Federica Schiavo Gallery

With his Guardaroba (Wardrobe), Federico Cantale beckons us into the alchemist’s workshop. But paradoxically, in alchemical fashion – after all, alchemists were the people who searched for “the stone that is no stone” – to enter into the workshop means in this case to halt at the wardrobe, to take off one’s clothes and admire a cat. The cat, which in Antonello da Messina’s famous painting of St Jerome’s study minds its own business while the saint concentrates on reading in the magnificent architectonic frame of the painting, is all that remains in the alchemist’s workshop, which we are on the verge of entering. But who is this alchemist?

The alchemist is obviously the sculptor, Cantale himself, who speaks of full-fledged “distillations” when he refers to these works. Indeed, his wardrobe is composed of an entirely normal pipe and five suspended works which are none other than five hangers, or in Cantale’s regional Italian: five omini (an important word, which literally means ‘little men’). Just this, five hangers, five omini. And yet, so much more. To appreciate the unimaginable effects of the alchemical process one need only examine them briefly.

Zosimos of Panopolis (III-IV c.e.), one of the first alchemists, whose texts have been handed down to us, presents a part of the procedure for the transmutation of metals with the following: “The repose of the waters, movement, decorporation, incorporation, the separation of the spirit from the body, the tethering of a spirit to a body… Everything combines and everything separates. Everything mixes and everything is put back in order… Everything blossoms and everything intermingles on the altar-vial… The natural method consists in the rarefaction and the condensation of the breath, in the conservation of the rules, in the growth and conclusion.” This is the alchemy, the cooking and the dyeing of metals by means of the spirit and the breath of the material itself, so that it returns to itself, to gold. And the hangers have been subjected to a similar process. Decorporated, incorporated, the spirit separated from the body and finally tied to a new spirit: these hangers have become spirit itself, but materialised: they fly suspended and mobile, nothing more than hangers and anything but. We see them floating there, suspended from themselves, like Calder’s mobiles: a certain poetic weightlessness is born from matter.

Duchamp gives the name mobiles to Calder’s weightless, flying works, and in this name there seems to be a reference to some other alchemic dream, that of the perpetuum mobile, that we find in the Paradoxa Emblemata of 1700 (fig.). The hangers become more than symbols, alchemical emblems, dialectical images: we see the hanger that has fused directly to the cape of the magician-alchemist to which we will return; we see the forbidden brass fruit, ripe to be picked; or the breath itself of the human

being, become matter, glass, and its skeletal material become light, almost as if it were skin or some membrane ready to fly away. At the end, we find the alchemical symbol par excellence, the ouroboros, the serpent that devours its tail, usually accompanied by the ancient alchemical motto: “everything is one”. Just like in the alchemical symbology, where it appears floating or even to have been pinned to or suspended from a rod, here it rests suspended, it becomes omino.

The sculptor is the alchemist, but we become alchemists as well once we enter the wardrobe. Indeed, to enter the wardrobe, which is the workshop itself, here becomes an invitation to leave our own clothes and let them become work (opera), let them be transmuted. The invitation is to do the same as the wizard and leave our own cape to transmute and transform into a hanger and into spirit, until we finally figure out – as Emanuele Coccia has now been telling us for years and has restated in his recent book, Filosofia della casa – that what is at stake in our clothes is not simply a body, alien and external, but rather precisely our own flesh, which is always made of other bodies, always already animated by the breath of the world. It is perhaps an exceptional case, and one to take into account, that the step of the alchemical process in which the transmutation of the metal corresponds to the transformation of the alchemist themselves, is described in this tradition through the figure of the omino (homunculus). In one of his visions, which will have a tremendous influence on later alchemical thought, Zosimos narrates a phase of the transmutation of metals in the following manner: “And while yet he spoke these words to me, and I forced him to speak of it, his eyes became as blood and he vomited up all his flesh. And I saw him as a mutilated little man, tearing himself with his own teeth and falling away.” When we look at Cantale’s omini (the little men, or hangers), we look at ourselves, our own clothes becoming little men, eating their own flesh and taking flight.

What has Cantale’s magnum opus shown to us? That the wardrobe is the world and, conversely, the world is a huge wardrobe. To step into Cantale’s wardrobe means to never come out. Microcosm and macrocosm are reversed, the one enters inside the other so many times and with such intensity, that the analogy cannot hold and so it short-circuits. In the alchemy wardrobe, which is our own life, our clothes become spirit: they finally show themselves as our own soul, expanding into the world.

Then, we shouldn’t be surprised if what is left of the “workshop” here is just a little cat, a heavy little cat of granite, which stares at us entirely eyeless. To accept that our world is a wardrobe does not simply mean to transform matter into spirit but the opposite as well: to let what is spirit return to matter. Who is this ghostly cat, which haunts the workshop with its presence? I believe it is another extension of our soul,

an image with no physical basis, which inhabits the ether and which we see repeated every day, in every format: it’s a memetic cat, a completely spiritual being, which the alchemical process has here transmuted into matter. Just as the hangers became spirit and air, volatile beings ready to do the same to our clothes and become our soul; so the cats we see in memes on social networks every day have become flesh. Art is such a transitioning power from matter to spirit and from spirit to matter, until there reigns but indistinctness.

Alberto Parisi

Bologna, 26 May 2021

Zona Gialla

*Translated by Alexander Ferguson and Alberto Parisi

With his Guardaroba (Wardrobe), Federico Cantale beckons us into the alchemist’s workshop. But paradoxically, in alchemical fashion – after all, alchemists were the people who searched for “the stone that is no stone” – to enter into the workshop means in this case to halt at the wardrobe, to take off one’s clothes and admire a cat. The cat, which in Antonello da Messina’s famous painting of St Jerome’s study minds its own business while the saint concentrates on reading in the magnificent architectonic frame of the painting, is all that remains in the alchemist’s workshop, which we are on the verge of entering. But who is this alchemist?

The alchemist is obviously the sculptor, Cantale himself, who speaks of full-fledged “distillations” when he refers to these works. Indeed, his wardrobe is composed of an entirely normal pipe and five suspended works which are none other than five hangers, or in Cantale’s regional Italian: five omini (an important word, which literally means ‘little men’). Just this, five hangers, five omini. And yet, so much more. To appreciate the unimaginable effects of the alchemical process one need only examine them briefly.

Zosimos of Panopolis (III-IV c.e.), one of the first alchemists, whose texts have been handed down to us, presents a part of the procedure for the transmutation of metals with the following: “The repose of the waters, movement, decorporation, incorporation, the separation of the spirit from the body, the tethering of a spirit to a body… Everything combines and everything separates. Everything mixes and everything is put back in order… Everything blossoms and everything intermingles on the altar-vial… The natural method consists in the rarefaction and the condensation of the breath, in the conservation of the rules, in the growth and conclusion.” This is the alchemy, the cooking and the dyeing of metals by means of the spirit and the breath of the material itself, so that it returns to itself, to gold. And the hangers have been subjected to a similar process. Decorporated, incorporated, the spirit separated from the body and finally tied to a new spirit: these hangers have become spirit itself, but materialised: they fly suspended and mobile, nothing more than hangers and anything but. We see them floating there, suspended from themselves, like Calder’s mobiles: a certain poetic weightlessness is born from matter.

Duchamp gives the name mobiles to Calder’s weightless, flying works, and in this name there seems to be a reference to some other alchemic dream, that of the perpetuum mobile, that we find in the Paradoxa Emblemata of 1700 (fig.). The hangers become more than symbols, alchemical emblems, dialectical images: we see the hanger that has fused directly to the cape of the magician-alchemist to which we will return; we see the forbidden brass fruit, ripe to be picked; or the breath itself of the human

being, become matter, glass, and its skeletal material become light, almost as if it were skin or some membrane ready to fly away. At the end, we find the alchemical symbol par excellence, the ouroboros, the serpent that devours its tail, usually accompanied by the ancient alchemical motto: “everything is one”. Just like in the alchemical symbology, where it appears floating or even to have been pinned to or suspended from a rod, here it rests suspended, it becomes omino.

The sculptor is the alchemist, but we become alchemists as well once we enter the wardrobe. Indeed, to enter the wardrobe, which is the workshop itself, here becomes an invitation to leave our own clothes and let them become work (opera), let them be transmuted. The invitation is to do the same as the wizard and leave our own cape to transmute and transform into a hanger and into spirit, until we finally figure out – as Emanuele Coccia has now been telling us for years and has restated in his recent book, Filosofia della casa – that what is at stake in our clothes is not simply a body, alien and external, but rather precisely our own flesh, which is always made of other bodies, always already animated by the breath of the world. It is perhaps an exceptional case, and one to take into account, that the step of the alchemical process in which the transmutation of the metal corresponds to the transformation of the alchemist themselves, is described in this tradition through the figure of the omino (homunculus). In one of his visions, which will have a tremendous influence on later alchemical thought, Zosimos narrates a phase of the transmutation of metals in the following manner: “And while yet he spoke these words to me, and I forced him to speak of it, his eyes became as blood and he vomited up all his flesh. And I saw him as a mutilated little man, tearing himself with his own teeth and falling away.” When we look at Cantale’s omini (the little men, or hangers), we look at ourselves, our own clothes becoming little men, eating their own flesh and taking flight.

What has Cantale’s magnum opus shown to us? That the wardrobe is the world and, conversely, the world is a huge wardrobe. To step into Cantale’s wardrobe means to never come out. Microcosm and macrocosm are reversed, the one enters inside the other so many times and with such intensity, that the analogy cannot hold and so it short-circuits. In the alchemy wardrobe, which is our own life, our clothes become spirit: they finally show themselves as our own soul, expanding into the world.

Then, we shouldn’t be surprised if what is left of the “workshop” here is just a little cat, a heavy little cat of granite, which stares at us entirely eyeless. To accept that our world is a wardrobe does not simply mean to transform matter into spirit but the opposite as well: to let what is spirit return to matter. Who is this ghostly cat, which haunts the workshop with its presence? I believe it is another extension of our soul, an image with no physical basis, which inhabits the ether and which we see repeated every day, in every format: it’s a memetic cat, a completely spiritual being, which the alchemical process has here transmuted into matter. Just as the hangers became spirit and air, volatile beings ready to do the same to our clothes and become our soul; so the cats we see in memes on social networks every day have become flesh. Art is such a transitioning power from matter to spirit and from spirit to matter, until there reigns but indistinctness.

Alberto Parisi

Bologna, 26 May 2021

Zona Gialla

*Translated by Alexander Ferguson and Alberto Parisi