At the end of the seventies, I wondered whether there could be a sequel to Costantin Brancusi’s, Arturo Martini’s and Fausto Melotti’s discourse on sculpture.
I wondered if their work, in addition to being what they represent and express, was also a path to innovation in the tradition of the plastic language.
I wondered whether the artists of my time had failed to grasp all the lessons of the masters of the early twentieth century.
In the mid-seventies, another aspect of the cultural spirit of my time was Bonito Oliva’s Transavanguardia movement that theorized a return to manual skills. In 1980, Paolo Portoghesi’s “Strada Novissima”, at the Venice Architecture Biennale, gave birth to the aesthetic and philosophical movement known as Postmodernism. It is in the “present that looks to the past” where, to some extent, I once again recognised myself.
In those years of professional and artistic growth, I won two National Competitions for Public Artwork and in 1975 participated in the Quadriennale d’Arte in Rome. Furthermore, my teaching career – the art of knowing and knowing how to communicate the knowledge of art – broadened the horizons of my research into the aesthetic. Studying, teaching and working in the foundry did not give me much time for exhibitions or competitions. I therefore had to choose between being a full-time artist, craftsman, or teacher; and possibly working on sculptures without any ties to the art market.
That said, let’s return to innovation in the tradition of plastic language. Let’s go back to Brancusi, Martini and Melotti, master sculptors of a “timeless” art, for at least two reasons. The first being the correlation between what the semantic register, history and human feeling recognises as plastic art, as the millennial and universal art of sculpture. The second concerns the tactile approach – rational and manual – of expressing, thinking, creating sculpture. Here, with a certain amount of pride, I know that I am aligned with the spiritual premise that the search for an idea or a story to visualise lies in being able to master matter.
As mentioned, at the end of the seventies, I thought that my research on sculpture and my teaching profession would suffice. However, didactics with all the theoretical problems, and sculpture as a narration of the sacred and the symbolic, were to become the aesthetic experience in which I still mirror myself. For forty years (albeit intermittently) I searched for “simple forms”, “spirituality”, “universality”, in the story and the shape of my sculptures. I searched for the roots of the sacred and the meaning of my sculpture in the beauty and rigour of geometric signs.
The teacher and person I am today is thanks to the forty years spent teaching about the knowledge and form of the language of images. On the other hand, I have always been a sculptor – or so I thought – until I realized that to be a real sculptor I had to examine the roots, the history of sculpture, its millennial story. I had a project to develop but I needed time, I knew what to do but I was slow. I was slow, ambitious and not a part of the art market.
However, if these notes are a more extensive conversation about my work, more could be said about my rejection – albeit a painful and controversial one – of a discourse with the art world today. As already mentioned, I needed time for my discourse on sculpture to be shaped and formed. I had to have a certain number of pieces to enter exhibitions or competitions, but in the end I gave up. I stopped turning to critics, to foundations and to the art market.
In other words, I am part of another story – another “scale of values” – not as far as the reason for art itself is concerned, but regarding the collective, the market, which has become the mouthpiece, if not the “cultural authority” on everything and anything that is art.
In short, my reasons for creating sculptures were to study and learn, to research (or perhaps just for myself), but nevertheless I made sculptures. I created sculptures because I was searching for my (hi)story in this art form. I looked for a sense of belonging in its (the sculpture’s) story, an independent and cultural involvement with which I could relate … create (sculptures).
