According to Epicurus, the essence of things resides in atoms, which, infinite in number, move in infinite space. Their eternal movement is not a simple dispersion, but rather a fall, subject to a slight swerve, or clinamen. It is this eventual deviation from the straight line that allows them to accumulate. “Clinamen” is the title of Luca Trevisani’s exhibition, which comprises five pieces from 2006, including a video of the same name. Shot on a skateboard ramp, it shows a series of ice spheres that roll down, bump against each other, break apart, and melt as they follow the ramp’s path. Trevisani seems to choose shots that transform the space into a pure intersection of rationalist lines, but with the ambiguity of a de Chirico–esque metaphysical piazza.

Accumulation and proliferation are two recurring concepts in Trevisani’s work—metaphors for thought processes that proceed according to an impenetrable and nonlinear logic, in continuous development and transformation. In the interview printed in the gallery press release, the artist states that he is interested in the liberation of energy: in the expansion of material and in the passage from one physical state to another—ice, water; solid, geometric form and unstable liquid; in light and in time. Gibbosa e sfuggente (Lumpy and Elusive) is a pair of nylon spheres, velvety to the touch, which illustrate the phases of the moon. Partirei dall’acqua (I Would Start Out From the Water) is a sphere made of resin. The transparent material captures the light, and inside the sphere is an hourglass.

Trevisani’s thought finds expression in his precise formal research and in the warmth of the sensitive, soft material. Lo Savio’s Halfpipe and Du soleil, de la lumière, des spheres, de la glace (Of sun, light, spheres, ice) are both sculptural pieces with tactile and seductive surfaces in resin and paraffin. Both are reworkings of the architectural and spatial relationships of the skateboard ramp, through a process of formal analysis. The vertical slope of the two mini-ramps, down which streams of paraffin and gel slide (Lo Savio’s Halfpipe), has a counterpart in the irregular void carved into a shiny cube, in the second piece, which, in a single mark, synthesizes the curvilinear wave of the ramp and that of the model for Francesco Lo Savio’s Maison au soleil, 1962, from which it was cast. Lo Savio, in his conceptual investigation of pure, minimal forms, from 1958 to 1963 explored the relation between form and light, considering the former as a device for making the latter visible and seeing the work as a process in a state of continual change. Again in the interview, Trevisani provides a clue, saying that the light and dynamism in Lo Savio’s works fascinate him on account of their musicality: “Because it has to do with understanding the life of matter, and existence in general, as a continuous flux, made by pulsations of different intensities.” Emotion may have been banished in favor of a conceptual approach in the work of this twenty-seven-year-old artist, but, as he reminds us, it is in the mobile versatility of the idea turned into form and material that existence comes to life.

—Alessandra Pioselli

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.