Abstract

In Theory of formativity (1954) Luigi Pareyson provides an analysis of the work of art and creative process in which the theme of risk is crucial. Having rejected the avant-garde lexicon altogether (vocation to the new, genius, illumination, creativity ex nihilo, spontaneity), art is brought back under the sign of the general human ways-of-making: artistic formativity is a paradigm of this. In a unique dialectic between intentionality and matter, art leads to a work that is «law and result» of the process from which it arises at ones. The status of finished artwork is therefore the success of a paradoxical dynamic whose condition of success is, for Pareyson, the immanent norm of the formation process itself. That norm, if on the one hand it does not precede the work as project to be finalized, does not even identify with the randomness. The Pareysonian analysis of artistic process joins two instances in a non-linear way. On the one hand, an organicist vision based on what is named «formant form», i.e., the work caught in the heart of its slow and non-linear adapting to itself. This vision is combined with the repeated emphasis on the dramatic character of the entire arc of the artistic process, which is fully exposed to the risk of failure. To be understood in its aesthetic value, the theme of risk must be linked to the original ontological personalism and to the theory of interpretation that Pareyson develops between the late 1940s and early 1950s. For this reason, in the first part the article extensively discusses the theoretical premises on which the theory of formativity grounds, then analyze the Pareysonian account on the structure of the artistic process.