More than waiting, the square of Pietrasanta seems to be suspended when at the end of the day the movement stops and the noises die out. Tomorrow is the big day and the city most suited to art in all of Tuscany – the art of today of course – will wake up with an agora transformed into an open-air museum: 12 statues arranged in a circle, except the central one which is a poignant bench designed as it is so as not to let the people seated see and speak, they compose The square waiting, a pandemic exhibition.
Visions and dialogues
The God from the machine of this installation is called Vincenzo Nobile and is a former Florentine architect of Ragusan origins who at one point, struck by the Tonfano pier, left his studio in the city and opened his Nag Art Gallery in Little Athens which is about to Nations now Art “To promote – he says – contemporary artistic expressions that can be decoded by everyone”. When we got to him in the gallery – where he exhibits and trades paintings and sculptures – the large statues chosen for the exhibition were about to be moved to Piazza Duomo where they will remain until May 23 to mean a lot of things: “that the agora waits patiently the end of the pandemic and in these days perhaps also the beginning of the red zone; that art survives us, but that without benches, that is without the point of view of those who observe it and those who remember it, it is silent; that the stamina of all is so high that it holds together the energies of many creatives to give a sign to the world. As if to say, we are there, despite everything ». To see them so alone in the square while the city goes out, the mind runs to Pompeii, where everything has remained intact except the people, to the great cities of art which, especially during the first lockdown, were surreal stages, to De Chirico in Enigma of an autumn afternoon because there is always something that has to do with the ultimate meaning of being in the world in operations like this that stop time and sweep people away from the places born for them. And yet, analyzing them one by one – we even met some of the artists involved in their studios – the individual sculptures also tell you many other things. There is The dialogue by Boutros Romhein, for example, a highly conceptual and evocative marble work that speaks the language of memory and sharing, the Syrian origins of its author and his idea of art.
From Syria to the Apuan Alps
Boutros was born in Damascus but has lived on the slopes of the Apuan Alps, where the provincial road begins to climb towards Colonnata and the neighboring quarries, for 40 years. Here he has his studio, his gallery, his home and his school of sculpture. It is he who tells us about the poetics of his monumental sculptures exhibited in squares and parks around the world, from New York to Canada or China. The size and shape above all, “which recall the great totems of archaeological Syria, the stone columns of Palmyra, artifacts from 2000 years ago”. These large marbles, as in the work that will be exhibited in the square from tomorrow, are always worked to evoke “animal figures that refer to the eternity of nature, and in the case of the horses that dot many of them even my father and his passion for these beautiful creatures. They have holes that open to the other, create links by breaking down walls and borders and, finally, are dotted with human presences, faces of men and women bearers of the memory of the world ». Alba Gonzales, on the other hand, who in her works reveals Greek origins and who as a former dancer is inspired by some dancing figures in the Rodin style, for The square waiting carries a gigantic one Justice in bronze: she is a woman who can see front and back, left and right and has the same soft shapes of another bronze work that has just arrived in the square: it is The Fortune by Daphne Du Barry: she too, born in the Netherlands but living in Pietrasanta at least four months a year, has chosen a woman with round and feminine contours to represent the most evoked goddess in these pandemic times. Operation similar to that of another artist, this time Polish called Katarina Victor Thomas. «I – he tells us – as an image of resilience I carry the Milady de The Three Musketeers, a strong, very intelligent woman who has always fascinated me, even before starting to study sculpture in the city where I was born, Krakow, and where I often work (even if it is in the foundries of Pietrasanta that her sculptures find their definitive shape ed.) “. Among the 12 figures who are waiting for us in the square, this one is his Madame B you recognize it immediately, for the inevitable hat it wears. Algarco, on the other hand, from Brescia, now living here full time, made a very interesting operation in view of this exhibition. “L’Anfnow at the time of the Coronavirus, this is the title of the work I am showing, it is a work done in the first lockdown ». An immense amphora, in fact, in bronze, made at the Artistic foundry from Prato where we went to follow all the processing steps – from plaster to bronze through silicone and clay to recreate the positive and negative of the original work signed by the author with a process that has been the same since the days of the great sculptures of the Parthenon. «A work – continues the young Algarco who is creating a series of sculptural paintings of great beauty on this same subject – which at a certain point cracked as if to signify the cracks of our contemporaneity. I thought it strongly represented the drama we are experiencing. But I wanted him to tell something more ». To see it today, it looks like an ancient amphora of hundreds of years and even more, an archaeological find that came out of the depths of the Mediterranean. He recreated the signs of time and the sea by immersing the work in brackish water for two months, collected by himself in Marina di Pietrasanta with large bins.
Gifts and hopes
It almost reveals the soul of his Cristoforo the white marble of 1.80 meters in height signed by Enrico Savelli: a stylized figure of a man whose chest is sculpted to make the marble transparent: backlit gives the feeling of showing the soul of man. Renato Bonetti took to the extreme the basic idea of the exhibition with the square full of sculptures without men and brought his The coat: an empty shrug. The figure it should contain is full only to the waist, the man it should cover has no face or bust. We will still find a tribute to the pirate Pantani signed by Tano Pisano, a beautiful one Kiss, a colored resin figure of Tony Nicotra, the fin of one Fox Shark by Alessandra Politi Pagnoni and a Apollo by Misja Kristoffer Rasmussen. But it is Lorenzo D’Andrea’s bench that ultimately holds together this ideal circle of artist’s interventions with a diameter of ten meters. He called her The firebird, just like Stravinsky’s make-up which draws inspiration from a well-known Russian fairy tale. In marble and bronze it has two seats divided by a large parallelepiped which prevents communication between the parts. But – and here we want to glimpse a message heralding hope – this large piece of marble that obstructs the view is surmounted by a bronze bird: it is The Firebird which represents the strength of good.
© Time.News
March 18, 2021 | 15:15
© Time.News
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