WEM EDITORIAL #14 DANIELE SIGALOT
Ode to mistakes, new perspectives
Essay by Sonia Belfiore
“Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless.”
Thomas A. Edison
Rereading, transforming, playing with the observer’s perception are some of the main nodes of Daniele Sigalot’s research in which the light becomes heavy, the superfluous the protagonist, failures good ideas. The unexpected, the everyday, discarded ideas, take a place of primary importance in Sigalot’s works giving them a statuesque character capable of evoking dreamlike and impossible atmospheres.
For Roma Arte in Nuvola, WEM and Sigalot present Master of Mistakes and the Mistakes series, works in which the lower common denominator is error, conceptually and formally reinterpreted as an element as provocative as it is poetic capable of revealing the beauty of the unexpected. A large-format work and some small ones tease the viewer’s perception, the first one imposing itself almost crushing him, while others seem fragile and light, two different but complementary faces that tell the concept -wrong- of failure.
In Sigalot’s works, error doesn’t have a positive or negative connotation, but is reworked by the artist as a deviation from what was expected, a failure that is transformed into a monument, into genius; it is precisely within this perspective that the series of errors comes to life, of which Attempts At Greatness, totems, Inconsistenlty logical, an elegant mandala, and Master of Mistakes, a majestic ball, are part, Mistakes, small-format errors that bloom like flowers, all works conceptually and formally composed of errors.
Thanks to the artist’s working background in the world of advertising, the idea/error pair has been pressing Sigalot’s research for years. Ironic and sharp first in the world of advertising and later in the world of art, the artist feeds on many, new ideas that statistically bring with them some less successful ones. It is these latter ideas that the artist has become most attached to, thoughts that are more human, more common, more real, and it is to them that he dedicates a monumental work, Master of Mistakes. The sphere weighs more than 700 kilograms, made of crumpled aluminum, and represents all the discarded ideas produced by Sigalot throughout his career. In Master of Mistakes, however, the trashed ideas come together by acquiring a soul of their own, an escape from their inevitable fate, in which an ordinary gesture becomes extraordinary.
2,500 A4 sheets have been worked on individually by the artist, an obsessive repetition in which the weight of the blank sheet becomes an achievement, a narrative that the elegant Mistakes individually encapsulate. With the Mistakes series, Sigalot highlights hidden aspects of everyday life, emphasizing the beauty of simplicity, the harmony of spontaneous gestures, the genius in apparent banality, all seasoned with irony, the artist’s stylistic signature capable of revealing hidden mechanisms.
The A4 sheet of paper, a material that usually every creative person interfaces with in the early stages of ideation, becomes the protagonist of the works on display, at first the spokesman and trace of the mistakes made then transformed thanks to a skilful formal design. The Mistakes series is then a true decomposition of the large sphere exhibited at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, as 2499 units of it will be produced and “incubated,” or almost the same number of sheets that makes up Master of Mistakes.
The works are an ode to mistakes, to untaken opportunities that can nonetheless trigger new perspectives.
Attempts At Greatness is a totem, a chart, a mental coring that presents the path of the creative process, sharp, tortuous and ascending. Among towers of crumpled papers every now and then one glimpses a good idea, neatly folded or stretched out ready to be read. A narrative, the one constructed by Sigalot, capable of architecturally visualizing the diffculty and unpredictability of the right insight one arrives at through the path constructed by mistake after mistake.
As Attempts At Greatness, Inconsistently logical also represents a different formalization of ideas; if in the first work the rhythm is static, introspective, built up idea by idea, in Inconsistently logical the ideas acquire a swirling procession. A mandala that, like a stop-motion moving image, narrates the transformative and conceptual journey of a blank sheet of paper that becomes a wrapper, ready to be trashed. Mistakes are transformed into their opposite by blossoming into a harmonic composition, in a search for balance in chaos.
Daniele Sigalot’s art, the error series in particular, is an interweaving of care, love, and music. Daniele rescues discarded ideas, pays attention to them and gives them form, a form that comes from a close synergy between craftsmanship and industrial processes. Starting from the beauty of the material and making use of the precision of metalmechanical machinery, the artist in the last stage individually manipulates the aluminum by uniquely crumpling all A4.
Each sheet manipulated by the artist’s patience and love enters into synergy with the others, as in a score… and there is music! A music that jumps, that runs, consisting also of unexpected, of mistakes. Like glitches, a short and sudden spike caused by an unpredictable error, the short circuits triggered by Daniele create small ruptures in individual critical thinking becoming a stylistic cipher.
Finally, it is curious to think that the word error comes from the Latin error-oris and that is “to wander,” a verb that reflects the living and changing nature of the works, a continuous experimentation: an unpredictable creative flow that reflects the spirit of our time.
“Just because something doesn’t do what you planned doesn’t mean it’s useless,” said Edison, who is said to have made thousands of attempts to improve the invention of the light bulb.
During a press conference a reporter asked him, “Say, Mr. Edison, how did it feel to fail two thousand times to make a light bulb?” Edison’s answer was, “I didn’t fail two thousand times in making a light bulb; I simply found one thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine ways on how it shouldn’t be made.”
Daniel Sigalot could say the same about this series of works, adding, however, that thanks to these one thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine mistakes he managed to create something else, monuments to failure, hymns to the mistakes he made that gave birth to something else, to excellent ideas.
