The Brooklyn Rail

The first United States retrospective dedicated to the titular artist, Magazzino Italian Art’s Maria Lai: A Journey to America is exceptional. Born in 1919 in Ulassai, Italy, and passing at the age of ninety-three in the nearby Nuoro commune of Cardedu, Lai bore witness to decades of art history and its myriad constituent avant-garde movements. Despite occasionally making contact with some of these—chiefly, Arte Povera, which Lai was not a proper member of, but with whose integrant artists she showed and influenced—Lai pursued a singular ambit defined by the thread. Italian art historian Giorgio Di Genova characterized Lai’s artistic enterprise as the “poetic amanuensis of sewing.” However, more than “sewing,” Lai’s thoroughgoing leitmotif, that of the line, manifests in multifarious modes throughout her oeuvre.

Punctuated by biographical films and interviews—such as Stefano Scialotti’s Maria Lai. Assetata di Libertá (2022), which interviews Lai from 2004 to 2005 as the artist recounts the pivotal moments from her life—the exhibition is eruditely researched. Perspicaciously curated by Paola Mura, it proceeds chronologically and includes approximately one hundred works. The first galley room includes a number of Lai’s early watercolor and oil landscape studies of the rolling amber hills of Sardinia, executed during the 1950s. These are adjoined by a number of semi-abstract clay-hued panoramas of flaxen mountains meted out by pale cliffs. Veduta di Cagliari (1952), a sepia-toned watercolor of the local cobblestone Catalan Gothic architecture, is particularly interesting, as it adeptly captures the hulking nuraghi (circular stone towers) and megaron temples. Lai’s precocious study, Gregge di pecore (1959), purposes ambiguous, cloud-like hoary slivers that simultaneously index boulders and grazing sheep. Landscapes like Ovile (1959) and Composizione Polimaterica (1964) betray the influence of Lai’s compatriots, such as Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri, both of whom Lai exhibited with in 1955. In particular, one espies the ascendency of the latter’s matterism, characterized by heavy impasto skeins reminiscent of desiccated clay stone, in Lai’s rocky bluffs. In these early sylvan landscapes, Lai paints her mountains like mud, incised slit lines suggesting the nascency of her line. Here we find Lai, who has not yet fully come into her own, gingerly trying her hand at varying epochal approaches, ranging from tachisme to Abstract Expressionism.

Composizione Polimaterica, an acrylic and cork on board assemblage, augurs the next set of works—Lai’s oil, straw, cork, and linen mixed-media works on canvas. Following her Montreal and Manhattan foray in the spring of 1968, Lai began executing larger-scale textured pieces, like Autunno (1968), Discorso cosmico n.2 (1968), and Notturno n.2 (1968). Here, Lai posits cork atop the pictorial field and trowels crests of eggshell, taupe, and coffee paint into peaks around it. These works, which plot raised, leathery surfaces upon verdant painted fields, demonstrate continuity with her early abstract landscapes but are more playful. In this period, rife with material experimentation, Lai’s line is all but lost.

The exhibition also includes a reprieve with a handful of works that speak to Lai’s technical dexterity. Although it is rather orthodox in comparison to her assemblages, Busto di Mila (1970), a rust-colored sinuous terracotta bust of a woman’s smooth, sloping swan neck and ovoid head is skillfully executed. It also evidences the influence of Lai’s instructors, Marino Mazzacurati and Arturo Martini, and attests to the tactile pursuit undergirding Lai’s oeuvre.

The exhibition culminates in Lai’s work from the mid-1970s, which found her deracinating the canvas from the wooden support, treating the canvas as a foundational sculptural element. By the end of the decade, Lai also produced her first “sewn books,” fabric works in which the stitched word is not only unreadable but also spilled, like cords of black hair coalescing down the covers and spine. Lai decisively moved away from painting, preferring instead to work with looms, integrating her village’s history of folk traditions and lore. These would subsequently serve as Lai’s afflatus. It is here that Lai’s work becomes utterly unique, thatching together wool, wood, tempera, acrylic, leather, fur, and cloth. Many of these works find string sloping in meandering Z-shaped arrays that traipse the edges of open wooden prisms, Lai’s structures resembling the inner frame of a quartered antique piano or autoharp. Her assemblages also include checkered backgrounds lined with textiles spun in the Samugheo island’s traditional a pibiones technique, where a stitched relief pattern is formed from the multiple grains incorporated in the cloth during weaving. One of the most original works on view, Telaio (ca. 1971–75), laces axes of string through stacks of wooden popsicle sticks and utensils. These and related works, like Telaio in sole e mare (1971) and Li trammi (2006), recall Louise Nevelson’s series of cardboard and wood collages on board from the 1970s. Yet they are by no means derivative and demonstrate a kind of futurism far from Nevelson’s lexicon, indexed, in particular, by Lai’s woven globe-shaped ovals marked by latitude lines. This cosmic leitmotif, which is impressed upon a number of Lai’s wooden assemblages, was apparently inspired by Lai’s fascination with photographs of the Earth taken from space during the late 1960s.

In the downstairs gallery, a short film by Tonino Casula chronicles Lai’s tour de force of relational aesthetics, Legarsi alla montagna (1981). Lai was occasioned by the Ulassai municipality to render a monument to fallen war veterans but demurred. Lai is quoted as noting that she, instead, “decided to do something for the living.” Lai’s idea for a communal ceremony was inspired by a folk legend recounting a young girl tasked by her town to deliver bread to the local shepherds. The girl, setting about her mission, is interrupted by a roaring storm. Upon taking refuge in a cave with the shepherds, the girl catches sight of an ethereal blue ribbon floating in the sky’s expanse, which she soon follows, the cave collapsing behind her. Lai’s tribute “for the living,” modelled on this ribbon, transpired on September 8, 1981. She involved the entire community in the game-like endeavor of stringing a seventeen-mile strip of powder blue denim—purchased from a cloth merchant and cut into segments—through the village’s structures, both natural and manmade. As the film shows, the ribbon is run through the peaks and valleys of the town’s expanse. The three-day affair licensed Lai’s return to her provincial town—where, after her younger brother was killed in 1955, she had decided never to return—and served as an ineffable, illogical, but rapturous communal ritual. In the film, beady-eyed school children, crow-nosed cloaked grandmothers, and top-hatted, pipe-puffing young men snake the ribbon through balconies, passing it through tree branches, church spires, and the summit of Mount Gedili. Piero Berengo Gardin documented the celebratory affair with black-and-white photographs. These photos, culminating in school children fastening a ribbon-cum-makeshift-bridge between the expanse of two mountains, bookend the projected video. Lai subsequently applied sapphire watercolor upon the ribbon portion, illuminating the adumbral mountain faces with bands of blue. The video and photograph testimonials together capture the town’s Arcadian charm and highlight Lai as the inaugural Italian artist to purpose “relational aesthetics.”

In the adjacent gallery is a narrative cloth work whose title is that of Lai’s nom de plume, Maria Pietra. The 1991 scroll is, again, inspired by a short story (as so many of Lai’s works are). This one was written by her friend, Salvatore Cambosu. It recounts the tale of a mother who, in order to save her child, is turned into a solid block of stone. The unrolled page follows an anthropomorphized blush-pink rectangular figure with dotted beady eyes as it floats along various plains and shadowy structures. The parchment’s wind is guided along a slipping, sloping black thread, which winds into the same sloping characters as Lai’s asemic writing. The latter’s illegible twisting characters chart assorted variegated fabrics and straw-colored tempera blankets, including Fili d’olio (1997) and Telo autografo verde (1997). As in her “sewn books,” the fiber tails run down the page and pool at the spine, evocative of a fisherman’s tangled net.

Magazzino’s Lai retrospective is comprehensive and speaks to an idiosyncratic artist and ritualist who, in remaining tethered to the line, both culled and advanced Sardinia’s folkloric social history. At times, this is a social affair, with the line curled by children and townspeople’s fingers, the ribbon passage harnessing hipped roofs to adjacent bare trees and, through their branches, slipping in and out of the town mountain’s promontory. Elsewhere, Lai sews the line herself, weaving it in black threads-cum-strokes along a wooden structure or stitching it through a canvas and unspooling it into disheveled balls. In Lai’s mixed-media works, the most unique objects on view, the line becomes taut, stringing through striated metal utensils arranged as bridges upon wooden planks, forming rectangular structures akin to a Japanese koto. Even in her sculptures, Lai’s line invites plucking. Throughout her career, Lai created artifacts and rituals, aptly betokening her the maestra of “relational aesthetics.”