Giorgio Milani: La Scrittura Come Enigma

These works are typically assemblies of wooden movable printing types that Milani finds and collects in the warehouses of old printers and recycles as materials for art. They are characters that, ideally, preserve the memory of everything they have printed, the memory of all our knowledge. Those carved woods, different in shape and size, and also in material and age of production, are no longer used as tools to leave the imprint of letters on the page, but to build three-dimensional works: works not with printed words-images, but works with physical wordsimages. Something to touch as well as to see. Letters and words not as a cast, shadow of a matrix, but letters-object, words-object. As Elena Pontiggia writes in the introduction to the catalogue: “Milani’s writing, his Poetari, do not create a rational catalogue or a scholastic filing; they are the place of the enigma, not because they reveal the mystery, but because they reveal that the mystery exists. Letters and signs are collected in orthogonal trends, within squares and rectangles, in rhythmical and musical spaces, but they are not readable neatly and judiciously. Try to read them: you will not succeed, because they are hermetic like the leaves of the Sibyl. They are an encyclopaedia of Babel, of the misunderstanding.”