Sartori extracts samples from a gravel quarry and uses them with rigor to create a scientific archive of sorts. The method has no purpose other than to observe the non-functional characteristics of the samples taken.

What remains of her artistic basis is the freedom to concede to the useless and to plumb the real. Thus we have “Frottages” on normal paper. “Evaluation of the Fine Dust” is the image obtained from spreading glue onto paper made of very smooth stone, on which the dust coming from the stone is applied with a brush. “Distribution of the Sands” is a series of sheets where the artist scatters a small amount of sand in a box, and the grains are arranged according to their weight and calibers. “Thin Sections” are the enlargements of a portion of stone in three different phases. Sartori concedes nothing to her personal inventive faculty or to her emotional one. Her drawings aim to offer a given fact reflecting all the human effort made to keep scientific images pure and, to keep knowledge shared, free from personal frames of mind and uncontrolled movements.

Overcoming our individual exigencies and the notion that everything revolves around us is probably the biggest struggle to overcome in order to move on from an infantile state to a mature one. It is a process that must be honored. We want to have a purpose as it would help us and make us feel less abandoned. However, the practice, the doing, and the knowledge that derives from this discovery is the best way of reacting to the absence of final causes; they are our best consolation and our possible purpose.

Excerpts from the “The Utility of Futile Ends” by Angela Vettese, Mariateresa Sartori. Sassi Stones. Reading the rock.

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