Rail: I’m beginning to think there’s a third meaning to your title The Second Time. You’re making seconds-long videos with ancient stones. You’re spending hours and hours piling up tiny tesserae of watercolor and weaving veils of lines. Talk about seconds and time. You’ve said that you’re very much okay with somebody in an exhibition spending only a few moments with something it took you ages to make.
Colombo: The dots are made with pencils, and are time consuming. You have to imagine that after every four or five dots, I have to re-sharpen the pencil. It’s a gesture that’s repeated over and over again, for the large drawings about six hundred thousand times. The marks in these drawings look ephemeral, as if you could blow on them and make them disappear. I think the magic of painting is that it can compress time in a way that no other form of art does, and that the sense of time can be embedded in the meaning of the work. The fact that they’re on separate sheets of paper arranged in a frame with a cross of empty space between them allows me to have a sense of both ordered and fragmentary time.
Rail: I imagine that time feels different in Athens, where millennia of history are on view. What originally drew you to Greece?
Colombo: That’s a long story. What drew me to Greece was love, like everything that draws you to something when you’re eighteen or nineteen. And then it got completed by the discovery of two poets, C. P. Cavafy and George Seferis, who have accompanied me since. In Greece I felt the first sense of freedom, and therefore forever remembered it as one would remember the first love. I was drawn also to the simplicity of the architecture, both in Athens and on the islands. I’m not fond of Baroque architecture, and so I was a bit like a fish out of water in Rome. At least in a large part of Rome. I love the directness of the Greek language. I love the music. I love the culture. I fell in love with it, and I’ve been faithful to this love ever since.
Rail: I’m so grateful that you introduced me to Cavafy and Seferis and will never forget you saying how much you appreciated the fact that Cavafy rarely used adjectives. Tell me about what his work means to you.
Colombo: Cavafy writes in an austere and spare way, and therefore I would always look to him as an example of clarity. He lived in Alexandria, and worked as an administrator for the Suez Company, but had this semi-secret life of loving men, which was not accepted at the time. He wrote erotic poems along with historical poetry. You couldn’t say I’m even remotely comparable to him, only that, as it was with him, love has also moved much of my own poetry.
Rail: How do you conceive of your images?
Colombo: I work in layers. I’m not interested in representations of an actual space, as it would be in Renaissance art. In my poem paintings, the first layer might be a kind of painted or drawn embroidery, the second might be a fabric in which the letters seem to be embroidered, and the third might be a representation of the night behind the fabric. These layers are flat but also realistic. I’ve always felt comfortable with Byzantine art, and with its clear and essential forms of representation. It does not mimic a space, and it has a quality which, to me, is extraordinary. As a broad generalization, it is religious art. In the Western world, painting was traditionally a window into another world. Byzantine icons have another purpose: if a painting is a window, this window should also let the light in. The issue of light is directly connected with the religious function of Byzantine icons. It is something that I try to achieve in my work, yes, that the paintings allude to something, but that this something also has to come back to you in the form of image and light.
Rail: The Italian sculptor and writer Fausto Melotti was a mentor to you.
Colombo: I met him when I was twenty-one through my gallery in Turin, Mario Tazzoli’s Galleria Galatea, which showed Melotti and many artists I admired. Visiting his gallery in the 1960s and ’70s was a lesson in quality: Francis Bacon, Alighiero Boetti, Joseph Cornell, Max Ernst, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Melotti. We started a conversation that was very instructive. He told me an artist should never repeat himself, an idea which I’ve taken to heart. I never wanted to have a trademark style. I also try to avoid patterns of squares that are too regular. In a way, in life we are already in a grid that we cannot escape, the grid of who we are. Therefore, I try not to overuse patterns of squares, although they are part of my phonemes and grammar. Melotti encouraged me to see things through a different framework, which was an important teaching for me. Italy in the early ’70s, with the rise of the Red Brigades and of the strife between the right-wing fascists and the left-wing extremists, was a place of strong political engagement, which seemed to be required of every artist. I was interested in poetry and did not have a political inclination. Fausto Melotti was very lyrical in his work, which was not as appreciated in its day. You have to remember that at the time, the Italian art of any relevance was Arte Povera, with its connections to the student movement and politics in general. With Melotti, in a way, we also shared the way we lived our lives. I did not know it at the time, but he stopped making art to support a family by opening a tile factory. Bathroom tiles, kitchen tiles, each more beautiful than the other. And when his children were grown up, he started again in his studio, full time. In a bizarre way, I followed these tracks because I did other jobs for years to support my family.
Rail: Melotti’s work is very different from yours. He was a sculptor and made delicate metal works featuring abstract forms derived from the real world. What was your biggest takeaway from these conversations?
Colombo: That I should never be afraid of the lyrical impulse. That writing was significant and could accompany an art-making practice. He was a poet as well. Mostly he told me, “Do not be too symmetrical.”
Rail: You also spoke with Melotti about the idea of lightness.
Colombo: He said not to be afraid of lightness. He wrote about the angelic nature of art, which resonated with me.
Rail: Your poetry is filled with characters I might call urban angels. This includes “the blind women of Athens,” or the watch repairman who keeps late hours in his shop.
Colombo: They’re spirits. I would not use the term angel. You can say certain things in poetry that you cannot in any other way. Kenneth Koch said poetry is image and song. Let me take one of the examples you just mentioned, the poem that says, “At night the blind women of Athens / mend clothes and speak of angels.” We know that blind women cannot thread a needle. They cannot know exactly where the eye of the needle is, what the colors of the threads and the clothes to be mended are. It is an image of whispering solidarities, complicity, gentleness, and of a covenant of gentle old souls talking. This can only be narrated in a poem. If you were to translate it into prose, it would take twenty pages, and it would not have that concision, which is what I wish my poetry and also my art would have. Hoping never to exceed in ornament. The shortest poem I ever wrote that became a painting is composed of four words and fourteen letters altogether, although they’re arranged to take up a lot of space, both on the page and in the painting. Let me describe the painting: it is composed of four sheets, each 56 by 75 centimeters. In the background, there is a very dark wash made of many blues, dark blues, and indigos. Over the wash, in certain parts, there is a very faint yellow color, very slight. The poem says, “wax / wane / ebb / neap,” each word in a corner on its own sheet. What you see underneath, the yellow shade, is a reflection of the moon, possibly on the sea, and what you have is a great contraction of time, because they allude to the phases of the moon, twenty-eight days, and to the phases of the tides, which are roughly six hours. So the idea, again, is to say as much as possible with as little as possible. It’s a poem that anyone can keep forever. Again, I thought about how to represent space in the flattest possible way. I really have very little three-dimensional sense. And while we’re talking about a kind of flatness, I must say I’ve always loved Greek shadow theater, in which an image is cast onto a sheet by a light behind a cutout form. By convention, the player in shadow theater is the person who would create and move all the silhouettes himself and do all the voices. Players would travel from village to village and set up their little theaters, which is a form of proto cinema. Like the shadow players, I feel I don’t need an assistant—other than for the embroideries, which are done in a workshop in India because I just don’t have the technique.
Rail: Could Plato have gotten his idea of the cave from seeing one of these shadow theaters?
Colombo: No. Shadow theater comes from Indonesia and arrived in Egypt via the Red Sea. Later, in the sixteenth century, it moved to Turkey. In the 1820s, you find the first mention of shadow theater in Greece, where it took on its own very particular style. Very funny, anti-power, anti-government. It was lively until the 1970s and was really a hands-on thing, another way to do something with very little, which I love. One of the things I like about shadow theater, and also embroidery and crafts, is that the hand of the maker always touches the material, always touches the surface of what they’re making. There’s no distance. I am here at my table as we speak with my hands on my work. That’s probably one of the reasons why images of hands occasionally appear in my watercolors. They are often the hands of someone I love, a gesture of affection, because, at least in my case, art can be moved by sentiment. But I also draw the hand because it is the first thing I see before the pencil and the paper. It is therefore natural that hands appear in my watercolors as an image.
Rail: Your work is very much in the modernist tradition. It’s spare and pared-back like your poetry and very much concentrated on the interplay of form and image on the picture plane. At the same time, it’s engaged with history and the timeless mysteries of life—on both individual and cultural scales. Do you agree?
Colombo: I think you’re totally right.
Rail: How do you reconcile your interests in modern art—the play between flatness and pictorial space, the text-image hybrid, aspects of collage and fragmentation—with what I might call the human-scale epic tradition, the arcs of lives, big and small, that you also conjure?
Colombo: I just do what I do. I do understand that my work is, for me, like a bridge between the present and possibly a future, but it incorporates the past. If I may add another memory from my studies of literature, there’s a verse in T. S. Elliot’s poem “Gerontion” that says, “In memory only, reconsidered passion.” Painting is a way to keep a diary of feelings.
Rail: This reminds me of that wonderful, very short poem that appears in the book of poetry that accompanied your 2014 exhibition at Qbox Gallery in Athens.
Colombo: “After the ecstasy / we were lost in metaphors.”
Rail: This seems like a key to your work. You are very much in touch with your past selves and the emotional highlights of your life. You recall the sense of being nineteen and in love and in Greece for the first time, or the feeling of becoming a father.
Colombo: Yes, yes. Being alive is about keeping doors open. In a poem from that book, I mention that the archive of the living includes “open doors / sparkling rubies / and nights so lonely.” Beauty and longing. In the modernist tradition, there is a mistrust of language, a belief that words are worn out, and that one cannot express emotions except through metaphors.
Rail: I’ve always thought of you as a “soul curator.” You’ve always taken an artist and heart-led approach to organizing exhibitions. Is there a connection between your work as a curator and your work as an artist?
Colombo: I’ve learned from working with artists. I always worked for institutions that had little funding. So I worked with artists at the very beginnings of their careers, some who have gone on to become extremely well known, but it was always right at the beginning. My guides were actually other artists. One of the first artists I worked with, Robin Winters, said I should go see Kiki Smith. So I bounced from emerging artist to emerging artist, and together we had to come up with ideas for how to make shows with very little money. So I learned huge amounts: how to hang work, how to modulate an exhibition. And everybody had different needs and different approaches, but that was basic schooling. So it is not entirely right that I’m self-taught. I’m self-taught at drawing, but not at hanging exhibitions. All the artists I worked with were the best teachers.
Rail: You haven’t entirely given up curating. You’ve co-curated the Iraqi pavilions at the Venice Biennale in 2017 and 2019. What were those experiences like?
Colombo: I organized those projects with Tamara Chalabi of ITERARTE, with whom we’ve made the embroideries. I did not go to Iraq, but Tamara went. We selected the artists. Some were exiled so it was easy for me to go see them. In other cases, it was complicated. For Archaic, the 2017 pavilion, one woman artist’s husband didn’t want her to paint, so that involved some clandestine work. We also had restrictions because it was in Venice. We rented a beautiful, empty nineteenth-century library at Palazzo Cavalli-Franchetti. We were not allowed to put a pin in the wall. We devised a theme that would be appropriate to the history of Iraq: archaic. We decided to focus on issues which were central to the life of Mesopotamia in ancient times and still are today in modern-day Iraq: music, writing, hunting, and, of course, war. Through Tamara, we were able to borrow forty artifacts from the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, the one that had been looted, and place them in freestanding vitrines that we had built to create an exhibition space. The Iraqi artists each showed their work in their own vitrines. It was like a sea of vitrines, the glass panes of which reflected the sky visible through the windows overlooking the Grand Canal. Eight of the artists were Iraqi, but Tamara was able to embed Francis Alÿs in the attack of Mosul, where he worked as a war illustrator/reporter. So we had his illustrations as well. It was a very peculiar show that I enjoyed doing, but I haven’t curated an exhibition in about six or seven years now.
Rail: When I was in the studio in September last year, I saw some new work which had a diorama aspect. They involved tables. Can you talk about them?
Colombo: I’m trying to work with all the things that I love. Among the things that I love is Greek music, traditional music from the twenties to the fifties, rebetika. I also love Greek plastic tableware, as I mentioned, bread baskets, objects like that. I also collect plastic tablecloths, everyday tablecloths—today’s folk art. I’m now making tables, each dedicated to a Greek musician, with a portrait and a representation of one of these tablecloths painted on the table. One might also find another small object painted on the table, which is an attribute of the singer, a cup of coffee or a watch. As you approach the table, music by that singer comes from underneath it. So far, I’ve made three. I’m also making large individual portraits of musicians. One of them is on view in Geneva. It’s of Vassilis Tsitsanis painted in four sheets, 112 by 150 centimeters overall. It represents a large curtain of ochre organdy, and in the lower left corner there is an opening with a pencil portrait of Tsitsanis playing the bouzouki.
Rail: You’ve introduced me to rebetika music, which comes in part from what the Greeks call the Catastrophe during and after World War I, when one million refugees from the Ottoman Empire moved into the country. What is it about the music that appeals to you?
Colombo: Raw emotion. Not embellished. If you’re Italian, you bring with yourself a horrible tradition of embellishment.
Rail: Of embellishment?
Colombo: A horrible tradition of embellishing everything. So it’s part of separating myself from my background, most likely. I like the simplicity, the directness, the way the music is constructed—not harmonically, but architecturally. It’s certainly not bel canto. You become a good rebetiko singer after you’ve smoked five hundred cigarettes a day and your voice has finally broken. It’s a world. Their lyrics are simple, a mix of despair, gentleness and harshness. That made me love the music. It’s part of my love for the country, its traditions, people, language. When you experience that at twenty, it’s the most wondrous thing on earth. There are moments in life when everything comes together. You know, your first love, your love for a country, meeting an artist like Fausto Melotti, having your first show, going to yet another country for graduate school—everything is like a rain of wonderful meteors from the sky. This makes you establish loyalties that are unbreakable.
Rail: Many people may have these loyalties and passions, but few have done what you’ve done with them, which is to transform them into transporting art and poetry.
Colombo: This is very kind of you to say. I had very little sense of myself until I was fourteen. And then everything came as if in a storm. I refused to read books until I was fourteen. So, I went from The Absent-Minded Mallard, which I read at six, to Leo Tolstoy. It was a great leap, but everything came in very cohesive and very concentrated form.
