A profound and natural artist, but nourished by the most vital experiences through a disciplined study, Nunzio Bibbò,      rich as he is of a modeled flair, appears in his sculptures, featured by pungent expressiveness, to penetrate the most intimate human values.

Indeed, his figures of elderly men and young women, of men who have been through hard work and relinquished women are the materialisation of images that come to mind from the memories of the people of his native soil, the raw and dried out land of the Upper Sannio, of people who, unchanged, in silence, live their lives of work and sacrifice.

And if they are alongside different figures, those suggested by the city environment that drive the sculptor to bold structures, but always harmonised with an intense psychological characterisation, it is in the vigorous images of his native land, animated by a proud greatness, that Bibbò establishes his originality.

Far from comfortable suggestions and shy of a vacuous intellectualism, he rediscovers in his native world the great and eternal values of the spirit. And these values he renders with a language, which, although moving from tradition, is very topical, alive and agile, a language that gives a firm drawing framework, despite the motion of lights, to the very same preparatory studies, using pen or pencil, and which comes to, in the plastic material, through a flaked away and vibratile modelling, and a powerful prominence.

I remember one of his great sculptural compositions, in which he arranges as in an ancient triumph over which the shadow of death has gone through the symbols of our alienation, the machine, a cloth, everyday things, an apple, so chalked, almost becoming incorporeal, in this empty and still life air.

Where in contrast to this blood fever, to this impulse that opens in a gesture that creates and gives form to matter, everything falls into this possessive obsession, of a body that is no longer flesh; where flesh becomes chalk, and moves away, as on a papier-mâché stage where life is extinguished and even the show is over.

But not everything is here, Bibbò senses in the sculpture a possibility that does not resign itself to giving in, the power to be other than this impassive testimony of the emptiness and silence that have occupied the space of our existence, something that is life, in one of its extreme fragments, relict, semblance grasped with extreme patience, and yet at that final limit, held as if suspended in its uncorrupted dimension. No longer in time, but after time, where every image is found in its archetype, and however resigned, it acquires its infinite and absolute dignity. Finding identity, as overcoming the barriers of illusion and appearance, of fear, of this sudden feeling of dust that falls to embody things in the image of death, calculation of impossible existence, as a shroud on limbs now faded and reduced to the bone. Yet Bibbò does not abdicate; if all this is part of our reality, he feels in his hands as a sculptor and in his imagination of myth, under the patina and the casting of chalk, like the effect of lava, which has made the moment, the moment before, eternal, in an extreme aspiration to still be life.

Under the chalk or along the lines of an olive tree trunk he feels the throb, the vibration, the blood flow, and with a sure hand he reconstructs the image, this indestructible presence, he digs following the invisible traces, until he recomposes the living features of a face and a body; or the space and the objects of our everyday life.

It is not, neither pop art nor arte povera, it is sculpture, that is the ability to translate into substance and form what is the reality of our life, in an operation that is not false aestheticism or pretentious cerebralism, but in any case and always, presence, presence of man and his desire to be appropriate to the vision of his dream and his desire.

The message of Bible for the survival of men

“If all this is part of our reality, he feels in his hands as a sculptor and in his imagination of myth, beneath the patina and casting of chalk, as in the extreme aspiration of being still alive. Under the chalk or along the lines of an olive tree trunk he feels the throb, the vibration, the blood flow and with a steady hand he reconstructs the image.”

Elio Mercuri

It is precisely this blood flow that Mercuri sees in Bibbò’s sculptures, the lifeblood that gives sensitive concreteness to his works, filled with meanings that constitute not a particular aspect of reality, but its totality, which goes well beyond the expression “Ecology”, a term that turns reductive with regard to the problems developed by his works.

We can see in his sculptures the drama of contemporary man, compressed by the suffocating structures of the “civilization of machines” that flattens the critical conscience of the individual and that hinders his yearning for the complete liberation from the subjugation to the will of the prevaricating power that conditions the becoming of the human being and the full realization of his self-consciousness. If we frame Bibbò’s work in the context of a teleological vision of man, we could see the truest and most pregnant aspects of his poetics and message.

Franco Portone

Sponsored by Istituto Arte e Comunità, n. 26 feb. 1976, mensile

I’ve never liked presenting artists to catalogues. It always seemed to me an unnecessary and, most of the time, paternalistic act. Worthwhile art imposes itself, the good art, of course. And the public must judge it for itself, with its own reactions, even if they were not appropriate and specifically adherent to the critical text.

It doesn’t matter: artistic production must express its innate merit of stimulating culture in man.

If I accept to write a few lines about Nunzio Bibbò, it is because it seems to me necessary to point out a young man, even if already qualified for teaching at the Liceo Artistico di Brera and currently working at the Liceo Artistico di Benevento, who stands out for his strong bond with authenticity. During my long teaching, in fact, at the Academy of Rome, I have always recommended young people to “see” everything, to capture with the eye every qualifying note that appears in the productions of the most varied artists, to assimilate it and “mediate” it with their own nature, but then, precisely, to forget everything after having assumed the best and prepare to tenaciously be themselves.

This was precisely Bibbò’s path. Here and there, in his initial production, you can see some memories of influential artists, and in particular of that great Arturo Martini through whose work we all passed and who was able to dramatise and render primitive his sculpture to the point of making it appear, in the most eloquent pieces, the relic of an ancient civilization. But the merit of Bibbò is to have made a personal reading of the Masters and to have identified himself as the son of an ancient territory such as the Upper Sannio, so that the civilisations buried there, in his land of misery and old slavery, are still alive in the carved faces of women, children, old people, all characters of his tormented sculpture. Which can be defined as a significant act of loyalty to the heavy southern reality.

… so beautiful the naked in their primitive and disorderly vigor…

A burnished bronze, a torn tree, etched in the sensitive bark by the insulting violence of men, but still throbbing with life in the secret of the saps, on which a young pigeon that escaped the forest fire lands and stands and sings its protest. And from another bronze, dilated among the rubble of an atomic bombardment, two heads of innocent victims rise up for the extreme rebellion. On these parameters the art of Nunzio Bibbò proceeds, based on the ethical convictions that inform his life. The relationship with nature is fundamental with his sculpture: passionate and severe, the concept of Bibbò always binds to man every form of expression of art. Like all men of taste and observant, Bibbò feels and assimilates those results of contemporary history that seem positive to his temperament, but inexorably discards those suggested by fashion or the market or imperiously indicated by cults of critics.

His plastic is inventive, imaginative, impetuous. The landscapes he creates, like the wings of a representation – towards which Bibbò’s inspiration is proclive – welcome groups of hieratic figures, as if fixed in a magical and expectant atmosphere. Something spreads in the faces of the figures – sometimes indistinct, sometimes marked by light as portraits – like a human hope. Full-bodied and also spiritual – but not mystical – the figures of Bibbò – men and women – carry within their veins of bronze or clay the vital impulse towards existence freed from suggestions and subjugation to expired ideals. In his condition as an artist, Nunzio feels this yearning doubly, as a new conquest of his generation that frees itself from dialectical fetters and conceptual sophistry. The sumptuous marinism that drew on the vocabulary of the synonyms of formal expressions and distributed personal forms jealously guarded and dated, was submerged by the rebellious invasions, overcome by the relentless course of history.

Nunzio Bibbò is young and untouched by corruption, the high dignity of the figures gathered in civil assemblies shows in him a respect for the human personality, illustrates the awareness of the community in the context of the relationships that are the basis of society. He is a native of the Samnite people, peasant and caring of the land, grateful to mother nature and goddess of the ancient race. Between the Samnites and the Etruscans there were unforgettable bonds of alliance in opposition to the preponderance of the weapons of Rome, and perhaps this bond was reunited in Bibbò in whose sculpture the archaic motifs of the eventful and vibrant Etruscan world merge with those of the austere line of the Middle Ages.

The corroded and suffered material of his sculptures (especially the nudes and the isolated figures in lost wax) is reduced to the gracefulness of beauty. But the nudes are so beautiful in their primeval and disorderly vigour that they seem miraculously saved from violence and storm and shine in their purity and integrity.

The counterevidence of the validity of Bibbò’s plastic lies in the graphic work. The figures and landscapes are obtained from an in-depth analysis of the sign that does not allow for easy effects; and those who know how to read in the dense intrigue of lines and swirls, of carryovers and superimpositions, understand how much effort a sculptor (accustomed to correcting a clay fleck with his thumb) makes to premeditate and contain the emotion of the marker or tempera, which cannot be retouched. They are no longer notes from memory, but works that have definitively passed to painting, whose tonal and chromatic values have their own independent existence and workmanship. The suggestion of counterpoints between painting and sculpture is strictly controlled under the guidance of a strict and careful sense of the frugal, which Nunzio Bibbò has always observed: by vocation and by choice, drawing the gratifying satisfaction of an artist to recognise himself in the figures and gestures of the works that have sprung from his sensitivity and his thought, without artifice with human and solar clarity.

“The artist does not suffer too much from the difficulty of the reluctant material, and indeed the challenge, and enjoys triumph.” (Benedetto Croce)

…. It is certainly less easy to use current aesthetic categories for the definition of the work of a sculptor like Nunzio Bibbò. In the only previous occasion in which I had to deal with it, I highlighted its vitalism, still being able to refer exclusively to a universe, seen sub specie humanitatis, of which I was also impressed by the abundance of visual culture, vitalised by contributions extending from primitive to classical civilizations, from medieval expressionism to the contemporary one.

It is natural that, in sculpture in particular, the innate talent and mastery acquired are not of little use, in order to reach an adequate expression of a very rich patrimony of images; especially when, as frequently happens in the work of Nunzio Bibbò, it is a matter of closing and organising, in syntactically impeccable turns, complex groups, variously articulated and dense of nuances in the psychological configurations.

Today, in the great compositions of the Landscapes, in stone or terracotta, the same wise concertation of masses and volumes is harmoniously moved in solemn expanses, interspersed and interwoven with wide and slow movements, rendered each time vibrant by the wise play of the steps and, with unpredictable times, lashed by deep excavations of perforated dark circles under the eyes.

And truly, in these petrified and adorned landscapes, as in the sorrowful images of human beings of all ages and conditions, seem to relive, as Giuseppe Mazzullo wrote, “the civilizations buried … in their land of misery and old slavery”.

Since they are back in fashion and activating the sculptor’s craft, the genius loci, the manual skill, the primary material of giving shape, many sculptors have rediscovered the rock and are working with refined language to bring the shape of the sculpture as close as possible to the rock that provides the primary material. After the experiences of the neo-avant-garde, it is a backwards path considered wild and also close to nature and naturalness. Or, with a real waste of ingenuity, and with an entirely cerebral operation, they seek the form of sculpture in the figures and styles of ancient plastic, plundering all possible museums with an exhausted and refined mannerism. They pursue an icy and inert idea of sculpture and do not realise that, in a “educated” way, they reach the rock and not the form. They are moved by a nostalgia for the ancient beauty that lies in the ruins and museums and it is believed that only such nostalgia can artistically inhabit the present.

I believe that from this road so well refined that leads from the form to the rock there will never be a true rebirth of sculpture, even less of sculpting. It is possible, instead, that a rebirth will come along the road that leads, perhaps in a zigzag pattern, from the rock to the form. The splendid occasion for a deep and poetic reflection on the plastic problem so topical offer us some highly formal sculptures by Nunzio Bibbò that vary, in large and small, a motif of original conception and execution we can define as landscape, ancestral Landscape. There are some in refractory soil of Spoleto fired and in nenfro stone. The rock from which Bibbò starts out is not only material that he loves and knows to be potentially beautiful, but a primordial lump nucleus that has an image sediment both in its deepest self and in the history of the forms of sculpture in Italy since ancient times. The lyrical-existential-historical form is incorporated into the mass of matter: it is necessary, with light, patient energy, at times with grace and delicacy, to free the mass from the overlay until it reaches the form, the image. In the centuries-old development of sculpture and painting in Italy, from the Italic tradition and Magna Graecia to us, we will always find the hump, the hill and the mountain isolated or in a chain, enter the sculpture of form and image to characterise the quality of space and a certain environmental situation.

The sculptures that Nunzio Bibbò titled “landscapes” are archetypal sculptures from which the richest and most varied forms are generated, according to inexhaustible imaginative possibilities. Please allow us a small and easy comparison method. Everyone knows the saline structures that grow, crystal on crystal, in water, or the growth by geometric expansion of solids of certain minerals. Nunzio Bibbò follows a constructive imagination that is guided by a powerful energy that leads him to occupy space, to dominate it, to concretise the energy of a volumetry that projects in all directions. It is this primordial certainty, archetypal of occupation and human hold of space with concrete materials that has always made true and great sculptors.

So, for Nunzio Bibbò a rock is a primordial nucleus that contains infinite forms of a possible history of men that moves from an archetype but goes in many directions. And to be a generator of forms the rock of refractory soil or nenfro varies with the variation of the point of view, it never repeats the same figure but seems to rotate like a prism with a thousand faces with projections of volumes and with recesses, with solids and voids, with volumes of light and cavities in shadow. The refractory soil of Spoleto with the firing takes on wonderful pink and yellow tones of an all-Italian tenderness, of colours that can be felt as Greek or Italic or modern between Morandi and the Cubists Picasso and Braque of the analytical period. I have often found myself, at the crack of sunset at the Circus Maximus, in front of the great ruins of the Palatine Hill; it is incredible how the colour that the western sunlight gives to the ancient terracotta is close to the colour of the refractory earth that Nunzio Bibbò fires.

It is the colour of the remains of an architecture and a material, but it is also a colour that eventually settles in the depths of imagination and memory. Here, then, is the ancestral quality of these Italian landscapes and with their colours and ravines, peaks and chasms and openings of doors and windows that the sculptor has retraced on the material modelling, raising, adding, making cuts like wounds, moving in an extraordinary way the surfaces of the volumes almost retraced with the senses, memory and also with the prefiguration, the combined history of nature that made and modelled these Italian places. Ancestral Landscapes recall many real or painted or sculpted places as primordial generations of landscape and territory: they have a stylistic value and a psychic one. Their great novelty lies in the fact that they are images of the presence of the past, perhaps given for apocalyptic fragments as the Poiriers do. They are images of a nature-city that possesses vital energy to grow. If you turn around any of these ancestral Landscapes you can see that each of its faces can generate other forms, it closes an energy that can generate other situations in the sculpture, other volumes expanding in space at 360°. I am convinced that this energy that moves from within will generate other forms and other images capable of expanding into space and occupying it plastically, humanly, poetically.

The primordial step was to pass from the rock to the form following a straighforward ancient-modern impulse that comes from an Italic culture and at the same time modern from an archetype sedimented deep in the imagination. When a sculptor can sculpt, with pure and non-descriptive plasticity, an image that appears to his deep self as to Nature-History, then he can give shape with naturalness and truth to sculptures that can be said to be modern.

Nunzio Bibbò is a difficult sculptor. Nunzio Bibbò is a sculptor of instant hold on the viewer and turns around a sculpture; therefore, Bibbò is also an easy sculptor. Nuncio Bibbò is a sculptor-monument. Nunzio Bibbò is a sculptor of analysis, to observe, also, in detail.

Therefore, he is an anti-monument sculptor. But his sculpture stands as a monument. Nunzio Bibbò provokes, also in the terracotta, the eternal grey of the stone, universal sign of the sculpture. But Nunzio Bibbò provokes, also in the sculptures without direct intervention of color, meanings and optical communications of colour. For example, the light of day or the light of night, opposite colours, come out from Nunzio Bibbò’s sculptures. The great sculpture determines a visual twirl, even when it is a linear surface, from bas-relief. Nunzio Bibbò provokes circularity, but it is also a line of sculpture of open facade, as the sculpture is. Nunzio Bibbò is architecture. Sculpture is architecture’s twin childbirth art sister. There is no sculpture if it is not architecture, just as there is no work of architecture that is not sculpture. A pearl of architectural art seen from afar or from the airplane, or seen with an expert eye at these visual openings even standing near them, or being “inside” them, must be an integral sculpture. The rare and wise magic of sculpture as architecture is the primary force of Nunzio Bibbò’s sculpture. What do these and other contrasting qualities mean? That Nunzio Bibbò is a difficult sculptor because he is easy, mysterious because he is clear. The sum: Nunzio Bibbò is a sculptor, a man of art of an art in which one cannot deceive. The sculpture is, or falls. Certainly, it can stand upright, but it falls in the eye. The sculpture of Nunzio Bibbò stays in the memory. It means that of weight and round, of haughty and basic, everything has entered inside.

For Nunzio Bibbò, in search of a definition, one could speak of a narrating sculpture. The example of the tender stone left stone, indeed as such exalted, raised to stone-mountain to simulate the story of a village-Castle (and Bibbò has more examples in his most recent work as an artist), is equivalent to a narrative chapter of a novel. One could with these sculptures of Bibbò build a sacred-human representation, and the sacred stands for secular sacredness, that is social sense. And together the sculpture-country or more stones collected in a narrative unit gives vibrations of thin spells. The stone story of Bibbò determines a mixture of fable and denunciation of the dwelling misery to which man is often forced: whether he is an inhabitant of the suburbs of the hinterland or an inhabitant of the metropolis. These magical sculptures of Bibbò, carved from a soft stone from the hues of the lead skies, are a research and a conquest of novelty, so this sculptor should be indicated as a participant in the research anxieties that today divide the production of ritual art (even to illustrious signatures) from the more tasteful and more difficult born of vocation and urgency of research.

Nunzio Bibbò opens a chapter of his work that could lead him to determine his own sculpture starting from suggestions and representations at the limit of the popular and springing with a sort of ideological sculpture also (this “also” is necessary). This aspect of the sculpture of Bibbò goes analysed in depth, reading in the folds of these worked and illuminated stones. Yes, illuminated. In the memory, since the sculpture is something that is touched with the look but it remains inside like a liveable material reality, those holes-windows transmit lights and human life, lights that are turned on and off, that is, life is made of yes and no, of drama also.

The discourse on this essential Bibboian moment (the adjective of the name is deserved because it belongs to a sculptor of accentuated presence in the inventive poverty of these times, which also affects the avant-garde research), is just mentioned here. There are implications to be brought to a level of clarity, even polemical, which make this artist in the centrality of his youth, a pole of expectation, already positive in the results in progress.

The modern sculpture that is almost a watershed between the use of materials consistent in the sense of full-bodied solidity (marble, terracotta, bronze, wood), and solutions at the limit of random or material provocation, in terms of the fragibility of the material and unbreakability of the idea represented in this sculpture is the last, with use of cardboards, by Umberto Boccioni. Since then, the artist of the next half century and more has been subject to conditioning that raises questions about the truth of sculpture. Visual sculpture is also the impalpable intersection of beams of light projected into space. So there remains the courage to re-enter the great means of tradition but with the need to provoke new and sensitising energies for the new generations educated at different rhythms, not only musical. It appears from Nunzio Bibbò’s stone-narrators the courage of a figurativeness of sculpture that goes beyond the occasional, to stop as a result of research and poetic ability. Apart from the solidity of the craft, which is a necessary component when dealing with research operations to be documented as operations of artist’s wisdom and to avoid falls into the forger of the modern, Nunzio Bibbò shows a multiple and unitary artist’s ability, on the edge of charm and at the same time of that decompositive charge that is the indication of the research. Some of his terracotta figures, a landscape obtained from terracotta instead of stone, denounce these situations, in a positive way, which are developing in the sculpture of Nunzio Bibbò. On which the critical discourse, together with the visual consent of the sculptors, is really barely open, even though he is already a successful artist. It is a first conclusion to the advantage of an artist, this knowledge still unexplored and closed in his potential expressive Castle. As one of his Narrating Stones.

Nunzio Bibbò contemplates two essential trends with his sculpture: that at the same time settles in the abstract, as it lives in the pronouncement of the unfinished, in the whole of a single thought that is form and in a single reception that is volume; and it is figurative, which, however, its prevalence, in regard to truth, is built as if on the shreds of a flesh and on the representation of a dosed research of expression, of said and unsaid, of fact and unbuilt, of the intimate that escapes but that you feel in the fragility of the moments, and of the physiognomy that accentuates the suffering of the material that seems to escape the touches, the reliefs, the transfigurations. Yet Bibbò’s sculpture is all a total transfiguration, a resistance to language, but always in its own tongue, in a historical reception of the physicality of form. On the other hand, Bibbò still reveals a characteristic for a complex that sinks into the existence of the egg, and therefore of the roundness, of the face, of the whole body, of the volumes that blend into darkness and light, into the tormented exuberance of the figure. And it is discernible, in this analysis, the essential datum of the certainty between the unification and modulation of iconography, since, while on the one hand there is exuberance of torment precisely because of that escaping the perfection of features and gestures, on the other hand there is the high poetry of the unfinished, which does not disperse our humanism of all time, as the man of the excavation in the fragment of a remote life, and a presence in time, with the origin and becoming. This is a high achievement in the thought of the culture of Bibbò; an achievement that lives of experience and exuberance, of ancient perenniality and existence in the present day.

I arrive in Bibbò’s home-studio in the early afternoon, he is moulding various clay, perhaps for an exhibition to be organised in Benevento. For our conversation, he interrupts his work, I know he’s snot happy about it but he doesn’t point it out.

We have a coffee, talk a bit about ourselves, as always; I check if the recorder works and, without any further ado, I ask him: “What were the themes that characterised the first phase of your creative activity, between the end of the sixties and the beginning of the following decade?

At that time, I mooulded many groups, I called them “assemblies”, sometimes I inserted them into the landscape.

At that time, I also made portraits and individual figures, but I was more involved in the creation of these linked groups: the assemblies, the family, the couple…; perhaps I felt a sort of isolation, I felt the need for community and solidarity so strong in my homeland.

These “Assemblies”, therefore, did not intend to talk about the struggles and the aggregative movements that grew up in Italy at the end of the sixties?

Certainly, community values were also in the social movements of those years, but art, however, which must be able to grasp and even anticipate what is maturing in society and in people, must not try to tell about it, make pictorial or sculptural chronicle, if anything, grasp its essence.

You taught in Benevento but lived in Naples, where you spent your training period. The need for indipendence and knowledge led you to travel around Italy and to accentuate your isolation.

In 1972 I went to live in Milan: I had received a teaching assignment at the Brera Academy, in that period directed by Purificato. I accepted the transfer because Milan, together with Turin, was one of the few Italian cities that could offer an artist the possibility of growth. I only lived in Milan for a year because I had the feeling that I was in a cold environment that I could not accept; I moved again and came to Rome to teach at the Liceo Artistico. I found a more involving artistic environment. I had come to Rome to expand my knowledge, I came into contact with the generation of artists closest to me, but the paths of research soon led us to different grounds. In fact, I continued to work in an isolated and autonomous way on the field of research.

Why this artistic and personal isolation?

In the last twenty-thirty years, research in the field of figuration has been underestimated: critics and institutions have almost exclusively exploited the so-called avant-garde. The masters of figuration themselves have locked themselves away in their studies without attempting to keep open a dialectical confrontation in order to favour the encounter between different languages and contrast this unidirectional line that the fashions and currents of thought, of critics and directors of the Institutions, imposed on public artistic culture.

As a matter of fact, younger artists who decided to continue their research with neo-figurative languages have worked and work, but in isolation.

What contribution has the environment and the city of Rome made to your work?

The figures that I begin to mould in Rome are worn out and well render the suggestion that the trunks of statues exposed to the weather, with their air of decadence, provoked in me.

Do these worn-out figures become central to your research for a long time?

Somehow, I have never abandoned them, they become specific language of my work, a trait that contributes, together with others, to make my work personal. I infuse my work with the feeling of being in front of the vestige of a great culture. These are instinctive sensations, which already in describing them I feel I reduce and trivialise.

On the other hand, I consider myself an instinctive sculptor rather than a current artist or an artist who is planning a research.

In the following years some themes that will prove recurrent in your work are consolidated: the research on myth, the landscape of memory, lovers. These seem to me to be the three great topical themes of your work that, before the mid-seventies, had not emerged clearly.

I believe that making sculpture is about trying to convey one’s feelings of everyday life. I have always carried with me the presence of myth and the perennial emotion that lovers personify. It’s about my life, my anxieties, as well as the desire to belong to the group and, therefore, to the “Assemblies”. Lovers, love, disorientation, the loss of loves, the reconquering of new loves lead to the creation of those forms.

What do you find contemporary in those figures of lovers that you still sculpt, so plastic, but strongly engraved?

Love is so fundamental and capable of engraving in everyone’s life that, as long as I touch clay, I will shape a couple. Every new couple I shape will be different in terms of shape, life enriches and the shape draws the consequences, it becomes more cumbersome, marked, perhaps more effective.

The myth. In your sculpture is, in my opinion, the attempt to convey the feeling of an indefinite presence, of an impending figure, almost a divinity.

I think there is a link between these sensations of yours and my thoughts. For me it is, however, a sort of escape, of nostalgia and of finding an imperishable presence. There is the need to evoke the great cultural events, the great religiosity that art testifies, an essential way of interpreting the life of antiquity that fascinates me.

Thinking about myth, archetypes, is a vision for history that is necessary to me, it is a need that proposes me the present life, able to empty, to deprive us of any faith (not necessarily religious). If we stop to think, you see that there is no more contemplation, no poetry, no recollection, not even silence to paint a picture. There is no more the time, the desire, the conditions to visit a friend.

I think back to the past because it is the present, with its existential limits, that interests and worries me.

What were the reflections that led you to the creation of the landscape sculpture?

I got there without realising it, when it happened for the first time, I felt that I had produced a very personal work, that I had achieved a result that strengthened my expressive autonomy. Somehow, the landscape marks a moment of synthesis of my research. The working of the nenfro stone favoured this landing place. It is an Etruscan stone that can be found in the countryside of Tarquinia, it is a mythical stone that the Etruscans used for tomb structures, they also made architecture out of it. It is a very soft stone, you can work it easily, then, in the open air, it becomes very hard. I like it because, for its colour and materiality, it comes close to these mythological landscapes of mine. Stone, in fact, is the basic material for real sculpture.

Tell me about clay and terracotta?

Clay is the most important material in my work, I am a sculptor of modelling, touching and moulding clay since the early years of my childhood.

Is clay a transient material for your sculpture?

For me it is, almost always, the definitive material of my sculptures and, even when I work with stone, I keep in mind the effects that clay moulding allows.

I try to make the most of the material I use, if you pay attention to it, in some of my clay there is great attention not to point out the gesture of the moulding, the work of the hand; it is the desire to exalt the purity of the material and the clay allows it only if you enter into a deep relationship with it.

How many clays have you used?

Many: those of the ceramists of Tarquinia who offer you mixtures capable of creating very pinkish pottery, with brown veins, which refer to the colors of Etruscan vases; the Umbrian ones, different from each other, often capable of bringing you to light-colored ceramics, etc…

Few are your sculptures in wood, none in iron …

The materials are chosen according to the sensitivity and time of creation that the individual artists have.

I do not use wood because it does not allow me to create the sculpture with the immediacy that clay allows. The long processing times take me away from the possibility of passing, with immediacy, from the conception phase to the creative one. If I am not able to make the work through this rapid phase, I am left with a sensation of loss of authenticity.

The iron does not allow me to manipulate, to create those atmospheres that are characteristic of my sculpture. For me iron is a material that is an end in itself. I am linked to the Mediterranean, to the myth of the landscape, … iron does not allow me to transfer these sensations into sculpture.

The clay, with the properties it has, the color, the cuts, the surfaces, cannot be replaced with any other material.

What about bronze?

Bronze is a material that possesses historicity and, therefore, is linked to my sculpture that aspires to strong historical references.

If you had to choose on the basis, only, of artistic evaluations, which material would you use?

Clay. I would finish the work in terracotta. If I had available means, large ovens, space to work it, I would have no doubt.

What is the limit of bronze?

The indispensable phase of passage between the sculpted or modelled work and the one that comes out of the casting. Even when the intermediate and casting work is made to perfection, the sculpture loses its vitality. When I sculpt clay, I make a direct, almost spiritual gesture on the bronze I cannot act directly.

Your activity as a sculptor has long been accompanied by that of an engraver. How did you come to engraving?

I discovered engraving in Rome, in 1975-’76, while attending a printing shop in Via Germanico, by a Lebanese artist, Italo Mussa. Together with Mussa worked a man who was very sensitive to the art of engraving, Michele Ciavarella. I was very interested in the mark as engraving or acid transform and transfer it. An interest, therefore, linked to the theory of the sign and the research connected to it, the need to discover new chiaroscuro effects, with new tools for my work.

Have you also worked on lithographic plates?

Very few, I make almost only engravings, because they allow me to realise luministic structures that better correspond to the effects of the sculpture, of the masses, of the voids and of the full.

Drypoint is the technique through which you add strength and originality to your work of art?

I believe I can, through drypoint, reach the highest level of my engraving work, it allows me to create atmospheres and chiaroscuro effects that are an essential part of my sculpture.

Do you find particular difficulties in your work as an engraver?

The drypoint allows me to work on the slab in a sculptural way, as when I work on stone, in direct relationship with the material surface. The etching, instead, does not allow direct engraving, everything is left to acid, so the problems that may arise depend on this substantial imponderability of the engraving action.

Color and painting, instead, when did you discover them?

I started working with watercolor, tempera and then oil, towards the end of the 1970s, 1977-78.

I paint inside the studio, I rework the sketches made in the open air, I fantasise about them. As a painter I must be considered self-taught, at least as far as the relationship with colour is concerned.

You don’t use acrylic?

No, acrylic offers me colors that I don’t feel, I prefer the oil that I find more sensual and incisive.

Why did you feel the need to paint?

I paint because these coloured forms express, in a direct way, the chromatic variations of my research. My paintings can be considered additional keys to my sculpture. When I work with colour I paint forms, I am not a painter of atmospheres but of sculptural forms.

There was a period in which, through painting, you made abstract forms, dating back to the early eighties.

It is the painting of the years 1983-’85. In fact, I tended to cancel the known forms in order to search for primordial structuring; I came later, and again, to the recomposition of the form, enriched by this phase of research and pictorial experience.

Even the colours and chromatic timbres that characterise that phase are different from the present ones, they seem to produce nocturnal; is it possible?

The nocturnal, with shadows, with blacks, somehow leads to the fading of the form. In that period I meditated on form, I felt the need to materialise my research so that the works did not mark direct derivations from the work of others. It was, therefore, a research to which the nocturnes provided the conditions for its realization.

In your most recent painting, you spread the color with brushstrokes that, wide or thick, remain sharp in the surface and for distinct colors.

These are details of a pictorial language that emerged spontaneously in your work. This multitude of brushstrokes gives great movement to my painting and the shapes it proposes, like traces of chisel on stone.

For Nunzio it is time to go back to “touching the clay”, that material that, like no other, can tell his life, his emotions, his desires. Let’s suspend our discussion and, after having tasted another coffee, I let him model a woman dressed in a clay fabric.

From the seventies to today “the real” is back in fashion.

Bibbò is a sculptor who loves monumentality, the pleasure of astonishing with disturbing and majestic presences, almost ancient archaeological finds of architectural structures or figures. The plasticity of his works is a non-finite that alludes to the form, he gives shape and he moulds, tracing smooth surfaces or traversed by marks or spatula strokes. Vibrant in the draperies or dug by the compositional force of the sculptor, Bibbò’s works feed on the ancient Greek and Latin tradition to arrive at the culture of modernity with graffiti and collages.

If art is the language of memory and imagination, of myth and utopia, in Nunzio Bibbò’s work one can see in a tangible way how the secret, deeper and not at all unintentional centre of research is placed (or committed) to the essence of memory: it means, with this, that the act and the effort of creative imagination, for existential reasons that are rooted in the history of the artist, fold back on the past even further away, up to the myth, in order to recover the sense of the present and, immanent, not proclaimed (therefore without any rhetoric), to grasp the ideal that springs from formal reflection on the sources and origins of his cultural experience; almost the impetus from afar to throw himself into the dramatic lack of meaning of the historical present and disagree in a silence full of reproach. It is the sign of the need for ethical-social commitment, of that projectual prominence that can only be deduced from the intimate relationship that formal structures have with the world of the artist’s meanings: in short, with a desirable future for human beings, with utopia.

Essence of remembrance, I said, because of remembrance, what unifies its different contents, what remains, is not the episode, the fact or the narrative (a story), but its substantial nature, its most universal and significant value: essence, in the Aristotelian sense of “what something is for what it is”: nature, therefore, and genre-species of the thing, that is, here, in remembrance. In terms of analysis of the psyche, this essence is the archetype. The essence of memory is when it is necessary and in need to understand the present and to make that simple leap possible in the distant future. Essence, nature and species of the past event and its archetype (also Micacchi, 1988) individual and collective, which puts in place those states from which forms are produced, are generated, through an analogical conversion of the image, that is in a metaphor of the mental object, the memory. A creation, which is a regurgitation from the pockets of the mind. And we will see how this subjective dimension, mental and cultural, is expressed in a formal dimension.

Let us now consider the priorities of this analogical conversion of the essence of memory into form. Figurative art (and for the artist, here figurativeness lies in the fact that “the work still produces an image of forms”) (Bibbò, dec. 2000) is engaged in a mimetic act, which is expressed in many ways, and in Nunzio Bibbò’s work mimesis is aimed at capturing, not the phenomenal real, but the essence of the real (though still icastic, of strong images of a representational evidence), as such opposed to the accident, to the multiple happening: memory coincides in this way, not with the real, but with its archetypal absence. This means that the theme, the content, is not and cannot be narration, nor can it be a descriptive act: the entire depth of the meaning of the work, beyond the individual contents, is expressed in a composition of essentiality, to be grasped in the thing, in the single multiple things of human life: being together, love, the place of living.

So, mimesis, not of the objective real, but of the imagine-remembrance, of the memory that has become image, brought back to its archetypal phase. The artist is thus placed “outside the limits of real time”, with all the “trauma” of this displacement in another time completely unreal (non-historical)”. (Bibbò, cit.)

Ancestral, not by chance, a series of objects has been called by the artist; but the concept applies to the whole work, it runs through it. That’s why the opposition that Lukas had to bring, with regard to the analysis of the 19th century novel (The theory of the novel, 1920), between narrating and describing, comparing Zola (Nanà) and Tolstoy (Anna Karenina) on the two episodes of the horse race and the theater scene, is not valid here. Nor is it worth pointing out “popular” contents, because instead it is of lineages and peoples that are spoken about (Etruria and Sannio), which are or become universal in the artist’s imagination, and are therefore still present today, even in the social and political disintegration to which we are forced: essences of peoples, therefore; and perhaps a nostalgia for what disappears and embarrasses us. Thus we descend to the threshold, ideal, imagined, of a memory that is both knowledge and culture, but also visual reality and lived experience, of what is called the art of ancient Italy, which was born in the agglomerates of protohistoric structure, five multiples (Manduria, Spinazzola, etc..) and in the high seas cities of Lazio and which constitutes the traditions of Campania-Sannites and Falisci territories, the Villanovan culture of southern Etruria, where the clay figures of the IX-VIII centuries BC were manipulated, the first evidence of Italic plastic.

Nunzio Bibbò has great masters behind him, direct and ideal, but of all of them, as you can see, he grasps only what he needs to trace his path: Medardo Rosso’s light and compositional speed and an impressionistic negation of the defined; Brancusi’s plasticism, as we will see built on pure compositional laws and the search for “generative” forms, consonant with his essences; Giacometti’s corroding shatterings and space-mass relations, which Bibbò (and we will come back to this too) reformulates with great complexity; Moore’s archaism and the complementarity of space and forms. And the direct masters, then: Greco, with his Etruscan terracottas, and Perez and Mastroianni (whose chiaroscuro and disarticulated dynamics of structures he loves), Mazzacurati.

Formally, the “essence” is captured as a compositional form and as a plastic form, in which all the other characters of this artist’s work are summed up.

The “compositional form” here always has a double structure, that of the archetype, of which it has been said, and that of the fragment, which comes from the masters, with its own destructuring function (Tallarico, 1990), that of a worn-out figuration (Bibbò, 1993), subjected to the decadence of time, almost “residual skeleton of a great culture” (ibid.), which is a symbol, archetypal emblem, essence of our present day.

The essentiality of the “plastic form” immediately makes the object a “fragment” of the most remote history, which leads us and accompanies us until today, and a ” destructuring charge” (Selvaggi, 1988), a fragment of nature. Here we see the close link between the two structures of the compositional form: the essentiality of the archetype and the formal fragmentation, in which history and nature intersect until nature becomes the ancient, historical and archetypal source of the present drama. History and nature, not narrated, not described, but collected and captured in their original being. It has been called “nature-city” (Micacchi, cit.), “nature-castle” (Selvaggi, cit.), but also nature-figuration, nature-humanity: there is therefore no “environment”, no “landscape”, no “character” of some “tale”.

Essential plasticity, therefore, never decorative, because the emotional impulse that leads it to be has no need of filters, it is far from ornamental, scenographic plasticity. So, the material, the materials, are functions of the idea and therefore “necessary” to the plastic construction, which must be on fragile material, to be quickly worked: worked with the senses and with the feeling of the transience of memory. For this reason, the very tender nenfro and macco stones, clay and argillaceous clay, terracotta ceramics and, at the limit, bronze, for its archaic meaning.

A work that projects and retracts, that generates full and empty and, therefore, light and shadow, volume and surface, space and temporal path, and that chooses the material in relation to the colour that it has in itself or that it assumes with firing.

But what is the generative sequence of these properties of the artist’s sculptural language?

We can safely say that the work hovers over a first, fundamental dimension of spatiality, which acts as a container of meaning and to which the emotional moment of the artist leans in order to take its cue: it is the space of the lived-existential that generates the need for sculptural volume and has its root in the search for an expression of memory; it is in this kind of semantic space that emotion is reached, to remain then “fixed” in the form: “reached”, that is, in touching the essence, in probing time, to the root of the myth. It is the space of archetypal meanings, which pushes to the investigation of time and is petrified in the modulations of forms, in the articulations of a sculptural syntax. “Emotion” here does not stand for intimate folding, it does not mean autobiography tout court, even if it is on this “implicit” that authenticity is measured; emotion, generated by the hieratic, therefore sacred, grave and solemn value of its society-nature (the “assemblies” or the “ancestral” agglomerates) and of the figure-nature (the lovers, the female figures).

That first dimension, psychological, emotional, space generates the volume as an expressive tension of essences: plasticity comes from a need to get to the heart of the vision of time and “use” the material. Matter, as “optical communication” (Selvaggi, cit.), which carries with it the colour of the earths of which it is made. And the color of that matter, in its nocturnal stamps, has in itself the strength of the dissolution of form (Bibbò, cit.), and in its painful yellow-red, the strength of the “light of memory” (Selvaggi, cit.). Color-light, generated by matter, which in turn generates a second, equally fundamental dimension of spatiality: space, not as a container of an event, but as a formal necessity of the essence; not the space that creates those volumes that belong instead to the other dimension of spatiality, the semantic one, but a folded space, reflected, so to speak, addressed to the specific archetypes of memory and that is made and consolidated in “specific volume”: a syntactic space that imposes an “all-round” observation, highlighting the spatiality of the image and making explicit the syntactic temporality of the formal path of the work.

One could say that the space of the generating sense of volumes relates to the space produced in matter (with the play of fullness-empty, light-shadow, volume-surface) as a contour to the mass, as an air halo to the planet. This other space, reflected, that does not create the image but looks at the memory, space without emphasis, architectural space, not monumental, space that now looks at the painful psychic dynamic that captures the passing of memory: space of emotion. Dynamism, we said, which is not “futuristic”, not a search for “simultaneity”, but it is all impressionistic, projected in the capture of an “en plein air” of memory, driven to capture its transient character, like a sunset of Monet. Hence the impression of an unfinished, of a non-finished (Maiorino), which is nothing but a way of grasping the archetype. The dynamic datum of the work has its origin in the possibility of giving shape to the passing and transience of memory. Nature and the figure-nature become in these terms forms that loom from the past, presences made indefinite by the time that encrust them.

The vibrating but not grandiloquent spatiality makes Nunzio Bibbò a sculptor for an “analytical” verse (Selvaggi, cit.), but on the other hand he aims at the “synthesis” of the essential.

The interest in the theory of sign (Bibbò, cit.), which is discovered, for example, in the close link between the sculptures and the engravings, more than anything else (watercolours, temperas, oils), shows the awareness with which the artist has understood how the codes of effects (chiaroscuro and luministic) in the structuring of the masses are the syntactic determinants (in their temporal connections) of the symbolic values of meaning.

There is a social ethic that underlies, immanent, the work, and has no extroverted “gesture” and cannot have rhetoric: the “gesture” is introspective and, in this sense, passes substantially above the manneristic and baroque experience, of that “Neapolitan” culture that is made of eloquence, to go back instead, in the allusion to the primitive (Martini), to the fragment of an ancient Italic civilization.

First, let me say that this short writing arises while I’m structuring the catalogue, it was born from a personal necessity, that of testifying and clarifying to myself the passion with which I’ve been following for years an artist who clumps, who lives his marginality, from the circuit of advertised and glossy art, without making dramas of it, without believing to be a victim of a system (even if he would have reason to scream).

Mind you, I will not write about form, art history or any other aspect of Nunzio’s work that I leave to those who have more means than me (by the way, as I have already told my friend, in front of the work of art I am a “ruminant”, I digest news slowly).

I just feel the need to say what seems to me to emerge from an insistent, not forced, but needed by the value of the truths that his sculptures – but also certain paintings and engravings – bring out. And, in particular, of an aspect that seems to me not to emerge from reading the critical texts on his work.

If we carefully observe and investigate the subjects of Bibbò’s sculpture, we can reach many different conclusions, it all depends on our inner position, on our sensitivity, on our willingness to let ourselves be permeated by the work of art, by this specific work of art.

The work of art, and, daringly, I would say more than any other sculpture, produces, through those who intensely enjoy it, as many and different truths as those who know how to enjoy it. So, also Bibbò’s sculpture speaks about us every time we put ourselves in the condition not to underestimate its creative weight, going beyond the first visual reading.

Obviously, his sculptures speak of him, of his life. But is there, in your work, a segment that most isolates its self-assigned function, albeit unconsciously?

Bibbò, but also all those who have written about his work, say that his subjects are: Lovers, Couples, Assemblies, Myths, Landscapes.

Almost never a subject is mentioned – neither by the artist, nor by his critics – the Warrior. Why this apparent forgetfulness? Perhaps because the Warrior is considered one of the different forms through which myth is manifested? Or is it not taken into consideration because, apparently, in contradiction with the key to interpretation through which sculptures that are innervated in the materialisation of other subjects can be read?

And, again. If we think about the subjects listed a few lines ago, we realize that they deal with the representation of certain conditions of human experience or of the culture that history has handed down to us, and that Bibbò participates, albeit in an original and personal way, in a collective experience: love, the formation of social groups, the place and form of inner memory.

And the warrior? Can we talk about him with the same tone?

I don’t think so. Then what? Why does he appear in your production? What if the warrior is Bibbò?

To me no work of Nunzio speaks of him more than the inwardly available reading – on our part – of his warriors.

The warrior goes through almost every era of his research, only in the years of the selection of other people’s languages and forms we do not find the warrior. It emerges, in his work as an artist, when his expressive form materialises (professionals would say “his signifier”), as if to indicate a now mature presence, the achieved unconscious awareness of a function gained in the work of excavation within himself. All this long passage, from the phase of assimilation and selection of the visa in the Masters to the maturation of one’s own language, of one’s own expressive form, is revealed at the same time as the appearance of the warrior/Bibbò.

Since then we find him in every moment of his continuous research on different subjects, in the experimentation of different expressive techniques. For this reason, the warrior/Bibbò is there to record the steps forward, the difficulties, the changes in society that force the artist to find new registers on which to update his offer of sculptural forms suitable for a new feeling, not completely conscious, at least until the manipulation of clay makes it clear.

It is he himself – in warrior/Bibbò – who undergoes the tormenting experience of research, like the scientist/researcher who uses himself as a guinea pig.

Am I exaggerating? Perhaps, but bear with my strange sense of reasoning a little longer.

Why has the warrior created by Nunzio always attracted me with great intensity? What inner strength does he transmit to me? He speaks of me – understand me, does he speak of those who look at him? – or is it Bibbò that manifests himself to me in the clearest and most legible form?

I remember the dying warrior, leaning on an ancient column, on that non dramatic form of his, on that feeling coherent and satisfied to have done what the inherited values indicated to him.

Then the Warrior’s head, almost a skull that looks at the presumed interlocutor – each one of us – with strength, conviction; almost as if to say that the context in which he is forced to act has changed but he continues to fight coherently.

And again. Warrior with the spear, with the dagger, with the shield, in a resting position or ready to respond to an offense; but also, on horseback, with his beloved by his side greeting him.

And, each time, clay or bronze, oil or drypoint, to reiterate his testimony, his consistency with ideals of life, the awareness of knowing how to use “the weapons” that have been transmitted to him.

Then, surprisingly, the Warrior of the twenty first century, of tar, irons, salvaged materials abandoned by men, and the appearance of red vermilion on a ripped body.

Bibbò doesn’t use those materials to listen to certain art research of the second part of the second half of the twentieth century, or to ingratiate himself with certain available criticism. If he chooses a certain material that is unusual for him, not organic to the sculptor’s feelings in the seventies and nineties, it is because he feels the need for it. Which one? And why does he use it mainly, I add, with greater effectiveness precisely because of his being a Warrior?

Because, forgive me if I insist, he continues to experience a new human condition on his body. Society is becoming more and more complex for him, but also as if there were a departure from the principles, from the cultures through which the warrior/Bibbò was formed. For this reason, his body becomes dramatic, his gaze is that of an imposing powerless, his weapons are helpless, pure skeletal representation of the past. For this reason, he changes the material, as if to give life, with waste materials, to a warrior who does not see how he can affect today.

For this reason, I affirm that it is the warrior/Bibbò.

And, make no mistake, it is a denounce that concerns you. The warrior/Bibbò calls each one of us to further reflection.

While the paintings are images detached from our world, and inhabit a space of their own where we can look but not enter, the sculptures must fulfil the dual function of belonging to our living space as roommates and simultaneously reflecting it by giving it an interpretation.
Rudolf Arnheim

In his essay Sculpture, Rudolf Arnheim highlighted the “strangely dual” nature of art objects: “On the one hand, buildings are one of several species of physical objects, such as trees, mountains or water. On the other, they are images of the world of which they are part. A similar double reality is also inherent in the works of sculpture. They too are not only images but objects among objects, and this creates a spontaneous intimacy with things of nature, and with human bodies in particular”. In the same text, the scholar also stresses the absence, in sculpture, of the “essential trait of life, that is, movement”. However, Arnheim argues, this timeless immobility should not be interpreted as an inconvenience. Like painting, plastic extracts from the sphere of experience frozen fragments of experience, appreciated for their capacity for illumination and their enduring significance, that is, it connects past and future through a “pregnant presence and provides us with a series of stable images through which we can orient ourselves in space as we navigate following the current of proteiform events”.

Nunzio Bibbò’s sculptures do not escape these general rules.

He moves from the lexicon of a tradition tenaciously founded on a modeling that does not give up experimentation, even the most daring, to continuously rework with personal inventions, the great themes of all time: man, myth, nature, history.

There is in him a continuity, a coherence, almost an unconscious need to confirm, highlight and make coincide, in the multiplicity of solutions reached, the constant cultural reasons of his work and certain latent suggestions of clear classical matrix.

His depictions seem to collect and recover a stored sense, a network of emotional dispositions that can be translated, with the mediation of the trade, into the possibility of language.

Craft and tradition, although strictly functional to the representation of the most intimate existential tensions inherent in human nature, are therefore two of the elements that substantiate Bibbò’s research, a sculptor who, without eluding the treatment of today, tackles and analyses contemporary man by including him symbolically in a timeless dimension that expresses itself, as the philosopher Alberto Gianquinto has punctually observed, through a mimetic act aimed at grasping not the phenomenal real but the essence of it, the sedimentation of experience drawn from memory.

This is an artist who has therefore put before the manual operation a severe reconnaissance aimed at finding that particular common denominator capable of expressing the most “human constants” that disregards any coordination of time and place.

From this process of excavation derives the distinctly evocative force and the same topicality of Bibbò’s works, sculptures that, while not giving much to narrativity, satisfy a precise descriptive need brought to an intersubjective level.

Given these premises, the use and initial predilection for clay, and by extension of bronze, have not been emerging only as an adherence to an ancient technical tradition inherited from the artist’s place of origin, Castelvetere nel Sannio, but as a logical and thoughtful election of the material most suited to his own particular expressive needs. The indefinite evocation of the ancient also makes it possible to keep these artefacts away from any fall of vernacular nature, from the always lurking risks of popular declination. And this almost in spite of a communication that in Bibbò sometimes seems to assume the connotation of intimate confession, whispered, filtered by an unstable control that often yields to the instinctive and visceral gesture, coming from intuition, which frees him from the most cumbersome academic precepts and allows him to deny the measured rhythms and the measured compositional balances that sometimes manifest themselves with architectural firmness.

The clay, in fact, very sensitive to every minimum pressure of the thumb, therefore to the light, with its surrender to the artist’s repentance, retouching and execution open to a thousand variations in the course of work, together with the symbolic-evocative potential inherent in the material itself, naturally allows itself, contrary to the stone, to the rapid, instinctive gestures and humoral changes of the creator.

Bibbò exploits and exalts the properties of clay to the maximum degree, he works it indifferently by adding and subtracting material without laziness, without concealing, or rather almost highlighting, as if by a sort of intimate and secret respect, the reaction to the clean cut of the thread, to the decisive and soft pressure of the fingers, to the dry and dramatically scratching blow of the splint.

Here, in the flashing of the high and tense forehead of a Daphne superbly erected on a pedestal, in the leap of a kidnapped Europe, in the eternal intimacy of a couple of lovers or even in the female figures with wide hips full of passion for life, you will always find a sense of melancholic nostalgia for a mythical past hopelessly lost. It is these solid figures, with powerful and regal profiles, that almost in spite of the high register of myth manage to reconcile powerful silhouettes and dramatic tensions that recall an archaic peasant civilization, the golden age.

For some time now, remaining faithful to the themes addressed, the artist’s attention has shifted to the expressive possibilities afforded by a material far removed from the plastic tradition: tar. And if it is true that the sculptures have the same nature as their materials and draw real symbolic connotations from them, it is easy to deduce how with this cycle of works Bibbò has given vent to all his disenchanted pessimism by interpreting his own time in the light of a severe and unquestionable judgment that almost led him to deny the sunny Mediterranean, of his past research.

Disturbing and ghostly, these statues present themselves to the eye threatening and seductive, almost like fallen angels, hellish and damned creatures who have lost divine favour. They are anthropomorphic ruins with a proud and austere bearing, suggestive remnants of a dignity that was very high, monumental cocoons from which the vital breath has vanished leaving deep lacerations and empty cavities. “They are the image of the man of today emptied of his essence, of his ideals, of his vitality”, the author will say.

Among the sources of the sculptor, like Medardo Rosso, from whom the artist seems to have drawn the modern modulation of light and the fresh, virtuous summarization of execution, we can find other fundamental figures such as Martini, Marini, Manzù, Greco, but also, the ancient Middle-Italian sculpture and the Etruscan-Roman one, especially the one that precedes the arrival of the classical canon and succeeds to its crisis. These are the models that inspired the lively colourism and the majestic, hieratic monumentality of Landscapes, pairs of Lovers, warriors. A distinctly iconic monumentality that is solely dependent on the solemn elegance of the postures and on the strength of the implantation and impact of the plastic synthesis achieved rather than on the dimensional evidence of these sculptures that give little or nothing to the definition of the contextualizing detail.

Traced by deep, impenetrable undercuts in which light, almost frightened, does not break in, these works impose on the viewer a physical movement, around the artefact, and a purely mental one, to frame the work in a defined space and time.

But it is precisely through the inevitable failure of such an approach, in the sophisticated omission of any revealing trace, that these sculptures manage to communicate the centrality of meaning of certain human, eternal unknowns, such as the uncertainty of one’s destiny or the insoluble mystery that envelops and hides the profound essence of existence; questions that have always accompanied man’s journey and transience.

Conversation with Nunzio Bibbò

Curated by Andrea Romoli Barberini

The studio of the sculptor Nunzio Bibbò is located in Rome, on Via Casilina, in one of those suburbs where the noise of the groups of kids mixes with the hum of modified scooters and domestic noises slipping in the street from the windows of many dormitory buildings.

Here it is still possible to breathe some of the quiet and dramatically lazy atmosphere that Pasolini used to like so much, even if today the faces and voices that cross here are different from those of yesterday: less southern dialects and Mediterranean somatic traits, more Slavic, Asian, African languages.

Compared to thirty years ago, the landscape has also changed: the forests of antennas that grew like weeds on the roofs have disappeared and the buildings now seem to be infested by the white bubbles and spires of the satellite dishes.

In the belly of one of these buildings, whose entrance is hard to find for those who arrive on foot, through the maze of streets and lanes leading to cellars and warehouses, you reach an enormous embankment. The tenants of the building have transformed it into a delightful garden with flowerbeds, trees, benches and swings for their little ones to play safely from the dangers of the world outside.

Here works Nunzio Bibbò, the artist who comes from the earth, as he likes to repeat, and who perhaps because of his origins did not want to give up the coolness of a pergola of strawberry grapes that wraps all around his big house-studio in a green embrace.

His welcome is warm and sincere, like an authentic southern man.

At the beginning of the street there is a sign with the words: “Nunzio Bibbò, sculptor”. It seems almost a polemical way to claim one’s right to exist…

“Today, the way things are in the art world, the meaning of that sign may seem very polemical. I actually put it up when, from the studio I had in Piazza Vittorio, I moved here. More than anything else I wanted to signal my presence and facilitate the arrival of friends and collectors who came to visit me”.

And how did things get in the art world?

“Not well. There is less and less interest from the media. The artist, I mean the visual artist, is increasingly marginalised. If you ask a 20-year-old what he means by the word artist, he’ll answer: singer, actor. On the other hand, this is the message that passes through television, radio, newspapers. It is the usual blackmail for which what is excluded from the media is at the same time excluded from society. But every cloud has a silver lining, and paradoxically, for some artists, and I am one of them, this marginalisation has somehow become a research topic on which to reflect and work”.

In what way?

“Through the analysis of certain epochal phenomena such as the impact of the media on society, on people. The very superficiality of the messages conveyed is of great interest to me. It is enough to make this preliminary reflection to have some very useful coordinates of investigation. And take note that these observations are all the more important the more they can be translated into forms. I want to say that if today the model figure has an ambiguous plastic solidity, because you can see that inside it is absolutely empty, this formal variant has come to me by plastically translating certain television suggestions and their effects on society. In other words, art can develop and evolve also feeding on the indifference that is given to it”.

Obviously, these preliminary reflections also affect the choice of materials for the realisation of the work.

“Certainly yes”.

After so much work with clay, bronze, stone, how did you arrive at the tar?

“I can tell you that I felt the need to get out of a certain kind of doing things, out of a certain modelling of the sculpture. I used traditional materials for decades then, I would say almost out of a need for content, I started looking for new solutions. When I talk about content, I’m referring to the fact that we basically live in a world of tar and so I thought it was interesting to use this material that has become a bit of a symbol of our times even though it has always existed. Compared to man, tar today is a bit like clay yesterday. Then, as I was telling you, the need to represent the emptying of the individual and the figure influenced a lot. I say figure because in these works there remains a clear iconic value, even if perhaps certain critical definitions such as figuration or abstraction are in this case out of place because my tar sculptures are actually ghosts”.

This choice seems to me to be in line with some of your works made in the seventies with rags, plastics and other materials…

“It’s true. The design approach also has many points in common with those experiences. Someone naively interpreted this way of working based on experimentation as a moment of minor importance, but you have to be careful and avoid the easy misunderstandings: working with tar, or with rags as I did thirty years ago doesn’t mean to betray modeling at all. I mean that with these materials, apparently extra-sculptural, it doesn’t change much. Instead of modelling clay, now, with different techniques, I mould other materials. What’s the problem? What fascinates me about tar is the flexibility, the resistance, the colour, the light sensitivity of its surface and the possibility of intervening with fire. I discovered it almost by chance after I started modelling clay figures that I built quickly, almost crumpling clay sheets. The clay, however, could not withstand its own weight and always collapsed on itself without allowing me to work as I would have liked on certain cavities, on certain movements of light inside the work. So, I had to look for valid alternatives”.

In the latest sculptures, however, there is a more massive use of colour.

“colour has always been a component of my work, even if in the form of chiaroscuro variety. Now, instead, beyond the plastic games that I need for the modulation of light, I dedicate myself a lot also to the surface of the work, not only to the volume. I need colour to accentuate certain effects. Then I have to say that tar absorbs the colour well, it gives it a spontaneous fantasy”.

From a technical point of view, what are the difficulties of tar modelling?

“There are several. Earlier I mentioned some advantages, but in reality it is not an easy material. You know, sometimes it’s the same difficulty as materials, the natural resistance that the material opposes to the hand of those who work on it that saves the work from the dangers of laziness, of the too finished, of manner.

Tar, however, serves me as a final amalgam that contains in itself different materials such as iron reinforcements, rags, found objects and other elements of recovery”.

In some works, I am thinking for example of the Abduction of Europa, the profile of the work is as if contradicted by some metal wires that may seem functional to balance and stability…

“No, that’s not what this is about. Without those wires, the sculpture would keep its balance intact. I realised that these threads rather than imprison the movement, as I originally thought, actually expand it. It was a surprise to me too. It’s a matter of composition, volume and space.

You had already made something similar in the mid-seventies with the “Cages” series.

“It’s true, at least from a compositional point of view, there are many similarities with the Cages. But it has to be said that in that case the reference to the myth was non-existent.

Even in the variety of the investigations you dealt with, throughout your entire activity you have stayed true to certain themes such as the warrior, the woman, the ancestral landscape. What meanings do you attribute to these subjects?

“There are themes that stay with you for the rest of your life because they remain unsolvable and have a variety of meanings that change according to situations, moods. It is difficult to explain. The important thing is not to fall into repetition: you can repeat a theme endlessly, think of Morandi, but woe betide you if you repeat the solution. The warrior I realise has nothing to do with war. He is the warrior of time, who fights for knowledge. He is the discoverer of time, therefore he embodies the intelligence of a man who is aware of his own limits, of his own end but who despite everything does not give up improving himself. That’s what my warrior wants to be. In some cases, I represent him with more anguished and suffered forms, other times he seems more threatening. The meaning I attribute to woman, to femininity, is different. For me it is the pillar, the indispensable premise of man. The woman is the mother, the mother earth. And even when I do landscapes, I think of the woman because the earth is the mother of everything. Among these themes, as you can see, there are very close and not at all random links.

The monumentality, which in these works seems to have the value of the conscious heritage of a classical culture reinterpreted in strongly transfigured forms, remains one of the most evident characteristics of your sculptures…

“Maybe, it depends on what kind of monumentality you mean. You refer to classical culture and, talking about my work, you’re not wrong. I believe, however, that it is a fact linked to memory, to love for my land, history, traditions, which are my history, my traditions, my cultural identity. These works are not unrelated to the desire to cling and ideally reconnect to the ancient dream of classicism, a classicism to which I am very attached because it allows me to read the modern and look at today with a watchful eye. In a word: critically”.

The lovers of iron and fire of Bibbò the “warrior”

It is difficult to find in the contemporary landscape a sculptor whose works release such a powerful force as those of Nunzio Bibbò and express the fear, anguish and terror that are taking hold of the collective consciousness in a historical moment so full of threatening unknowns and apocalyptic omens. The figures in his large and medium sized sculptures, made of iron, tar, salvaged objects and interventions with colour, seem to come out of a battlefield in a break of hostilities, or from a hellish workshop. It would seem that he has put his symbolic expressive world to iron and fire, as the “warlords of war” are doing with the real world. His sculptures recall the tars and burnings of Burri, the great novator of Italian art. The Umbrian Master had been a good prophet in predicting, with his cycle, the repetition of the goyish sleep of reason that generates monsters. The world today is populated by monsters no less than the darkest period of the Middle Ages. The Futurists proclaimed the war “hygiene of the world”, but the war is transformed into the “plague of the world”, overcome as a carrier of catastrophes only by terrorism. Nunzio Bibbò, on the other hand, is characterised by a violent expressionism, in which iron regurgitates “with blood”, though certainly experienced on a formal level. In addition to Burri, his sculptures evoke wooden combustion, portraits of ancient Romans or Etruscans, the terrifying figures of Marino Marini, who was also an excellent painter, and the grotesque multi-material monsters of the late Enrico Baj.

But in contrast with this warlike and bloody world, Nunzio Bibbò creates works in bronze, polychrome terracotta and nenfro stones inspired by ancestral landscapes, towers and monuments, couples of lovers, ladies and knights, romantic warriors, mythical characters, evoking a meta-historical universe always lost but always reborn, especially when reality takes on its terrifying aspect again.

Costanzo Costantini

“Warriors of Time”        

Of the master Nunzio Bibbò

The exhibition of the “Vittoriano” wants to present the work carried out in the last ten years and, precisely, the tar sculptures, says the master Nunzio Bibbò: “Why the tar? Because it’s a material of our days, deleterious, temporary, flat material; and anyway, in my case, useful to the content of my theme: “The warrior”. Every human being is a warrior of his own existence. The human race that invented the story is a very strong warrior against the unknown of time, a warrior of augurs of a distant, unknown and threatening future. This is the idea, the content of my work. I hope that the work of sculpture can well convey this message.

Pa. Pel.

Sculptures by Nunzio Bibbò in the Vittoriano complex

In his works in clay, bronze and stone the forms, in the absence of defined contours, despite the solidity and overwhelming physicality and expressive capacity seem to lose their autonomy in space to open up to the mobility of the air, in the “tars”, instead in the manner of collage and juxtaposition of material (tar, iron), vivacity of modern artistic experiences because at the same time free from aesthetic conditioning and subject to a rigorous module of layout and choice of “materials” and which is appreciated as one of the most interesting and new proposals to be seen in the contemporary art scene. Andrea Romoli Barberini, curator of the exhibition, writes that Nunzio Bibbò “moves from the lexicon of a tradition tenaciously founded on a modeling that does not renounce experimentation, even the most daring, to continuously rework with personal inventions, the great themes of all time: man, myth, nature, history”.

Vittorio Esposito

Bibbò at the Golden Branch

Nunzio Bibbò is in fact a sculptor/painter who constantly carries with him the marks of the artist that researches in solitude. He also sculpts when he creates his mixed media paintings, populated by tied and embraced bodies, similar to shadows moving in the light, while in the sculptures – bronze and polychrome terracotta – the shapes, the figures with their faces with undefined features slowly emerge from the material (“Exodus”), ready to be swallowed up again. Mixing reality and myth, the artist confronts himself with the contemporary humus, analyses it in depth and places it symbolically in a timeless dimension, where he can highlight its essence.

Tiziana Tricarico

The tars of Nunzio Bibbò

“Although perhaps – as he himself says of his work – certain critical definitions such as figuration or abstraction are in this case misplaced, because my tar sculptures are actually ghosts”

The Samnite artist will exhibit his works, from January 22nd, in the rooms of the Rocca dei Rettori.

Enza Annunziato

From the Vittoriano complex in Rome to the Rocca dei Rettori in Benevento, Nunzio Bibbò sannita DOC proposes his sculpture exhibition entitled “Terrecotte e tars” for the day January 22, which will remain open until February 22. The exhibition has been organized and wanted by the provincial council of culture.

Nunzio Bibbo’ born in Castelvetere in Val Fortore, lives and works in Rome, he preserves in his creations his Samnite experience ‘rewriting it’ but in the immediacy of the present.

The title already implies his artistic path that starts from a traditional moment to evolve into shapes and colors of modernity. This also happens in the material that the artist uses to create his works.

After having used classical materials such as clay for a long time, he felt the need for a renewal also in the material exterior of his creations. tar is the new landing place that fascinates Bibbo’s imagination because it feels supple, sensitive, ductile, resistant.

In short, it has all the intimate characteristics of the Samnite artist, those of being anchored to reality without neglecting the brilliant imagination of the product, absorbing the stimuli of everyday life to superimpose them on the memory of the native places.

At the beginning of his career Nunzio Bibbo’ had left little room for color, playing above all on chiaroscuro shades. Today instead the strong and strident chromaticism allows him to give incisiveness to the artistic meaning of the work.

Among his most important themes we find the family and the warrior. It would seem to be a contradiction but Nunzio Bibbo’ immediately points out that ‘his’ warrior does not love war but rather is fighting for the affirmation of love. And this in fact is the dominant theme of Bibbo’s works.

Love is the very foundation of life both when there is the sadness of abandonment, the yearning of loss, and when there is the triumph of closeness, of the mystical poetry of adoration.

For Nunzio Bibbo’ sculpture becomes the rule of life, as it allows him to extrinsicate his feelings without being misunderstood but… only interpreted artistically. And in the game of cross-references, of sensitive discoveries, of silent archetypes, the myth of creation is a source of virtuous inspiration, magically linked to the earth as a fragment of memories and nostalgia, and stretched forward, as an inscrutable search for tomorrow.

The threads that we find, almost inevitable of his ‘warriors’ do not represent ‘cages’ of closure, but only close ties with the present.

Nunzio Bibbo’ an attentive and sensitive artist does not let himself be captured by the easy temptations of fashion, but tries, through a clean and incisive sculptural language, to interpret the chaos of modern civilization trying to carve out a space of dream and fantastic desire.

Drawings and graphics in the “Kontrast” Gallery

In the “Contrast” Gallery are exhibited drawings and engravings by the famous Italian sculptor Nunzio Bibbò. He was represented in 1980 in the Salon of the Union of Bulgarian Painters in Via Scipka ,6 and in 2011, in the Gallery of Foreign Art, with retrospective exhibitions of sculpture, drawings and graphics. It is no coincidence that his sculptures are part of the exhibition of the artistic panorama of the 20th century at the National Art Gallery of Sofia (Kvadrat 500).

Who is actually Nunzio Bibbò who passed away three years ago (2014), a man of strong and short figure, always with his not indifferent hair, emotional and expansive personality, strong interest for the social, his bond with Bulgaria, with his many friends and choosing the Bulgarian Ekaterina Bibbò as his other half for the last decades of his life?

Fascinated by Arturo Martini and Medardo Rosso, Nunzio thought that without mysticism one cannot make art, because it would take away his charisma. The famous Italian critic Cesare Zavattini, on the occasion of his exhibition in Arezzo in 1979, writes: “…his style, however, is not made schematically: because under those languages one discovers the flame, the cry of Gemito , which is the dramatic appeal that comes from the southern populations of which Bibbò is undoubtedly one of the highest interpreters of today” Nunzio is a pupil of Emilio Greco – representative of classicism in modern sculpture, Augusto Perez, Umberto Mastroianni, with his abstractionism and Marino Mazzacurati, and his figuration.

The artistic debut of Nunzio Bibbò in Bulgaria began in 1980, following the exhibition of the painter Ennio Calabria, known for his expressiveness and social commitment. Nunzio brings with him the Italian Mediterranean breeze, the world of rural tradition, rich in solidarity, and the anachronisms typical of his place of origin (Castelvetere, in the Alto Sannio, in the province of Benevento). A famous place with its “terracottari” – artisans of the clay tradition, its favourite material. Nunzio is part of an atmosphere, of a timeless time, typical of this place that becomes mythical after demythologising it. Bearer of the tradition of his land, he bore the signs of that archaic world, fascinating for its marked authenticity. His architectural landscapes, in paintings and graphics, with houses and stone walls, alternating with narrow alleys, were bearers of a historical, ancestral memory. The same can be said of his stone landscapes, which are at one with nature and have something primordial. In this way the ephemeral and dense form intertwines with the certainty of an authentic and original way, and the mystical wonder of creation recalls its supremacy, forgotten by man exalted by technological progress. These landscapes that are born from the earth as archetypal evidence, full of life, fruit of the authentic modelling of history. The same sentiment conveys the groups gathered together to face adversities in life. If we look at the characters drawn and sculpted, they are low, gloomy, with round heads, big eyes and thin lips, their ancient archetype has nothing in common with the ancient Roman, Greek, Norman or any other ancient people who crossed that territory. All this directs us towards the ancient Italic figures, while the series of paintings and graphics of female figures in simple dress remind us of contemporary virgin marys with their sign and spirituality.

During the ’70s – ’80s Nunzio stayed in a basement in Piazza Vittorio, near Termini station and the church of Santa Maria Maggiore. The space was reminiscent of the ancient catacombs and, after all, he could live and work there. The narrow corridors filled with terracotta, fragments of sculpture and materials of all kinds, necessary for work, scattered everywhere; the only space to live in was an iron bed, a small table and a few accessories for making tea or coffee. You could always enjoy a good pizza in one of the many trattorias and pizzerias around the square. Right here, in this catacomb some of the most interesting ideas and projects realised by Nunzio were born, for example the doors of the Cathedral of Reggio Calabria realised later (1988) and part of the drawings and graphics presented in the “Contrast” Gallery in Sofia.

In recent years Nunzio has dedicated part of his time to the development and realisation of the project of the artistic group “Il Grido”. The idea was born to bring together artists of different generations (ignoring the generational differences) united by the need to be listened to by society, looking for common points in artistic research. The group was composed by the painter Giovanni Battista Cuocolo, the sculptors Nino Pollini, Leandro Lottici and Aulo Pedicini and the photographer Nico Marziali. The Bulgarian artists Liubomir Dobrev, Stanislav Pamukschiev, Ivo Hadjimischev (photographer), Vladimir Schukisch , the Dutch artists Marko Markov (his Bulgarian friend of Dutch adoption) and Antony Den Rider were also to join the group. The curators were to be Emanuela Gregori and Axinia Džurova.

The heterogeneity of the group is due to the common research of artists of different generations, united by the same need to “make” art born taking into account the isolation of modern man. The organisation of such an artistic group required great effort, considering the loneliness in which modernity, its frenetic times, pushes all men, including artists. Its manifesto announced everyone’s need to make their voice heard, opening up to others and enriching themselves through the exchange of ideas and opinions.

At the end of the 1980s, Nunzio changed his residence and moved to one of the densely built neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Rome, creating an atmosphere in which Pasolini could build the plot of a new film. I would call it a neo-Pasolini atmosphere, with the apparent laziness of the neighborhood, the noises of the new inhabitants of these new urban landscapes filtered through the windows. Now the people of the south are slowly being replaced by new tenants from Asian, African, Eastern European and Slavic countries.

The appeal and the idea of the group “Il Grido” was produced in the new studio of Nunzio, in via Casilina, whose leader and inspirer was Nunzio Bibbò. His studio is on the ground floor, in the middle of a large park in the shape of a spiral, the refuge of a myriad of garages, and which then had many flowers, gardens and space for children who, unlike our generations, played there until late at night inventing the most fun games, living a carefree childhood, unaware of how happy he was.

Nunzio’s big house / studio, with not so much light, was however a cozy refuge for many travelers of our artistic environments that passed, crossed and surpassed Italy. The interior, as it has always been for Nunzio, was simple but comfortable, also for the overnight stay of those who, among colleagues, were left without protection at home, and to organise meetings and discuss ideas.

In this large studio Nunzio created the drawings and pastels of beautiful female figures, with subtle eroticism, like the poetry of love. Some of them are exhibited in the “Contrast” gallery. Gathered together with the graphics they reveal what is happening around us, together with the continuous change in the world of ideas and life in general, that the terracottas and tar sculptures seem to express all this clearly. Just like the warriors who try to defend themselves in vain from the invasion, to the bone marrow, of a simplified world. Externally they are knights endowed with armour, inside these heroes are empty – emptied of content, coloured tar and salvaged materials reaching their Mediterranean expressiveness and exalting the rationalised dialogue and plasticity of the new existence.

Nunzio Bibbò, with the drawings and graphics exhibited in the “Contrast” gallery, has gone through life and art with his active testimony of his time and the passion of a tireless researcher who introduces new expressive means with his art. He discovered the expressive power of colour in sculpture and made it a protagonist in his work. During my last visit to Nunzio’s studio, who passed away on 19 October 2014, in the lower floor of the studio his warriors and knights appeared as hieratic figures and eternal guardians of human memory and dignity. They recall the dialogue that continues between today’s world and mythological expression.

In the midst of his favourite subjects – landscapes, couples, women and groups -, the warrior appeared to me, not the winning one in battles, but the warrior of our millennium of waste materials, iron, tar and wounded body, a powerless and unarmed warrior, the warrior unable to change the processes of time. The warrior of Bibbò, in his failed experience, invites us to reflect on the need to equip ourselves with a new defender, or a new savior, but not created by our waste. Indeed, this is the message of the exhibition, “Il Grido” of Bibbò, which resonates after him and is still relevant today.

With Nunzio Bibbò’s exhibition in the gallery “Contrast”, we want to remember this message, that the main mission of art is to deal with the meaning of life.

Axinia Džurova

I met him through his work and his voice, that of the interview preserved at the Central Institute for Sound and Audiovisual Rome. From his voice came to me a not peremptory but humble man who lives art as “something sacred, something mysterious”. On the wave of the emotions I have procured, I will make an attempt: to penetrate, through my own, into his inner world.

The predominant feeling in front of most of his production is that of a strong nostalgia: a nostalgia due to the distance from places, people, ideals. A passion for what has been, for what could have been.

I think of ancestral landscapes and I necessarily imagine metaphysical places, sacred yes but also devoid of life, of men who inhabit them, therefore silent and somehow disturbing. They are objects that refer to the artist’s places of origin, but at the same time they never materialise into something truly familiar, real, human, seen or visible to my eyes.

I don’t think there is a place that resembles them. There is the idealisation in between, that idealisation that is typical of memory. An idealisation that makes the past pleasant, a cradle in which to take refuge.

The same feeling I have in the assemblies, in which, it is true, men are there, and in abundance. But these men are always seen in the distance, as a compact group, in which I am almost certain the artist can never be found. Nunzio himself, in the above-mentioned interview, talking about assemblies, refers to a feeling of isolation, to a need to belong to the group, whatever it may be, from which the artist seems to be excluded, no matter what the reason.

The same applies to the “mythical” subjects in which, although there is a clear reference to classical forms, what emerges above all is the reference to an ancient ideal of life, based on a firm faith: in moral values, in God, understood as an otherworldly entity to which one can blindly entrust oneself. It is the need, above all emotional, to call to mind better times, both for the artist and for Man. It is not a mere formal re-proposal of a canon, of a certain type of figuration: it is the need to recall purity. Purity in form as in thought, free from spiritual wavering.

The only theme devoid of nostalgia is that of love.

Love is the woman, but above all it is the couple: it is the body that embraces and kisses.

Love is comforting, it is a beacon in the dark, the only firm knot.

It is redemption, the possibility of redemption.

Reasoning, instead, about Nunzio’s favourite material, I understood how his art is not sculptural but plastic: clay implies not so much the possibility of reshaping the form until the end of the creative act (an important but in my opinion not fundamental element) but rather the opportunity to be constantly in contact with the material to be shaped.

Still need of contact, contact with a “familiar” material because it is used in its native places, symbol of its roots.

Nunzio’s art is pure art, far from the creativity, often mystifying, of his time. When I imagine Nunzio, I imagine a man whose story, whose feelings, are fully expressed in his forms. It is the only task of the contemporary artist: to bring back his own existence, to make his inner world usable, passionately hoping that the viewer can find himself in it.

that warrior

The warrior is solitary; in this sense he is opposed to the figures of the assemblies, to the community. If in the groups, as I said before, I find it hard to believe that the artist is included, in the warrior instead I see Nunzio fully. There is a sort of Transfert. The identification is closely connected to the Ancient, to the “mythical” figure of the warrior, virtuous and valiant in battle. But it is necessary to contextualise the choice of the subject in the contemporaneity and therefore, the warrior can only represent Nuncio.

An artist like Nunzio is a warrior above all for the obstinate need to cling to the past, to the Mother Earth, to man’s purest feelings, and to figuration, almost archaic today.

The warrior is reduced to the bone, he is skinny, uncut: he is a skull to all intents and purposes.

The warrior is mortiferous. It is a contradiction: the main talent of a fighter should be his physical strength, totally absent in this case. I now wonder whether this warrior is therefore defeated, perhaps even already dead, or whether he is still able to defend himself, despite his appearance. What strength crushes him? Hard to say. But looking at him, a famous phrase by Francis Bacon comes to mind:

We are potential carcasses.

It’s the condition of men. And that’s what I see in this head. It’s only a matter of time before each one of us knows Death. And it is precisely time that is represented. Time not unitary, but dilated. Time as a moulder: it is a wave that strikes the face of the warrior, starting from the right, where his action becomes more evident and attacks in a less effective way the left part of the face, in which I still find human forms, more fleshy. A deadly head, close precisely to Baconian dysmorphism, to that need to alter reality, or rather to reveal it, perhaps making art harder but definitely more truthful.

that couple

The couple: the contours fade, not definable; forms that invite interpretation. It rotates around and the sculpture offers itself in multiple outlets and interpretative solutions: the first impression is that the couple is standing, still, the protagonists united in the momentum towards the other; then it becomes dynamic, in movement, as if announcing other possible futures.

Fusion of bodies, the first; heads that unite in an indefinite and unitary form, an intellectual vision of love: union of minds before bodies. The reference can be to Magritte’s lovers. But, unlike the surrealist work where the couple lives in incommunicability and alienation, the imaginary “cloth” that Nunzio puts on the lovers’ faces, expresses intimacy, union and isolation from the outside world. So, election of souls: “Love”.

So, he evolves, with a greater sense of movement, confident in proceeding. In which direction? Together. A frank, obstinate proceeding. The legs are stretched in the tension of a decisive step, without uncertainties or fears, in the knowledge that whatever the destiny, it will be together.

The two readings offered by the form do not cancel each other out, they coexist harmoniously, leaving the interlocutor with the determination of a sweetly contemplative and at the same time firm, militant sentiment.

This text by Luigi Martini was composed for the retrospective exhibition of the work of Nunzio Bibbò. The title given to the exhibition is: “Una musica e un canto già scolpiti” (“A music and a song already sculpted”), it was set up in the premises of “4changing”, in Rome, in 1917.

Indeed, the title can suggest which point of observation the author of the text and the curator – the young art historian Giulia Gaibisso was a precious collaborator – chose when he imagined the exhibition.

Conceived by themes, the setting up of the exhibition was envisioned as a dialogue between music, poetry and Bibbò’s work. The themes proposed by the works were in fact accompanied by a soundtrack composed by pieces of classical music and by poetic fragments functional to expand suggestions in the visitor, so that he could immerse himself in the reading of the work of art.

Martini intentionally excluded a reading as a critic or art historian, in order to move on grounds that were close to poetic suggestions and to the relationship that, in his comprehension, exists between the arts.

It is an act of professed esteem, testimony of the love that the author has for the artistic work produced by Nunzio, so much so that, if he had not been able to elaborate an original and innovative idea in the planning and setting up of the exhibition, he would have given up curating it.

The text is an imaginary dialogue with Nunzio – a friend who had passed away three years earlier – and offers the possibility to better understand the project.

[1] We would like to thank the company 4changing and the publishing house Cibele for having granted the possibility to publish the text.

For you and for your work I decided to break a solemn commitment, made with myself ten years ago, not to curate other exhibitions.

The proposal came from Silvia and Lucio – yes, I know you don’t know them – they want to inaugurate the venue of their cultural activities with one of your personal exhibitions. I could say no after, to remind you, Ennio convinced me to talk about you even in church, where I only tried to hold back the crying?

I started working on the archives of your works – the disorder you left is absolute, and you don’t know how many times you made me imprecate -, Stefano helped me – I know, you don’t know him either -, photographing them all, and Ekaterina is filing and ordering them.

At the same time we started working on the exhibition, I chose Giulia to curate it with me – you don’t know her, she’s 23, but I’m sure you would be happy – and I asked Andrea – who you also don’t know (I’m realising that you don’t know anyone!) – to work with us on the editing videos, while Luciano “cleaned” your voice – needless to add that he doesn’t know you either – and Francesco offered his contribution in the selection of the poems – you’ve never met him but he’s from Campania, like you -.

And this is only the beginning. You don’t know how many people – stranger to you – are working on the exhibition – Paolo, for example, is going crazy to follow me in working on the catalog -, all just for passion.

The exhibition is a work in progress – I know, you’ve never heard me say such a thing, but now you’ll understand why – in the last month two particular artists – Oriana and Salvatore – have joined the work (in progression, as you can see) – that will create a technological situation, inside the exhibition space, that will produce a virtual sculpture with the emotions, sensitivity and attention that visitors will show towards your works.

What do you think? Would you ever have thought that your sculptures – but also the paintings and engravings – could induce to create – by measuring themselves – new works of yours? That clay and new technologies could interface to still create?

Of course, we have – Giulia and I – read and reread the texts that have been written on your plastic forms, listened to the conversation we had in 1993, looked at hundreds and hundreds of works: all to unravel the puzzle that, always, an authentic artist leaves to those who will meet him with desire.

And, since you induced me to break that commitment, we said to ourselves: How can we offer Nunzio’s work so that it can be “lived”? How can we make people listen to and grasp that “core of originality” that the true artist possesses? What is the “your soul” that you grant? Can we succeed where so many others, much more gifted, have not been able? Finally, is it possible to give you an exhibition that surprises you?

Also because, you are not simple, you are rude and archaic, you greet your friends by brushing them with your skull, rather than with your lips; an authentic contemporary. It is no coincidence that your sculpture feeds on earth, water and fire, and becomes an archaeological find in life, full of life.

I understand that you find us a little ambitious, it’s true, but you don’t work with passion differently. So we began to caress your sculptures with our eyes, with our hands the surfaces, and inside of us we raised sounds and harmonies, we composed different music and symphonies, depending on the materials and themes. Unable to translate them into sheet music to be orchestrated, we said to ourselves that everyone could find them in their own sensibility, as long as they put themselves in the condition to listen to them, your sculptures.

We had the perception that your fingers run on the clay keyboard, deform it with stenght, almost to lash it, to impress the strongest notes, then they rise to modulate the most delicate ones giving the sweetest curves; then a suspension…. then the most powerful reprise on another keyboard, thus freeing the most serious notes, of the organ that emerges from the depths of the earth.

Benedetto Croce wrote that “The artist does not suffer too much from the difficulty of the reluctant material, and indeed the challenge, and enjoys the triumph”, but I believe that the old Neapolitan idealist never smelled you.

It is the docile matter that is your chosen one, the eroticism of the matter that is in you is completely tactile, physical; it wants to give in under your fingers, let itself be caressed and shaped. The sculptors whose compositional eroticism is primarily intellectual, seek “reluctant matter”, oppositional, to work it with head and strength; for a long time.

It is you, instead, of the lineage of Medardo[1] and Arturo[2], particularly of the latter, the only one who is equal to you in composing unpredictable sounds with the epidermis of the sculptures; a music “that lines the silence”, with its adages and its crescendo, up to rhapsodies and modern cultured music: “blues” or “rock” it is.

And those who have the quality to caress them, with their eyes, and look at them, with their fingers, are allowed to walk through art, accompanied by elective music.

If Edward[3] paints the light, you capture it, impalpable matter, you imprison it in your forms, to give it back in a score; In front of your ancestral landscapes, the organ of Albinoni’s Adagio rises from the depths to lie on the water’s surface, on which your architectures rest, many and different shaped by history; sedimentations of intellectual, aesthetic and functional legacies to man, on which the violins then climb to majestically soar towards us, today and tomorrow.

Born in Naples the “archetypal” form of ancestral landscapes, eternal, to modulate poems, where your plastic sensibility transfigures the forms told by the earth that is cooked, and vibrates, and excites, and sings.

As Ugo says: “a passion, an idea of the world must not be, in a plastic image, simply “dictated”, but must Be, and live – with its opposite – […] esistenziata.[4]                     —  For the author, “esistenziata” means: the plastic image crafted, it derives from a deep process of existential appropriation by the artist    —

From your fingers the clay rises, climbs, ripples and remains engraved, forming cliffs traversed and marked by the exodus of history, of populations forced to seek other lands; until the sculptor’s oven traps them in terracotta so that they can continue to modulate the air with the lament for the suffering of the forced journey, with the sigh for the relief of the short stop and with the hymn of joy to the new landing. In them are all the fugitives in the course of time. And, once again, the organ of the Adagio rises from the bowels of the planet to follow the forms you have given and free itself in the caress of the bow on the strings of the violin.

The people and men who on earth – a new landing place – measure themselves in building their time, while yours is suspended.

«Qui la terra mirando, il padre Enea 
vede un’ampia foresta, e dentro, un fiume 
rapido, vorticoso e quieto insieme, 
che per l’amena selva, e per la bionda 
sua molta arena si devolve al mare. 
Questo era il Tebro, il tanto desïato, 
il tanto cerco suo Tebro fatale: 
a le cui ripe, a le cui selve intorno, 
e di sopra volando, ivan le schiere 
di piú canori suoi palustri augelli».

and Enea, points by looking them straight in the eyes

«“Via, […] volgete il corso 
itene a riva”. E tutti in un momento 
rivolti e giunti, de l’opaco fiume 
preser la foce, e lietamente entraro. 
Porgimi, Èrato, aíta a dir quai regi, 
quai tempi, e quale stato avesse allora 
l’antico Lazio, quando prima i Teucri 
con questa armata a’ suoi liti approdaro».[5] 

Along the way, groups, assemblies and reunions are formed and unraveled as they go; the wayfarer leaves his mark on the water-soaked tractor that, as it dries, returns your passage, records your presence; at least as long as the workers continue to shout at the poet.

«Ti vorremmo vedere accanto a un tornio!
Cosa sono i versi?
Roba da niente!
Certo che a lavorare mica ce la faresti».

and he to argue

«So bene
che non amate le frasi oziose, voi.
Per lavorare, fendete la quercia.
E noi?
Che forse non facciamo col legno lavori d’intarsio?
La quercia delle teste lavoriamo.
Certo
è cosa rispettabile pescare.
Tirare la rete,
e prendere storioni!
Ma non è meno rispettabile il lavoro del poeta:
prendere gente viva, non di pesci.
Una fatica enorme bruciare davanti alla fucina,
temprare i metalli sibilanti.
Ma chi
può accusarci di essere oziosi?
I cervelli forgiamo con la lima della lingua.
Chi è superiore:
il poeta o il tecnico
che porta gli uomini al benessere?
Sono uguali.
I cuori sono motori.
E l’anima è un motore altrettanto complesso.
Siamo uguali.
Siamo tutti compagni operai.
Proletari di spirito e di corpo.
Soltanto insieme
abbelliremo l’universo,
e lo faremo rimbombare di marce.
Contro i diluvi di parole innalziamo una diga.
All’opera!
A un lavoro vivo e nuovo!
E gli oziosi oratori,
al mulino!
Fra i mugnai!
A girare le macine con l’acqua dei discorsi».[6]

when to the communities of men, already Matthew made Christ say

«Se il tuo fratello commetterà una colpa contro di te, va’ e ammoniscilo fra te e lui solo; se ti ascolterà, avrai guadagnato il tuo fratello; se non ascolterà, prendi ancora con te una o due persone, perché ogni cosa sia risolta sulla parola di due o tre testimoni. Se poi non ascolterà costoro, dillo alla comunità; e se non ascolterà neanche la comunità, sia per te come il pagano e il pubblicano.
In verità io vi dico: tutto quello che legherete sulla terra sarà legato in cielo, e tutto quello che scioglierete sulla terra sarà sciolto in cielo. In verità io vi dico ancora: se due di voi sulla terra si metteranno d’accordo per chiedere qualunque cosa, il Padre mio che è nei cieli gliela concederà. Perché dove sono due o tre riuniti nel mio nome, lì sono io in mezzo a loro».[7]

and while your assemblies embody secular sacredness, there are those who, turning to the man and woman of your groups, exhort

«Impara la cosa piú semplice! Per quelli
il cui tempo è venuto
non è mai troppo tardi!
Impara l’abbicí: non basta, è vero,
ma imparalo! Non avvilirti!
Comincia! Devi sapere tutto!
Tocca a te assumere il comando».[8]

In the meantime, young man you land at the archaeological museum of Naples, mythology comes to meet you, not knowing that from the High Sannio brings you – archaic warrior -, waiting for Hendel’s organ to embrace you and accompany you in Sarabande to the discovery and battle, tragedy and exaltation, conquest, defense and revival of contemporary memory with perennial forms, on the wave of Odysseus intoxicated by the song of the Sirens.

«”Qui, presto, vieni, o glorioso Odisseo, grande vanto degli Achei,
ferma la nave, la nostra voce a sentire.
Nessuno mai si allontana di qui con la sua nave nera,
se prima non sente, suono di miele, dal labbro nostro la voce;
poi pieno di gioia riparte, e conoscendo più cose.
Noi tutto sappiamo, quanto nell’ampia terra di Troia
Argivi e Teucri partirono per volere dei numi;
tutto sappiamo quello che avviene sulla terra nutrice”.
Così dicevano alzando la voce bellissima, e allora il mio cuore
voleva sentire, e imponevo ai compagni di sciogliermi,
coi sopraccigli accennando; ma essi a corpo perduto remavano.
E subito alzandosi Perimède ed Eurìloco,
nuovi nodi legavano e ancora più mi stringevano.
Quando alla fine le sorpassarono, e ormai
né voce più di Sirene udivamo, né canto,
in fretta la cera si tolsero i miei fedeli compagni».[9]

while the warrior is transfigured in tars at the door of the contemporary city, even inside the “ring road” that surrounds it, crossed by the rushing and unconscious armies, accompanied by percussions; and suddenly the organ rises again and hears the song of those who have waited for it.

«Se non ti fossi curato di quello che mi accadeva,
Ed io non mi fossi curato di te
Avremmo percorso a zig-zag la nostra strada
attraverso la noia e il dolore
Sfiorandoci ogni tanto nella pioggia
Chiedendoci a quale dei bastardi dare la colpa
E stando attendo ai porci in volo
Lo sai che mi importa di quello che ti succede
e lo so che anche tu ti interessi di me
Così non mi sento solo
o non sento il peso della pietra
Adesso che ho trovato un posto sicuro
dove seppellire il mio osso».[10]

and from everywhere Queen Dido, amidst distant cockleshells and loneliness, is prey to a feeling, an almost unknown wave, that does not seem to rule, a fire that slowly takes shape in her heart and will remain her “companion” for a long time. He sits down, he gets up, he dresses in your whispering cooked earths, while he hears distant melodies

«“Anna, sorella, che incubi mi atterriscono sospesa.
Che ospite strano, questo, è giunto qui nel nostro
palazzo, presentandosi come d’aspetto, di così forte petto
e di armi. Credo davvero, e non è vana la mia opinione, che discenda dalla stirpe degli dei.
La paura rivela gli animi vili. Ah, da quali
fati egli è colpito. Che guerre compiute cantava.
[…]
Anna, ebbene lo confesserò, dopo il destino del povero marito
Sicheo e dopo che i penati furono sparsi di sangue fraterno
solo costui piegò i miei sensi e scosse il mio animo vacillante».[11]

David, with Brian, responds in other land and eras of tars and scrap iron

«Io, io sarò re
E tu, tu sarai la regina
Anche se niente li porterà via
Li possiamo battere, solo per un giorno
Possiamo essere Eroi, solo per un giorno
[…]
Io, io riesco a ricordare
In piedi accanto al Muro
E i fucili sparavano sopra le nostre teste
E ci baciammo,
come se niente potesse accadere
E la vergogna era dall’altra parte
Oh possiamo batterli, ancora e per sempre
Allora potremmo essere Eroi,
anche solo per un giorno».[12]

Meanwhile, the harmonies of the universe have materialised before you, in Naples, in woman and love:

«Era de maggio e te cadeano nzino,
a schiocche a schiocche, li ccerase rosse
fresca era ll’ aria e tutto lu ciardino
addurava de rose a ciente passe
Era de maggio; io no, nun mme ne scordo,
na canzona cantávemo a doie voce…
cchiù tiempo passa e cchiù me n’allicordo,
fresca era ll’aria e la canzona doce».[13]

your decencies struggle to melt, while you lift your fingers, you cancel the strength of your hand to let the figure hinted at detach from you, with lightness; a material illusionism given by small clay leaves

«“Perché ti vergogni?
Quel pezzetto di torace che esce
dall’apertura della camicia, perché
lo copri? Perché non dovrebbero le tue gambe,
le tue buone forti cosce essere
ruvide, piene di peli? Io sono
contenta che siano così.
Tu sei timido, sciocco, tu sciocca
timida cosa. Gli uomini sono le più timide
delle creature, non usciranno mai dai loro
rifugi. Come un serpente che scivola nel suo
letto di foglie morte, tu ti affretti dentro
i tuoi vestiti. E a me piaci così!
Diritto e netto e tutto d’un pezzo è il corpo
dell’uomo, uno strumento così, una picca,
come una spada, e come un remo, una gioia
per me!”. Così lei appoggiava le sue mani
e le premeva sotto i miei fianchi
così io cominciavo a meravigliarmi
di me stesso, e chiedermi che cosa ero».[14]

and your vibrant earthy crush compose new music: “You know I love you and I adore you…..”[15], feminine soft and proud surfaces, modulating the singing of the Anonymous Romance, which Andrés[16] frees from the navel of his classical guitar by making it sway on the strings. The notes wrap, rise, then abandon themselves to revive again. Until the majestic Spanish explodes:

«Avevi la passione che dà il cielo di Spagna.
La passione del pugnale, dell’occhiaia e del pianto.
O principessa divina dal crepuscolo rosso
con la rocca di ferro e il filo d’acciaio!
Non hai mai avuto il nido né il madrigale dolente
né il liuto che singhiozza lontano.
Il tuo trovatore fu un giovane dalle squame d’argento
e i suoi accenti d’amore l’eco della tromba.
E tuttavia eri fatta per l’amore,
fatta per il sospiro, l’abbandono e le carezze,
per piangere triste sul cuore amato
sfogliando una rosa profumata con le labbra».[17]

and from France responds another song to feminine beauty

«Vieni tu dal cielo profondo o sorgi dall’abisso, Beltà? Il tuo sguardo, infernale e divino, versa, mischiandoli, beneficio e delitto: per questo ti si può comparare al vino.
Riunisci nel tuo occhio il tramonto e l’aurora, diffondi profumi come una sera di tempesta; i tuoi baci sono un filtro, la tua bocca un’anfora, che rendono audace il fanciullo, l’eroe vile.
Sorgi dal nero abisso o discendi dagli astri? Il Destino incantato segue le tue gonne come un cane: tu semini a casaccio la gioia e i disastri, hai imperio su tutto, non rispondi di nulla.
Cammini sopra i morti, Beltà, e ti ridi di essi, fra i tuoi gioielli l’Orrore non è il meno affascinante e il Delitto, che sta fra i tuoi gingilli più cari, sul tuo ventre orgoglioso danza amorosamente.
Venga tu dal cielo o dall’inferno, che importa, o Beltà, mostro enorme, pauroso, ingenuo; se il tuo occhio, e sorriso, se il tuo piede, aprono per me la porta d’un Infinito adorato che non ho conosciuto?
Da Satana o da Dio, che importa? Angelo o Sirena, che importa se tu – fata dagli occhi vellutati, profumo, luce, mia unica regina – fai l’universo meno orribile e questi istanti meno gravi?».[18]

you continue to modulate rhapsodies of soft and erect, enveloping shapes, when the young Russian boy sings and raises in another part of the world

«Quel giorno tutta, dai pettini ai piedi,
come un attore tragico in provincia un dramma di Shakespeare,
ti portavo con me e ti sapevo a memoria,
e, girellando per la città, ti ripassavo.
Quando ti caddi innanzi a te, abbracciando
questa nebbia, questo ghiaccio, questo spazio
(come sei bella!) – questo vortice turbine d’afa…».[19]

until the Greek poetess of Ereso comes to blow in your strings of loving senses, which the thieving magpie accompanies, modulates and jumps and vibrates in listening and sniffing desires, in the age of passion and love

«Tramontata è la luna
e le Pleiadi a mezzo della notte;
anche giovinezza già dilegua,
e ora nel mio letto resto sola.
Scuote l’anima mia Eros,
come vento sul monte
che irrompe entro le querce;
e scioglie le membra e le agita,
dolce amara indomabile belva.
Ma a me non ape, non miele;
e soffro e desidero».[20]

until they explode in the strong grip from the back that the archaic and vigorous and cultured lover guarantees, and that the cooked earth gives in the most dutiful form. Rejoices and raucous screams of love the lover/warrior, because it does not only shake my soul Eros. The music travels with the sculpted material, shaped, and accompanies the waves of desires and the aesthetic force of your sculpture, until it gently reanimates in the crescendo of lovers

«corpo dolce e benevolo,
nella sua calma suprema, tutto
ha così tanto femminile,
così naturalmente voluttuoso,
dai piedi a lungo baciati
sino a quegli occhi chiari, puri d’estasi,
ma quanto e come ben saziati!
Dalle gambe e le cosce
giovinette sotto la giovane pelle,
attraverso l’odor di formaggio
e di gamberi freschi, bello,
grazioso, discreto, dolce, cosino
appena ombreggiato di delicato oro,
che t’apri in un’apoteosi
al mio desiderio rauco e muto
[…]
Passando per la lenta schiena
piacevolmente carnosa, sino
al culo sontuoso, divinamente bianco,
rotondità degne del tuo scalpello,
molle Canova! sino alle cosce
che ancora bisogna salutate
sino ai polpacci, sode delizie,
sino ai talloni di raso e d’oro!
Furono nodi incoercibili?
No, ma ebbero il loro fascino.
Furono i nostri fuochi terribili?
No, ma diedero il loro calore.
[…]
E ti conservo tra le mie donne
rimpianta non senza qualche speranza
di quando forse ci amammo
e di senza dubbio riaverci».[21]

The time has come to turn off cell phones, to enter the cavea of the theater of the arts, listen silently to the shapes, watch the sounds, until the last room touches the musician’s blanket that comes down from the “sumptuous ass” to welcome the sigh he carries with him.
It is the terra cotta of Nunzio Bibbò.

[1] Medardo Rosso.

[2] Arturo Martini.

[3] Edward Hopper.

[4] Da una conversazione con Ugo Attardi, in: Arte in Lotta, (a cura di Luigi Martini), Ediesse, 1996, p. 16.

[5] Virgilio, da Eneide, Libro VII.

[6] Vladimir Majakovskij, da Il poeta operaio, tratta da «Maiakovski, Marcia di sinistra», edizione Editori Riuniti per «Vie Nuove», fuori commercio, 1958.

[7] Dal Vangelo secondo Matteo (Mt 18, 15-20).

[8] Bertolt Brecht, da Elogio dell’imparare.

[9] Omero, da Odissea, libro XII.

[10] Roger Waters, da Pigs on the Wing.

[11] Virgilio, da Didone innamorata, libro IV.

[12] David Bowie/Brian Eno, da Heroes.

[13] Salvatore Di Giacomo, da Era de maggio.

[14] David Herbert Lawrence, da “Lei mi diceva proprio così”.

[15] Da un Madrigale.

[16] Andrés Segovia.

[17] Federico Garcìa Lorca, Elegia a Giovanna la pazza.

[18] Charles Baudelaire, da Inno alla bellezza.

[19] Boris Pasternak, da Marburgo, versione di Angelo Maria Ribellino.

[20] Saffo, da Tramontata è la luna, traduzione di Salvatore Quasimodo.

[21] Paul Verlaine, da A colei che si dice sia fredda.

So far, I have not written anything about your research because it is difficult for me to deal with sculpture.

Yet I started out by writing about it. I have always felt the energy of matter, I have always perceived its strength and its shaping in space. That solid existence, powerful in time and physical dimension, created object, real, tangible. What has always attracted me to sculpture is that it is autonomous even from the author himself, once completed. Sculpture is a “living” object, because it occupies a real space and time, the same space and time in which we act. It exists in itself. In this sense, it doesn’t matter who made it in the end if not for a question of history, culture, trace left behind. Matter has always exerted a great fascination on me. I can hardly refrain from touching a surface when it is material, when it has a thickness and with sculpture the gesture becomes unstoppable. It is an act of transgression that breaks the aura of the work of art and creates an intimate encounter with that object, an act of possession of something that cannot escape. But that same act that establishes a relationship of senses with matter, silence me, almost as if words could not make the work beyond its very reality. The mystery remains. Something that is, but that is not so obvious.

Two years later, I think today I can say that seeing your new works has struck me in a particular way. Not that I didn’t find your sculptures interesting before.

I have always appreciated their inner candour for such a stubborn effort, but for this authentic one, for not wanting to lose the sense of the human, the sacredness of things, the highest values that redeem man from the brutality of existence. But it was a content so well explained, impossible to misunderstand, that it nailed you within that reading, not being able to grasp other tensions, which were felt, but did not explode. It always seemed to me that your works announced something else, that lacked that immediate gesture that allowed your contents to coexist with the forms within a plastic material that returned your creative process as an act of thought, and at the same time psychophysical participation towards reality. And so, the figure can only be suggested, as was already partly the case in your previous works, but today in particular it seems to have lost its narrative context.

In front of your last works, I suddenly realised the shift, the linguistic gap that allows you to emerge in a different position within the artistic research that you have been carrying on for a long time aimed at expressing your relationship with the contemporary through an expressive medium so ancient, but so deeply rooted in man.

It is now clear to me that the form’s itinerancy towards an archaism that can no longer be interpreted in a mythological key, free from a culture that is sometimes too declared.

Those sculptures cut, more than modelled, that material even silent, without

tears, without strong lacerations, indeed composed in its being an expression of something that is beyond the natural datum, beyond the very appearance of things, affirm that reality can no longer be represented in the usual way.

There is a rigor and at the same time a felt, natural simplicity, a primordial force and at the same time a modernity, which characterise your works and make them expression of the contemporaneity.

I must say that the tars already mark a decisive step in this direction. That material so violent, that figure in many ways disturbing, is not born from a model, but from the wrapping of the sheets of tar itself. An operation that has a double value: on the one hand it reveals the desperate attempt to give voice to your inner anxieties, which you subtly perceive as those of the time, to which you contrast a mythical vision understood not as a sort of escape from reality, but as a possibility to give a sense back to man and his actions; on the other hand it expresses your need for lightness, to empty the material without losing the figure, which is made visible, almost retained, by the enveloping surfaces of tar.

That unpleasant material becomes strongly functional to the representation of the existential condition of contemporary man. That impossibility to mould denounces the loss of the relationship with life and at the same time the awareness that perhaps today emptiness is more significant and representative of the appearance of life itself. Even if the historical presuppositions of a culture based on those values that you are looking for have now disappeared, your nature as an artist leads you not to renounce your inner world, to preserve your purity with a deaf obstinacy, which however is vital to you. And it is so much so that your art cannot do without the figure, even if simplified, reduced to simple lines, because otherwise the fundamental reasons for your research would disappear. You want to jealously preserve your origins, but without renouncing to be a man of your time, to be in that contemporaneity that finds its maximum synthesis in your latest terracotta sculptures, where the figure is noticeable in the material, but without being represented in a naturalistic way. Almost a sort of monolith that silently encloses the history of man.

Ida Mitrano