Gianni Caravaggio

Gianni Caravaggio’s sculptures have always been in dialogue with questions of time, material, the artmaking process, and the demiurgic nature of the creative action. In his latest solo exhibition, the artist uses humble materials (flour, talcum powder, seeds, paper), along with marble and bronze, to craft disorienting juxtapositions of these themes.

In the center of the main gallery lies Principio (Beginning; all works 2008), a heptagonal slab covered with seeds and spheres of different sizes and materials. The seeds signify the potentiality of a poetic, personal universe; traces of its evolution, in the form of indentations, also appear on the walls. The slab is both a vague imprint of the artist’s hand and a cast of the actual floor where the artist took his first steps as a baby. In Rivelatore di coppia (Torque Detector), an open-ended reinterpretation of the myth of Eros, other spheres arranged on the floor are at the mercy of a mobile metal structure. Chaos is given a kind of geometric order in Iniziatore (Initiator), a sculpture featuring a Cartesian axis created from three types of marble around which have been scattered red lentils and black soybeans. In Attendere un mondo nuovo II (Wait for a New World II), an aluminum shaft extends through the window, collecting rainwater that, once channeled, runs down to the gallery floor; there, the water meets a pile of flour and plaster, melding the organic and the inorganic. Lo stupore è nuovo ogni giorno (Amazement Is New Every Day) is a constellation of talcum-powder stains made by pouring the powder over a perforated sheet of paper. Elsewhere, L’immagine di ogni notte possible (The Image of Every Possible Night) uses a riotous pile of steel rods to depict dawn (yellow travertine) and dusk (red travertine); night appears in the tension between the elements, an oblique, potential space.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.