Laura Stewart: Looking at your work, one sees that you come squarely from an Italian Modernist tradition, yet there is a universal concern with form, color and composition. Do you consider yourself more of an Italian artist? A contemporary artist? An international artist? Or do you not think of yourself in this way?

Ernesto Liccardo: I am simply a craftsman of color!

LS:  Unlike many contemporary artists, there is nothing “gimmicky” about your work; it is very obviously done for its own sake, and not with an eye to the commercial market. Do you have any comment on artists who seem these days to skip over the basics of draughtsmanship, color sense, and a spatial sense, and are more concerned with making “statements” whether political, religious, gender etc. than they are with getting down the basics?

EL:  I just do the work for myself and hope that the result makes others happy. When an idea that I have comes to life —and through my manual dexterity and craftsmanship — becomes what I wish it to be — that makes me happy.  I also love the fact that I can use fairly pedestrian materials, such as a piece of canvas, glued on wood and then painted.

Yet through the process and the choices that I make with regard to color, shape and form — these materials become so much more than the sum of its parts. That to me is poetry.

LS: Where did you grow up? Where did you study? What did you study? And when did you know that you wanted to dedicate your life to art as a vocation, rather than a profession?

EL: I started my obsession with color before I could even walk.  Like many children, I discovered early on that it was challenging enough to communicate with the outside world with words, and so I found that my art gave me an added ability to communicate and express myself.

I have not stopped since then, and now at the threshold of my 60th year, I still love it, and have made it this far without learning a word of English! Yet I have never found that I couldn’t communicate because my art has been what has broken down any language, or any other kind of barrier that might exist between me and another person.

Between the ages of about 9 and 13 I found that I loved to do portraits of people, as well as landscapes and seascapes, I experimented a lot, using tempera, crayons, pencils and sometimes oil paints.

When I became a bit older, and started running off all the time, I went to Capri to paint the Faraglioni, the sea and the boats.

Once I was introduced to a person and without knowing who HE (SHE?) was, I painted his /her portrait.   He/She expressed his/her satisfaction with a smile and a pat dismissed me. Later, I asked around: “Who is the beautiful lady who walks barefoot through the narrow streets of the island?”  And they told me that she was a woman, often walking with her husband, a Greek ship owner, and that was also the wife of a U.S. president. And that her name was Jacqueline!!

And so you see I was one of those boys in the back of the photo above. When school was closed for the summer holiday, we loved to spend the long, lovely summer days running up and down the narrow roads of the Island, where in those days it was easy to meet famous people, because Capri, in those years, was more laid back.

Capri had a special charm and was quite unique. However, I could never stay for long, as I missed the strange smells and tools that my father, who was a shoemaker kept in his workshop, and which  never ceased to fascinate me.

His “laboratory” was stuffed with the strangest things — but for a young boy, it was all wonderful. Lying about were his work tools. The walls were plastered with designs, cardboard cutouts and dozens of shoes in all sizes, shapes and colors hung from cords. In the middle of the room was a huge wood counter, marked and worn by time and my father’s toil, densely decorated with thousands of smudges of glue, wax, resin, and polish. The room was illuminated by a small spotlight that gave off an eerie yellowish light and it was on for countless hours during the long dark days of winter.

My father spent nearly all his time in this space, and for over 50 years with incredible skill, he cut animal skins to create ricavandoci sandals, shoes and boots, from python, crocodile, ox, ostrich, and peccary lizard skins!

I would watch him work, speechless, and mesmerized by the glinting of the sharp tip of the tool that he made himself to meticulously run along the white marks he had traced and then executed to perfection cutting “uppers”.

Without looking up from his work, he would tell me which animal belonged to which animal skin with which he was working. He would say that it was an alligator from the forests of the Amazon, which was used to make bags and it was hard to cut. I was always aware that it was this work that allowed him to feed his family of 10 children, and I was very proud when I wore the sandals that he made for me with his own hands.

Sometimes, for shelter from the summer heat, I would use the piles of animal skins like one would use a straw mat and would lie down smelling the strong smell that emanates from the process of tanning.

When I was older and left for military service in Milan, by chance I came across some works by Lucio Fontana, who had died a few years previously.  In his work, I saw the famous Fontana “Cuts” and my experiences  in childhood with my father  nearly exploded inside of me as I stood in front of these works, so elegant, yet so redolent for me of the art of “cutting” from which my father plied his trade. For years I wondered what Fontana was trying to express with these “cuts” and what he was looking for beyond them in the canvas. This has affected me all my life.

LS: Your recent work although aesthetically beautiful in its own right, both sculptural and painterly, has titles that are obviously references to advances in science such as stem cell research and the use of human embryos. Tell me how you became interested in Science as a theme for your art, and what are your thoughts on the potential ethical issues that the human race face as a result of this fine line between use of stem cell and other cutting edge research, cloning etc. for the noble pursuit of treatment of and curing of illness and the obvious meddling in what has for millennia been considered work better suited to divinity than man?

EL: The work to which you are referring —and that I have been doing for the last decade —was inspired by anthropological research that I began in the 1980s.  This was the beginning of a long journey that I have been on philosophically, intellectually and with my art that focus on the themes of morality, ethics and science. After my first show dedicated to this theme, in which I made digital prints in bulk, to demonstrate the idea that you can make many, many “pieces” yet really only ONE work — the whole thing really came together for me the day that  I  landed on the island in the Mediterranean called Ventotene.

I found myself gazing raptly at the Island’s unique and idiosyncratic rock cliffs. This stunning vista represented in spectacular fashion to me the natural expression of the ancient etchings that each of us carries inside of us.

And so the combination of my moral and intellectual research on the ethics of modern science was now exhibited to me in nature in a viscerally way, and the experience gave me the urgent need to bring that vision to my work. Perhaps it was the same feeling that arose in Fontana when he felt his urgent need to “cut” his canvases.

I developed these ideas further with my “Clone” series –this time using the traditional medium of oil on canvas to produce many works that were the same. This was in complete contrast to the concept of the earlier “Over Limits” series of the digital prints. My current work on stem cells, embryos, and genomes are my reflection of the current ethical issues in science that I believe should be in the service of man — and not vice versa.

LS: From a purely aesthetic perspective, when I look at your work — to name a few contemporary masters, I see influences of Albers, Calder, Fontana and Judd.  Which schools of art, or artists in the Modernist and Contemporary art world, do you feel have most inspired you? And also, as an Italian, living surrounded by some of the most exquisite art from Roman, through Renaissance, what artists, architecture etc., inspires you most?

EL: You are absolutely right on this point.  Add Picasso, Miro, but also Duchamp, Brancusi and Alberto Burri especially for a short period in which I was a friend. And my most recent influence has been the discovery of the work of Rashid Al Khalifa, whose subtle and intellectual art transmits this force to break down all barriers of time, history, culture, religion, or social differences.

In his work, in fact, I see how an artist can use a bold, descriptive analysis to reveal a complex issue — on which perhaps many rivers of ink have been spilled. Yet, alas, that is the precariousness of human existence.

Looking at his work, my mind is projected in a space-time dimension that is boundless, making me relive all the excitement that only the Italian Renaissance is able to convey.

In particular, I am fascinated by the combination opera “The Ecstasy of St. Cecilia” by Raffaello (year 1514), in which this great artist uses the allegory of the decay of earthly music through broken instruments and in his old age, is able to understand and reveal the precariousness of human and worldly passions. One can see this understanding in the rapt and delighted face of St. Cecilia listening to not a temporal sound, but a player who plays another unearthly music.

LS: There is a simplicity and purity in your work that usually only comes after many years of arduous experimentation and reduction, e.g., scaling away the extraneous in pursuit of expression that both engages the viewer, yet is spare through editing? Can you put in words how you have come to this place, and whether this was your intention from the beginning?

EL: In your question, I can read between the lines and see your acute analytical skill concerning content of my works.  Digging is the appropriate term  — and it  represents what my artistic research is all about.

LS: What are your plans for future work? What other contemporary issues aside from the ethical issues in advances in Science interest you? What other themes, media and work would you like to tackle in your next chapter?

EL: The idea of doing a truly monumental work is what attracts me in the years to come. I would also like this to coincide with an ambitious project involving the collaboration of young artists and individuals who love art out of passion and not as a profession!!

Cellula Staminale 2011 series