At the time that I was born an artist from Treviso, Arturo Martini, strived to break free of every material thing, even before the aestetics of the emptiness that rose in the 1960s. Renown artist Alberto Giacometti wrote that “sculptures rest on the void” and was cutting down the material to the point that his sculptures were nearly filiform. American sculptor Alexander Calder produced wire sculptures that looked like mechanical toys floating in the air. Italian art critic and historian of contemporary art Achille Bonito Olivo wrote that “everybody knows that sculpture is an art genre that asks for forgiveness because of the encumbrance it causes”.

Made almost only of emptiness, my shadow-in-the-net is made of a thread that flows, knots that create shapes and empy spaces that capture. Such a matter-metaphor of the world gives rise to a sentiment of impernamency of the mankind.

Rilke used to say that to live is like to fade away and that in our life we pass through things that will remain the same, whereas we are wearing out to the end. This generates our sentiment of loss which, according to philosopher Susan Sontag, is at the base of our desire for figuration.

The shadow is a fleeting image of the object casting the shadow and at the same time a new figuration itself. Giorgio De Chirico believes that a man’s shadow is more enigmatic than any religion ever existed.

Additional works

The Shadow-in-the-net is the representation of the object that gave shape to it and makes it visible even after it doesn’t exist anymore. The act of fading away is what gives rise to my Shadows-in-the-net. Susan Sontag would say that they are pseud-presences or clues of an absence. The Shadows-in-the-net are plastic graffiti where, like in Laozi’s glass, what counts is what is missing, meaning the emptiness. Like the shadow, this wire figure is borderless and transparent but, thanks to its succinct and colourless language, attracts the audience’s attention and then leave them alone in the empty mesh of the wire net. It then engages them in a dialogue with themselves the same way as those reading Proust would be reading about themselves.