CRITICA

Carolina Bacchi interviewed Thomas Marcacci about his essay “Line, space, time. Encounter between an artist and a psychoanalyst”, published on Critica, issue 2, Fall 2021. 

Carolina: In our current issue, we aim to reflect on the interconnectedness of uncertainty and creativity. You mentioned in your paper that your aim was “to meet an artist and play together through a dialogue of free associations.” Your paper beautifully describes the flow of associations between you both in a way that mirrors the process of an analytic session. As a reader, I felt inspired by your dialogue. Could you tell us more about the experience of moving from formless to meaning in your conversation with her? 

Thomas: I would like to start by saying that the foundation that makes possible an experience like the one described in the article is to share the trust in the possibility of seeing one’s thoughts welcomed by the other as something precious, a stimulus to further thoughts. On this solid basis, for Esther and me the curiosity could have hovered freely toward both the other’s experience and what would have come to our mind through our encounter. This shared trust sustains the negative capacity, preventing from the urge to reach any particular achievement. 

Your question makes me better understand that, on occasion of my encounter with Esther, my implicit expectation was to experience somehow a path which would have gone from formless to meaning. However, reflecting on this now, I realize that the point is not such direction but the process in itself. Of course the transformation from formless to symbolic and to meaning has its importance, but right as the opposite process has: to free from a stated meaning, deconstructing precise symbols, contacting a formless vivid experience. It is like a swing between unsaturated experience and fullness of meaning, where the precious thing is the possibility to keep these two extremes moving and transforming one into the other, again and again. From this swing comes out creativity, before any creation. 

Potentiality which finds form; form which resumes its move toward a new potentiality. Or, using a bionic theory, evolution through the oscillation ps/d. 

Carolina: You reflect on the fundamental “touching skin to skin” that we lost during the many months of the Pandemic while describing your encounter with Esther. You talk about the emotional experience of this impossible touch while describing her painting as finding the essential form without detailed representation. You mention the “outline is not only the limit that separates but it is also the point of contact between two surfaces.” I loved when you mentioned, in response to her work that “At a glance, it comes to me like a tactile sensation, right before perceiving any representation.” This makes me think about Milner’s ideas about creative imagination or Bion’s description of reverie/alpha function. Interesting to imagine that happening in the midst of a Pandemic distant life. Do you think her work spoke to the precariousness of what we were collectively experiencing – an urge for connection in search of representation? How do you make sense of you touching each other so deeply as you engaged with her work?

Carolina: You end your paper mentioning that somatic and physical aspects of the encounter “put us in contact with the environment in which we are immersed and influence it in turn, intertwining perception and symbolization, emotion and meaning, in a movement of mutual transformation.” Isn’t that the deepest nature of analytic work that relies on the constant movement and dialogue between uncertainty and creativity?

Thomas: These two questions make many thoughts come to my mind, which intertwine with one another. Therefore I’ll answer both of them through one whole reflection. 

A work of art solicits in the subject a response that occurs at multiple levels, from the most profound and phylogenetically primitive, to the most complex, sophisticated and peculiar to the subject. 

Your question prompts me to reflect in particular on the activation of the body in reaction to the piece of art with which it comes into contact.

Often the main channel of interaction with a visual artwork is, indeed, the gaze: a sensory channel that enters very quickly into connection with symbolic thought. On the other hand, when we have the opportunity to explore even a visual piece of art with other senses, touching it with closed eyes, smelling its surface, listening to the noise we can draw from it, or simply “observing it with the whole body,” we realize how much it elicits a corporeal activation, speaking to us directly through sensations without images yet, recalling presymbolic experiences, inscribed in deep and precocious layers of the Self.

This, in my opinion, can lead to a state of arousal where different layers of the person resonate together, opening up the possibility of a creative experience.

Reflecting on this now, it comes on my mind the great value that it may have had having touched Ester’s canvases, having felt the texture of the rough surface under my fingers, the relief of the lines, fluorescent to the touch as well as to the eye, the stiff sound of the soft canvas unrolled, like the slow breathing of the water against the jetty. Perhaps these sensations created a fertile ground on which the image had the possibility to fully ripen its fruits, leading some thoughts to find a new symbolic expression.

From this point of view, the pictorial style of Esther’s series on Reed Hook is a balance of saturated and unsaturated. They are visual art but accompanied by a materiality that affects all the other senses, especially being able to experience them up close. The presence of the lines and of the shapes, distilled to their essence, gives an unobtrusive handrail, which then drives the observer to go on its own, like a pier that accompanies the gaze for a while but then opens to a free horizon.

The experience told in the article took place during the pandemic; however, the paintings that accompanied us were not made during it. Despite this, your question makes me reflect that our experience was deeply linked to finding again a skin-to-skin contact between us and our physical and relational environment, which we could only observe remotely for many months. The works that accompanied us have lent themselves very well to this.

Perhaps Esther had an unconscious intuition when choosing which works to bring to our meeting: a reverie. Perhaps, moreover, we can think that if a work of art intercepts a dynamic that pertains to something human, then it will be capable of speaking to different contexts and through different eras. It communicates the essential of the experience it represents, letting each observer contact that essence, connecting it to their personal lives and declining it into their own language. A fertile experience, as you said, a dialogue where the known encounters the uncertain, opening the space of  creativity.