by Paolo Annibali.
The days seem increasingly shorter at the end of summer as well as this last period of my life is marked by a sense of elusive acceleration. Being always late, useless days: these are the constants of my emotional perception of time and the rational list of my accomplishments can only minimally mitigate it.
My days are guided by the severity of sculpture, which, as a tame discipline, dictates the rhythms of creation. Improvisation is impossible; the material demands knowledge of procedures, calculation…; I feel myself a builder more than a sculptor. Clay, so seemingly docile to the caress of the fingers, requires a profound understanding of thicknesses, shrinkages…, otherwise the outcome will be catastrophic.
Clay isn’t solely the art of placing, but also of pressing; construction also comes from within. Terracotta sculptures seem to come to life from within.
Honestly, I don’t know why; although the fragility of my hands marked by time, perhaps for a challenge? I seek an anachronistically solemn dimension in my sculpture. My works always emerge quietly: initially they stay in the palm of a hand, then they gradually take on the concreteness of highly articulated forms. I deeply miss the shared feeling that marked my formative years; I deeply miss the sense of belonging to and sharing those ideas that allowed me to glimpse a different world.
Adulthood is marked by a multitude of problems caused by the complexity of the contemporary world, problems for which I often feel myself inadequate. I have never shown a melancholic interest in the classical world, not even in the fascinating galaxy of Greek gods and heroes; what strikes me most is the feeling of the end of that world that aspired to perfection.
Where did those gods go leaving, in disappearing, behind themselves such grandiose vestiges? Their followers became orphans: which sanctuaries would they have offered their gifts to? It must have been a gradual abandonment, the temples slowly neglected, emptied of presence and meaning. Replaced by more advanced places and religions, they no longer offered a sacred precinct, a place of collective identity.
I tried to create a series of sculptures evoking the decorative apparatus of the past: the pedimental sculptures, the metopes, the acroteria. Sculptures Without a Temple, without the architecture that would have housed them. From the postures, from the stories of the little theaters (more than metopes, they seem like nativity scenes), you can understand a tale without myths or heroes, in which the absence of place, in the uncertainty of gestures and the futility of glances becomes the absence of a possible destiny.
The use of terracotta, more than Greek sculpture, recalls the fragility of Etruscan sculpture, where the vulnerability of existence was governed by an obscure sense of fate. It’s useless. Despite the desire to consciously dominate the artwork, it always chooses its own path, like an oracle offering different answers to expectations.
Despite the sense of provisionality I wanted to tell with all the characters, the five sculptures on the pediment have taken on the fixity and solemnity of an absolute form of crystallized existence.
A monument to nothingness.
From the Exhibition Catalog “Dirà l’Argilla” (The clay will say)