ELISEO MATTIACCI
CuratedbyGianfranco Maraniello
Mart, Rovereto
3December 2016 ― 12March 2017
The Mart contemporary sculpture trilogy attains completion with a final exhibition in 2016 dedicated toEliseoMattiacci.
After the major retrospectives on Giuseppe Penoneand Robert Morris, Gianfranco Maraniello curates an ambitious survey of the work of one of the world’s preeminent living artists. This exhibition continues an exploration of the sources and forms of sculpture in a conceptual passing of the baton among its masters.
I would like my work to give people a sense of processes
enduring from the Iron Age into the fourth millennium
EliseoMattiacci
The cycle on great contemporary sculpture
One year ago, after announcing a vision of clearly defined exhibition itineraries, Mart redesigning its spaces and inaugurated a new exhibition setup in December 2015: “Give us time because this is not going to be something episodic, but a continuing trajectory,”commented Gianfranco Maraniello. The constellation “Mart” was thus delineated, a realm where art spills beyond its conventional boundaries, moving like interconnected celestial bodiesin orbit around the irradiating power of imagination. The centres of this astral system are the great masterpieces in the Mart collectionsbut also the iconic contemporary architecture of Mario Botta: recognizable elements consolidating the museum’s identity.
The exhibition opening on 3 December 2016 emphasizes this visionin the trajectory dedicated to contemporary art, featured on the second floor. The celebrated works in the Mart section titled The Incursion of the Contemporary represent the inspiration and point of departure for the temporary exhibitions. This year a path has been plotted to explore dialogues, harmonies and contrasts within the realm of sculpture. The protagonists are three masters whose work representsimportant pages in the last fifty years of the history of international art: Giuseppe Penone, Robert Morris and nowEliseoMattiacci.
In a sweeping retrospective, Mattiacci’s monumental installations dialogue with the Mart collections, with the anti-traditional sculptural vision of EttoreColla, and with the Spatialism of Lucio Fontana. Those visiting the Mart exhibition on or before 19 February will also have the opportunity to contemplateMattiacci’s work in the light of that of another towering artist who revolutionized the sculptural idiom: Umberto Boccioni, in a major exhibition on the first floor.
Rooted in Futurism, the concept of continuity of space has become a stylistic trait inEliseoMattiacci’s work, a mindset he has never abandoned. We intuit his predilection for circular forms, rotation, and plastic dynamism starting in his earliest works, inspiring critics to see him has a possible heir to the Futurist – or better, Boccionian – tradition.
ThePenoneand Morris exhibitions at the public museum marked the beginning of an exploration of the foundational gestures of sculpture, opening an inquiry into the meaning of the work of art within the space it occupies.With Mattiacci,architecture and sculpture interweave once again in a close interchange between the works and the spaces designed by Mario Botta: no longer a frame or container, but spaces to be acknowledged and transgressed. Art stops interpreting the present, it ceases to be a representation of the world, but becomes the worlditself.
EliseoMattiacci. The Exhibition
Born in 1940, EliseoMattiacciis one of the preeminent figures driving a rethinking of sculpture that gained systematic form in the mid-1960s. In Rovereto a broad retrospective retraces the artist’s career to datefeaturing a selection of mainly large-scale works. The exhibition itinerary follows the trajectory of one of the best-loved Italian sculptors, presenting works that are rarely installed or that have never been exhibited in a museum. Named simply after the artist, the Mart exhibition contributes to enriching the critical literature on an artistic quest that has left an indelible mark on the last half century of art history.
Curated by Gianfranco Maraniello, the exhibition features supreme works, such as Locomotiva [Locomotive] (1964), one of his debut pieces, expressingthemes and intuitions that would be determinantsof Mattiacci’s artistic conceptions. Some of the sculptures presented in the exhibition represent enormous challengesin terms of installationbecause of their size and complexity. One such work is the famous Motociclista [Motorcyclist] (1981):exhibited only twice before (1981, 1982), this work announces the shift from the terrestrial dimension into the cosmos. Another is La mia idea del cosmo [My Idea of the Cosmos] (2001), which evokes a dreamlike, contemplative dimension; or Piattaformaesplorativa [Exploration Platform] (2008), located at the centre of the exhibition itinerary, which unites themes and materials dear to Mattiacci. Also present are works that made the annals of the 1972 and 1988 Venice Biennali, both curated by Giovanni Carandente (together with Giuseppe Marchiori in 1972). Mattiacci had an entire room dedicated to him at the former event, where he set up four works, two of which are included in the Mart exhibition: Culturamummificata [Mummified Culture] and Tavoledeglialfabetiprimari [Tablets with Primary Alphabets]. The 1988 edition featured the sculpture Esplorazionemagnetica [Magnetic Exploration].
Although Mattiacci is not well known within the graphic idiom, theMart exhibition also includes some twenty drawings that provide counterpoint to the monumentality of the installations. Executed primarily in ink and pencil, the drawings are not part of the sculptural design process, they are not preparatory drawings, but constitute a repository of ideas and suggestions that interrelate thematically and semantically with the artist’s cosmology.
A constant in Mattiacci’s work, strongly underscored in the exhibition, is his challenging of the prevailing cultural climate. The master’s works upend the convention of the work as a completed, self-enclosed whole, bring out instead the gestures that give birth to art and promoting a deconstruction of the dominant paradigms.
With Mattiacci, sculpture quickly got off its pedestal and transformed into a device that both belongs to and surpasses space, breaking beyond into energetic, existential, cosmological dimensions. His works guide us to an intimate experience of the universe byrevealing invisible forces such as magnetism and electricity via archaic rituality, by the propagation of the sound waves produced by a gong, by the provision of human measuring units, orbital paths, and paths to knowledge of the unknown through writings, metrics, and mechanical and technological instruments in a promethean yearning for the infinite.
Brief biography of the artist
EliseoMattiacci (Cagli, 1940) developed within the currents of Informalism and Spatialism. Moving to Rome in 1964 he was immediately caught up in the strong climate of experimentalism and developed an expansive idea of sculpture. In those years he took part in the events that most significantly marked the evolution of art (Lo Spaziodell’immagine, Foligno, 1967; Arte Povera – ImSpazio, Genoa, 1967). Action, performance and installation entered into his artistic idiom: unleashed in the city and elsewhere, his works interact with onlookers, nourish themselves on atmospheric phenomena and communicate with the heavenly orbs.
During the 1970s, the artist discovered an abiding interest in primordial energies. In 1972 he was featured with his own room at the Venice Biennale. His artistic quest adopted an anthropological gaze whereby he traced connections between rituality, primordial forces and technologies in a unified space-time continuum. He returned to Pesaro in 1986, where he opened a new studio in a disused industrial shed that opened up new possibilities for experimentation with hitherto prohibitive dimensions. His art was carried to monumental maturity and the supreme forces running through the cosmos appeared to become the very agents of his sculpture, arcing and shaping its forms.
Themes and sculptural types already seen in his early works, such as rotation, interception, and communication assume an observational and receptual dimension. The expansive energy of the subject thus gathers in a sculptural body that is capable of forging the work in direct relation with the magnitude of the universe itself. Among the most significant exhibitions of the period we recall the memorable room dedicated to Mattiacci at the 1988 Venice Biennale, the opening of the PradaMilanoarte spaces in 1993, and the grand exhibition at Trajan’s Market in Rome in 2001.
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