Futuro Antico. Interview with Victor Stoichita

What are your inspirational references in art?

Being an art historian involves a certain detachment from overly personal preferences. This is why I can't say I have a favorite artist or period. My interest lies in studying how images function in the Western world. In this context, I am particularly concerned with the problems of creation, figuration, and the impact of images. This type of interest cannot avoid considering very broad social, cultural, and artistic contexts, leading to research where the very canons of academic art history are sometimes questioned. Of course, the paths opened by Warburg and Panofsky’s iconology have also shaped my journey, but I would also add the lessons drawn from visual semiotics and, more recently, from mediology and anthropology.

What is the text that represents you the most? Can you tell us about its genesis?

There are two books that I think illustrate my approach quite well. The first is L'Invenzione del quadro (The Invention of the Painting) and the other is Breve storia dell'ombra (A Brief History of Shadow). The first originated as a doctoral thesis (defended in Paris back in 1989) and then developed into an essay about the genesis of this strange object, the "painting," with which Western man has been familiar for centuries and which, I believe, constitutes a specific way of "capturing" or evoking the visible world. My intention was to invite a reconsideration of the origins of modernity, between iconoclasm and the apotheosis of the painted image.

And Breve storia dell’ombra (A Brief History of Shadow)?

Breve storia dell’ombra originated from a reflection on the great issues of Western representation. We all know the myth told by Pliny the Elder about the origin of painting, which involves the shadow outline of a lover traced on a wall by a girl in love. It’s a myth with an unexpected origin, according to the parameters of Western representation, which might seem narcissistically more interested in identity mirror games than in the alterity of the representation-shadow. With Breve storia dell’ombra, I wanted to tell the history of "a forgotten residue," but one that is no less significant for being forgotten. This research was accompanied by two cross-disciplinary exhibitions: one at the Thyssen Museum in Madrid and the other, more recent, at the Hermitage Foundation in Lausanne. These exhibitions led me to confront an experience from which I learned a great deal: the staging of works of art (of “paintings” themselves) in a modern, coherent exhibition space.