The title sounded mysterious, “Quasi, autoamori di Johnny, e una poesia” (Almost, Johnny’s Self-Loves, and a Poem), but it perfectly illustrated the content of Corrado Levi’s show, which opened shortly after the artist’s large-scale retrospective at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Bergamo, some twenty-five miles outside Milan. At Peep-Hole, however, there was only a very short poem and a string hung across the room lengthwise, from one wall to another, to which twenty-seven sheets of paper were attached. The same configuration, sans poem, was repeated in a smaller adjacent room, but with only a single sheet of paper. One thought of laundry hanging out to dry, and of photographs drying in darkrooms. But Levi’s work also refers in no uncertain terms to the body and to sexuality. One side of almost every sheet has the handwritten phrase JOHNNY SI MASTURBA (Johnny is masturbating), followed by meticulous specifications of the hour, day, month, and year (it is 2004). On the other side of the sheet the artist has sought to make a life drawing in pencil centered on Johnny’s hand, producing a series of fragmentary and nervous sketches or tangles of lines, in short, communicating the physical and emotional agitation of Johnny, who is at once actor and participant. In fact, Johnny’s performances took place in the presence of the artist, who wanted to record them firsthand, as a sort of body art by proxy, with the additional mediation of the drawing as a form of expression.

In Vito Acconci’s Seedbed, 1972, although the act of masturbation took place in real time, it became part of a private world, also expressed with other introspective forms, above all the monologue, with which the artist communicated indirectly to the gallery audience. Though Johnny’s acts of masturbation did not take place in public, they refer more explicitly to the eroticized body, beginning with the desire that induces the act. Some of the sheets tell us that JOHNNY VIENE (Johnny is coming), is having an orgasm, with an indication of the date and time, and with the stains of the sperm that he produced added to the writing and drawing on the front and back of the sheet. What Levi seeks to visualize is specifically a rhetoric of desire—not so much the rhythms and vitality of the body, but rather the anxious moments of pleasure, with the compulsion to repeat that desire imposes. The work runs linearly along the space as if to define a trajectory, but it is composed of modular elements, apparently from many occasions, brought together to delineate a utopian, continuous time, namely that of desire that one self-satisfies.

In the end, however, there is irony—an essential component of Levi’s sensibility, as the poem suggests—which cools down what might, depending on the viewer, be seen as the high erotic temperature of the show. In the smaller room, moreover, one witnessed a spatial and temporal reversal that had the feeling of a paradox: The final sheet states, JOHNNY SI MASTURBA IN UN’ALTRA STANZA (Johnny is masturbating in another room), bringing us back to a disappointing here-and-now, having torn us away from the imaginary time of pleasure.

—Giorgio Verzotti

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.