Today a Woman Gave Birth to the First Robot

An Italian artist attracted me because he came from Klee and was technically perfect. Corrado Cagli created certain enchanting tangles of lines more complicated than the Minotaur’s maze and said he made them by hand. As an adolescent, I was bewitched into trying to understand how he did them, but I never could. I loved him because he was a serial experimenter – even African masks became star wars characters in his hands.
Paul Klee is still my favourite artist because he saved conceptual art from the danger of being too clear. He immersed it in the mysterious obscurity of water-colour and those who try to explain it, to find a beginning and an end, are unsuccessful. Klee is a scientist of poetry who mixes Leonardo da Vinci with Merlin the Wizard. It doesn’t matter how many potions and formulae are tried, the answer is always painting that can’t be explained.
Tabarelli seems to be explainable but he isn’t. He’s disguised as a scientist. He works day and night with the piratical intention of conquering an art that will do itself, without working. And he will be happy to look on and live off the proceeds – aesthetical, of course. It’s not true, it’s just a contemporary red herring. Patrick Tabarelli builds machines and makes astronomic calculations to reach the inexplicable mystery of a single poem, the part that can’t be calculated – the enchantment.