Eliseo Mattiacci. Misurazioni

On Saturday 28 October 2017 at 6.00 p.m. the Galleria Poggiali of Florence presents the solo show of Eliseo Mattiacci entitled Misurazioni (Measurements), curated by Lorenzo Bruni.
The project for the exhibition stemmed from the desire to survey the artist’s career of over fifty years from an original vantage point. With this specific purpose in mind, at the beginning of the show in the Florentine gallery two large installation sculptures dating to different periods – Misurazione dei corpi celesti from 2003- 2004 and Tempo globale dating to 1990-91 – have been set in dialogue, along with several works on paper. The latter include Opera nel bosco of 1983 and Occhio del cielo of 2005, which illustrate the centrality of drawing to his production and his poetics. There is also a photographic work, Rifarsi, produced as the sole trace of his performance in 1973. The juxtaposition of these works will make it possible to bring out a motif that for sculpture is as unusual as it is pregnant, which the artist has addressed from different conceptual angles and using disparate aesthetic solutions: the manifestation of time on the one hand and of the temporality of experience on the other.
As Lorenzo Bruni writes in the article for the catalogue that will be published specially for this event: “To a superficial glance Mattiacci’s research can appear clearly divided between the gestural works in dialogue with the individual and social body, with which he fuelled the Arte Povera debate in the 1960s, and the period of the sculptures on cosmological subjects which he formalised starting in the 1990s, leading the debate on the strategy of environmental art to unexpected solutions. In actual fact, the artist’s development has been constant and consistent, always pivoting on the question: what role can a sculptor play in the reformulation of cultural ethics in an evolving and increasingly “liquid” society? This conceptual rather than formal issue led the artist to create works that can be seen as personal traces or collective instructions for a measurement of the surroundings of both the visible and the invisible.” The curator also intends to stress how “his installations have always explored the limitations and the potential of both the architectural and the natural space, of iron structures and magnetic tensions, aiming at a reformulation of art and society such as to achieve a heightened awareness of the dialogue/confrontation between the ‘I’ and the ‘world’ and vice-versa. Indeed, for him, viewing both the body and the cosmos as ‘presences’ is an essential prerequisite for giving tangibility and specificity to the entity that unifies and divides everything: time. Only thus is it possible to create an open mechanism to rethink the active position of the observer/artist on a different plane, which is not simply that of bringing everything down to cause and effect, but nor is it that of accepting the impossibility of explaining the phenomena that surround us.”
In addition to the six works mentioned above, the others occupying the various areas of the gallery aim to underline evanescent aspects of Mattiacci’s way of making art that have come powerfully to the fore over recent years. For example, operations such as Dinamica a parete in steel and copper dating to 2010, Punti luce of 2011 in brass and steel and the drawings with their different styles and subjects, focus renewed attention on the extreme pictorial and chromatic sensitivity that has always hallmarked his work. Then there is the sculpture Sospensione of 2011 – consisting of six spheres made of circular aluminium rods set on the ground – and Atomi e nuclei (2010) – a flat semicircle of steel supporting cylinders divided in half containing spheres in suspension. These sculptures underscore one of the fundamental aspects of the formalisation of his works: materialising the tension that can exist between physical and visual forces in contrast/dialogue with the architectural container in which they are inserted, thus transforming it into the space of the work. In the Florentine project a central role is played by the large installation entitled Corpo Celeste (meteorite) dating to 2008: invading the gallery’s Via Benedetta space, it modifies the relation between work and observer, exploring the potential of the monument in a post-ideological world. The task the artist entrusts to the work in this case is to embody an incommensurable entity such as the cosmos, meshed with the topic of the archive. Indeed the threadlike tangle of the discards from the working of the metal absorbs or brings forth from its central nucleus framed or fragmented designs linked to the notion of the expansion and dynamism of the forms. The dense and delicate physical and mental horizon that emerges from pondering the works in the Misurazioni show one after another “makes it possible to fully appreciate Eliseo Mattiacci’s research as an investigation and stimulation of the interaction between the observer and the landscape. Landscape, however, understood as the result of negotiation between the antitheses of visible and invisible, architectural and cosmological, private and collective.”
 

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