Untitled Red, No.03, Framed Unique Photogram, Date Unknown - 2014 © Tom Lovelace
On my mind... Tom Lovelace
Tom Lovelace was invited to spend some time in Sol Lewitt’s former Italian studio in Spoleto, an ancient Roman fortress town. Tom is from Cambridge or Duroliponte as it was known in the Roman Province of Brittania.
Sol moved to Spoleto in 1980 when his wife Carol inherited her grandmother’s house on the Amalfi Coast. Sol couldn’t have been conceptually further away from the grids that dominated his work when Carol would drive him along those incomprehensible hairpin turns on narrow vertiginous roads smaller than most New York sidewalks.
Whilst in Spoleto, Tom found a series of faded bacheche at the central theatre. They had been bleached by the sun over the years and the overlapping traces that each layer had left was unintentionally turned into a sort of readymade photogram.
Perhaps Sol was still contemplating how to reconcile the grid with the miraculous anarchy that surrounded him when he made his photo book Sunrise & Sunset At Praiano in 1980. Or perhaps he was looking at the island of Capri in the distance and wondering how Tiberius managed to rule the entire Roman empire from Palestine to Britain for the last ten years of his life from such a tiny mountainous island.
Two thousand years from now, someone or something will look at that same sunset and regard Sol’s book with the same disingenuous appreciation we have now for primitive art. Those little images are about as close to describing the world as Tom’s photograms are to describing Sol’s ghost in Spoleto, they’ll think.
About Lorenzo Durantini
Lorenzo Durantini is an artist, curator and writer currently based in Florence. He is also a regular contributor to Foam Magazine.
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Joerg Bader & Sébastien Leseigneur: On my mind...
