the world of theatre adaptations of the most famous musicals, from Hollywood to Broadway, and vice versa. By entering this spatial structure, the visitor becomes both spectator and potential actor. A spectator, firstly, since they are able to curl up on the bean bags designed especially for the exhibition, whose printed patterns partly echo those seen on the panels. An actor, secondly, because the coloured lighting may suggest a theatre stage, thus enabling complete immersion in the space.
This installation reflects Maxime Rossi's approach to his work: between scholarly research, shifts of meaning, and serendipitous developments, the artist follows a path where an initial concept - here, the life and work of Sister Corita - becomes the connecting thread within a constantly expanding constellation, where various scattered elements all contribute to his thinking and practice.
For Maxime Rossi, each presentation of a single project is therefore capable of becoming a supplementary source of information, a new direction to be explored.
While his research into Max Ernst's period of American retreat in Arizona found its first expression in 2013 with the creation of ceramics produced in the Salerno region, the presentation of the film Two Owls on a Mountain, and a Snake at the Bank (2012) at the exhibitions Real Estate Astrology (at Allen Gallery, 2015) and It's a Zodiac Rain (at Tiziana di Caro Gallery, 2016) enabled him to develop and refine a projection environment in which the visitor is an integral component. The moving image is experienced via the spatial envelopment of the spectator: in the rococo setting of the Neapolitan gallery, coloured filters help create an environment of tinted light where traditional vision is challenged - deliberately deviating from the precepts of the White Cube or Black Box. This way of working with light is reminiscent of the approach taken by Thomas Wilfred (1889-1968). In the 1920s, under the title Lumia, Wilfred used light as the raw material for artistic experiments that focused on ways of controlling and projecting luminous shapes evocative of the aurora borealis. By analogy, the infinite depth of these abstract images is suggestive of one of Maxime Rossi's most recent projects - Christmas on Earth Continued (2016-17). In it, he used an algorithm to reinterpret a new version of the Pink Floyd song Louie Louie, endlessly mixing the recordings to create an ocean of possibilities, a constantly evolving constellation, mirroring the approach of this artist who springs constantly from one star, or galaxy, to the next.
1 Julie Ault (dir.), Come Alivel: The Spirited Art of Sister Corita, London: Four Corners Books, 2006
2 Directed by Marc Connelly and William Keighley, and produced by Warner, The Green Pastures is one of the first films containing extracts from the Bible performed by African American actors.
3 The title of this work refers directly to a 1967 silkscreen print by Sister Corita, Wet and Wild, playing on the metaphorical and semantic overtones of the titular phrase, which implies an impulsive and frenetic action just like that of the tap dancer's