Over the last 30 years, I have been keeping a close eye on his work. His was the very first piece I bought, when I was 16. The Italian painter Claudio Diatto started his career in the ’80s in “Alta Langa,” in Northern Italy, where people and places helped him face those early years of artistic experimentation.

Here is the chat we had in his studio on December, 2018, during a special Italian edition of ARTCaffè.

‍ARTCaffè: Let’s start from your latest series, which you have been engaging in over the last five to six years.

Claudio Diatto: The genesis of those works comes from long time ago, indeed. The “Cartesian Woods” I exhibited in China; “Textus;” and the latest, “Divenire|Become,” where I examine the relationship between figurative and abstraction. Those are my latest series that I will keep developing in the near future. I am living a very happy moment, because I clearly understand what I am doing… which is an important privilege, to me.

More than forty years ago, after what I call my “social suicide,” I wholly devoted myself to Art. From 1979 to 1991, painting became my self-analysis therapy. However, I went beyond that and I can now make Art in its deeper sense, not because I have fully recovered, but because I healed myself quite enough.

ARTCaffè: What do you mean by “social suicide?” I am always intrigued by the reason why an artist ended up doing what he or she does, and that was a fundamental moment for you, the starting point for your following work.

Claudio Diatto: That was a conditio sine qua non, without that premise I wouldn’t have end up where I am.

I have an absolute passion for Art. At 7 years-old, I had a great painter as a teacher in elementary school. Instead of making us doing trivial drawings—so common at that age—he introduced us to watercolor, an extremely difficult technique, and did so in a very professional way.

In secondary school, my professor was one of his former pupils, and again a talented painter. Long story short, I was the one who knew how to draw. I grew up, kept on studying, and started working during university. At a certain point I was hit by a big crisis due to a loss in my family.

A couple of hours with a therapist would have probably been enough. But due to the inability to commit an actual suicide, and the impossibility to have adequate psychological support, I took Art as my personal tool and I committed what I call my “social suicide.” I gave up a prestigious job and renounced to all my exams when I had only one left to get my degree in architecture.

I couldn’t and I still can’t accept the widespread attitude about making art after another job. The two things are conflicting to me. You can be a good artist but if you are engaged in another activity many hours per day, you will never reach important results. I don’t mean technical results, but emotional ones.

All of a sudden, because of my drastic choice, I had to support myself with my art. I realized that being just good at drawing  and painting was not worth a dime.

By deepening my studies, I discovered that my figurative way of painting was an excellent tool to process my own situation. Since I was not yet able to work on mine, I started working on others’ memories by processing old family photos of people I didn’t know personally. For 13 years, word of mouth brought me into friends of friends’ houses. From beneath the bed, every family would pull out the classic shoe box, the one that held all of the their treasured memories. I added colors and parallel stories to those images and I turned them from personal memories into collective ones.

The series ended up as my solo show in Paris, in Rue Dauphine, at Galerie Le Breton.

My work was in a prestigious gallery in the heart of Paris. For a young artist as I was, that could have been a starting point. Following the “social suicide” parabola, I should have thrown myself into the Seine, ending my life in a romantic way… Instead, the year after the exhibition the woman who would become my wife came to rescue me.

I never put aside the pictorial discourse itself. Behind the “Memories” Series, there is wide research about the way of painting: flat colors, no shades, a tendency to pop. Unfortunately, my self-analysis had moved from the research of the content to the technical content of the painting: I was making very small formats with 36 different colors and it was total nonsense.

That was the moment I moved on to the second series: the playful one, in which I modified the figuration and put emphasis on Nature.

ARTCaffè: That was the moment we met. One of the first painting from that series, still with representations from the previous one, is “Le jardin dell’oncle Marcel,” the very first piece I bought.

Claudio Diatto: That research combined thirteen flat hues and a reference to Matisse regarding the juxtaposition of colors. In the same period, I got to know the art market better and discovered that there was nothing good about it. I lost many artworks, had conflicts with gallerists, and shut myself in.

But in 2000, I was enlightened by the synthesis of the Woods.

‍ARTCaffè: Let's go back to the opening topic of our chat: your latest series.

Claudio Diatto: “The Woods” was already a topic in my previous works, together with other graphic symbolism, but treated in a sweetened and light way. “The Woods” has a character that allows anyone to project fears, joys, or wishes onto it. It is also graphically appealing: that is why, at a certain point, I felt the need to unravel this theme.

Back then, I was not happy with my figurative work anymore. Many people saw similarities with Nespolo and his wooden works and even though I loved his work I knew I was heading in another direction.

For more than a year, I looked for a graphic synthesis of “The Woods.” The first results were nine fragments that I realized while thinking of the lessons of the great architects from the ‘60s and ‘70s: take away, take away, and then take away once more. Renzo Piano in particular inspired me. To him, emptiness in architecture is a way of representing silence.

In my previous works, shadows were painted on canvas as artificial volumes on a flat surface. I wanted to detach from the canvas and I started realizing those compositions by cutting them. I experimented with metal and wood but those solutions were too complex. I wanted to lighten and simplify—that’s how I got to paper.

From this, the “Cartesian Woods” were born—my new way to tell stories through countless fragments. In those works, the main character is the woods. At the beginning, some of the previous figurative shapes were still there, such as the man catching the moon with a red thread.

The reference for this series is the “Discourse on the Method” (1637) by Descartes. We all come from Descartes. I deeply feel I come from him because of my studies in architecture, my previous life, and my way of painting where I pay extreme attention to each single detail.

As for Descartes, “Walk straight and, if you keep the direction, you will get out of the woods.” The thread in my works helps the red man to get out of the woods. I called it “The Bright Woods,” in opposition to Dante’s dark one: losing yourself into these woods is not only pleasant, it is advantageous.

I started combining those fragments with silk prints, derived by pictures I took of woods near my home. The red man disappeared; I wanted to go beyond that playful approach and start a new, mindful discourse about the topic I was exploring. That was the beginning of the series “Textus.”

My reference for that series was the philosopher Massimo Recalcati. In making Art there is always a moment when you need to give a higher meaning to the image you realize. With a fruitful coincidence, Recalcati’s philosophical point of view came in a moment when I felt the need to explain those new works to myself.

To him, Art should lift the veil that divides Reality from the Real word. Reality are those social conventions we all adapt to, otherwise, we could not survive the heaviness of the Real word and its tragedy, grief, and violence.

Two sections compose each work in “Textus.” On the left, there is a bucolic scene: in these woods—which is a “texture” (hence, “Textus”)—time is suspended. Something just happened or is going to happen: something pleasant—or anyway not bad. By lifting the veil, as per Recalcati thought, we find a reworked picture on the right: a black synthesis of the woods that counterposes the white. It is the feeling we all experienced right after the storm, “it is over and we survived it.” It is not an absolute tragedy because there are still those smells that make us appreciate we went through that storm.

The two sectors are indivisible: it is not a diptych, but a whole work, that has to be undergone in its unity. If this image has to have a meaning, I would like people to read it in this way.

ARTCaffè: While working on “Textus,” you also started the series “Divenire|Become.” What is the origin of this series?

Claudio Diatto: The starting point of “Divenire|Become” is a figurative image: the shape of a hand that includes another figurative story. Right before “Textus,” in fact, I was cutting and painting thick and big papers, where the technical discourse was represented by the incision of a stylized shape.

In these works, as Lacan would say, we have a signifier and a meaning: the hand is the signifier, the meaning is the story contained into it. I took the signifier, the physical object, and through a series of “zooming windows” with different foci I extracted 120 cards with the only rule not to modify anything but the chromatism. No lines, curves or angles.

While looking at the fragments on the floor, I realized it was the beginning of a new syntax. Germans call it Aufhebung, preserving while going beyond (in Hegel’s dialectic). The original meaning was lost, because those fragments didn’t tell the same story and since I didn’t modify anything the signifier was still the same. It is as if, paradoxically, a writer would have randomly cut the pages of his book, thrown them on the floor, and those fragments would have kept a meaning anyway, even though it would be a different one. I thought of Ellsworth Kelly: in his twenties he already grasped all those concepts. One of his statements was, “The form is the content.”

Once I identified the fragments I needed the right method to organize them. Evening after evening, I was thinking of how to put the colors aside, of Matisse’s lessons, of plain/empty, of Renzo Piano… The next morning, I would enter my study and nothing would work. One day, I noticed that those I left about randomly were the best combinations. They gave me a feeling I wanted to transmit to the viewer, so I took Kelly as a reference: I discovered in some books about him that his solution was to randomly extract his abstract shapes out of an old hat and then combine them and that was the way he realized his masterpieces.

The above reasoning demonstrates that there is no such thing as separation between abstract and figurative, because they share the same genesis, the same essence. They are both related to form. In one case form becomes the content, while in the other, form is organized in a fiction that is telling us something.

As well, Tom Wesselmann came to mind. In the 50s and 60s, he was creating his American nudes with those early laser cutting machines in the States. One day, while walking over metal scraps spread on the factory floor, he realized that those scraps had their own important formal value. Already a very famous artist, he wrote in an amazing letter that that was one of the best days of his life. He then started creating both figurative and abstract works with the same success and the same creative power.

ARTCaffè: What about your future projects?

Claudio Diatto: My new projects are mostly related to the technical way to present “Divenire|Become.” In that series I use cotton paper so I need to protect the pieces and I am working to complete the structure. The research is not on the content but on the technical solution and very often that solution can either enhance or demean your original idea.

Lately, I finally found a good proportion between creative and execution time. They cannot be too unrelated. In the past, that proportion was not balanced and that was frustrating; once I made a single piece I already had so many new ideas. As an artist, I’m fed by a very childish joy that is also creative and effective. It is the joy you feel each time you complete a work and you look at it.

‍ARTCaffè: One last question: why did you choose “Again” as a title for our ARTCaffè, today?

Claudio Diatto: Literary content is very important to me because it goes together with the content of my work. That is why I’m very careful when I choose a title—both for my works and my shows.

“Again” refers to the possibility to develop a certain buoyancy through artistic production. It is a very important adverb to me. After so many years, I still have the same enthusiasm, the same confidence, the same willingness to do far too many things, like an epic hero who keeps on falling but is never defeated. He won’t win but in the end he will not give up.

When I look around, I see many esteemed peer colleagues that have resigned. A couple of them even decided to retire. That would be a total heresy to me. You cannot retire from such a thing as Art: you have to die on stage, like Molière.