NEW YORK— The Italian-born, New York-based artist Luca Buvoli has been a presence in the American art scene for approximately 20 years. His fanciful, yet deeply intelligent work—including Not-a-Superhero (1992–2001), Flying—Practical Training (1997–ongoing), and most recently, A Very Beautiful Day After Tomorrow—Un Bellissimo Dopodomani (2007)—has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art (1999), the Queens Museum of Art (2001), and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (2007), among other institutions, and is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. This summer he has realized perhaps his greatest success to date, participating in curator Robert Storr’s exhibition at the 52nd Venice Biennale, which runs through November 21.

Buvoli’s project for Venice, an energetic multipart expansion of the A Very Beautiful Day After Tomorrow installation he created for the ICA earlier this year, occupies over 5,000 square feet in the entrance to the Arsenale. Like much of his art, it is ambitious in theme and execution and falls into that ambiguous genre known as “multimedia,” combining sculpture, videos, painting, and mosaic [see video excerpts here and here].

ARTINFO spoke to Buvoli about his Biennale installation, delegating work to assistants, and the "essential moment" of an artwork.

Luca, when I visited your studio in May just before you took off for Venice, you had four or five assistants. Is this a typical number for you?

Depending on the project and deadline, the studio expands and contracts from one part-time assistant to a maximum of nine—like early this year.

Have you always worked with assistants?

The process of working with regular assistants is still relatively new to me. In my Not-a-Superhero project, all works were produced by Luca Buvoli Comics, a fictional company that made comic books, animated films, action figures, and posters—all of them hand-made solely by me. Mimicking the mass-produced format and scope of Marvel and DC and replacing it with my scratchy collages and sculptures made of urban debris was a financial necessity for me, but it was also a part of the work’s existential investigation of identity.

With the Flying–Practical Training method, I focused on the role of a made-up character, Professor M.a.S., who instructs unassisted human flight. At the same time, I translated this idea of “teaching” by hiring and training a few assistants to help design my unusual catalogs/artist’s books and to cast and sand the more cleanly produced sculptural works.

At present, I am a “polyglot” artist, involved in many media, and I benefit a lot from the technical expertise in sculptural fabrication and digital realms of two specialized assistants. At times, I also have worked with very helpful assistants who have strong writing, office, and organizational skills, but this has less to do with the production than with the distribution of the work.

What tasks do you delegate and which do you keep for yourself?

I do all the research, formulate the theoretical basis of each project, and make most if not all of the creative and aesthetic decisions. I sometimes share these thoughts and interests with one or two assistants when I write proposals or project descriptions and I ask them to proof my English, but at times I prefer to see the assistants’ responses only at a later stage of my work.

Some assistants are thirsty for knowledge and want to talk about the theoretical or technical aspects of my work. I enjoy suggesting readings and engaging in discussions with them, which is also a good way for me to test an early response to the issues raised by the work. But when we’re up against a deadline, we barely have time to share a few words on the status of the project over lunch.

Tell me about A Very Beautiful Day After Tomorrow. At what point did you bring an extensive team of assistants on board?

This was an unusual project. We had a tight deadline and the work was extremely ambitious, with two very large sculptures, five videos, many works on paper, and a large mosaic. Rob Storr had invited and assigned me the first room (about 5,000 square feet) at the Arsenale only last November, when I was completing the project with the same title for the ICA in Philadelphia. At the time I was working only with one new assistant, Phil Penberthy.

Thanks to the support of the Toby D. Lewis Philanthropic Fund for the Cleveland Jewish Federation Foundation and a few sales, I was able to hire a few other assistants right away. Before the departure of the pieces for Venice in April, I had about eight part-time assistants, mainly to complete the casting and sanding of the resin parts and the metal frames for the paintings. And then, after the pickup of the works, I converted my work space into an animation and digital-media studio, to complete the five animated videos. Before I left for Venice in mid-May with my DVDs, I had about nine assistants, some of whom had also worked on the sculpture and metal fabrication.

Are you able to do all of the technical work for your multimedia pieces yourself, or do you depend on others to carry out certain tasks?

Actually, I would like to learn how to delegate many more parts of my art production and organizational activities. After writing, directing, drawing, shooting, and editing over 15 of my animated films and videos since 1993, this time I was forced to delegate the slow process of doing the thousands of animation drawings. I had to accept the reality faced by most animation productions: that they require large teams of specialized technicians and artists.

Except for the first few minutes, which I had made a couple of years ago, most of the rotoscoping in the two videos “Excerpts from: Velocity Zero” and “Velocitá Zero” was done by Amanda Amato, Noriyuki Kuroda, and Ryan Brown, whose qualities of line share affinities with my own. I assigned them to draw each element like I usually sketch them. It wasn’t easy at first for them to follow my nervous line and my templates, but after a good amount of supervising, I was very pleased with the results, and they were very happy to have learned some animation methods and techniques.

In the work’s title video, “A Very Beautiful Day After Tomorrow (Un Bellissimo Dopodomani),” I wanted to draw on my own the images for the 2-D animated sequences, while the live action was either archival source or my own footage. I worked next to Napoleon Nicdao, my 3-D assistant, on the motion paths of the 3-D animated sequences. His skills allowed me to generate a much closer result to what I had envisioned.

Despite my desire to learn all possible techniques, tools, and approaches, ranging from ancient mosaic to 3-D computer-generated animation, I realize that I have to learn to delegate aspects of my work to professionals in order to give shape to many of my projects.

Do you believe that working in the studio of an artist who makes multimedia work is fundamentally different from working in the studio of an artist like a painter, who is expected to do everything himself, and by hand? Or are all artist studios created equal?

Years ago, I studied art in Venice with a painter who was a restorer of frescoes of Tintoretto and Tiepolo, and I was very aware of the fact that many artists of the past had reserved for themselves the role of conceiving, designing, planning, teaching, and delegating the right amount of work to the right person in the bottega, and of supervising the whole process, right down to the painting of the lumi (light strokes) or details of the faces. The conceptual and creative moment is the essential one in any medium. I am also aware that creativity happens at different moments, and it is up to the artist whether to accept “infractions” of the rules and incorporate possible “mistakes” (her or his own or the assistants’) as part of the creative process.

Having said that, in my own work painting and drawing remain the most intimate activities, and the ones that I cannot imagine ever wanting to delegate to anyone, due to my approach to color and to the great pleasure that I receive from this unmediated involvement.

As for new media, I learned mainly from books and struggled through a self-taught filmmaking and animating course from 16mm film to digital programs. I have accepted the collaboration of technical experts to speed up the process.

Do you expect that people who come to see your work understand that studio assistants have contributed to it? Would knowing this change the audience's opinion of the work?

Actually, I’ve experienced the opposite. When I began showing my reinforced resin “Vectors,” which were almost always modeled, molded, cast, and assembled by me, people asked what fabricators I had hired. Even when I was showing my early 16mm animated films in the early 90s—years before there was any interest in this medium in the art world—a few people asked me what computer program I was using, or what animator team I had hired to create such hand-made and delicate effect. In fact, each film was the result of thousands of my individual pen-and-ink drawings and careful planning.