Claudio Parmiggiani Senza titolo

cm 240 x 114 x 3 cad.

Ever since the 1960s, Claudio Parmiggiani’s work has reflected on the nature of images, their cultural roots, and their emotional resonance, involving the use of a wide range of materials and media, from photography to the cast, from the fragment to the impression to assemblage. In the artist’s work the recur-ring themes are solitude, silence, memory, an approach that reconciles the deepest spirituality and the most radical materialism. His shadow sculptures, as they have been called, often evoke bodies and objects that have disappeared, always avoiding the purely intellectual game that most of the time accompanies the themes of absence and traces. In his work disappearance always has something traumatic and spectral-ly theatrical about it: it alludes to the heart rending disappearance of things and people, burnt by the bonfire of history. Since 1970, the artist’s favorite material has been shadow, fleeting and sharp at the same time, which is projected into the environment via a method known as “delocation,” that is, by using fire, dust, and smoke to reveal the shapes of the objects that are absent. One of the subjects “dealt with” the most using this method is the book: an enduring symbolic form of cultural value and knowledge, but also a solid material entity with a rich formal history. In Parmiggiani’s invisible libraries, the book be-comes the figure of the mind and of human memory and, therefore, of everything that in our present never ceases to disappear, to turn to ashes.

A. Cortellessa, Claudio Parmiggiani. Only the ground obscured, in “Senzamargine. Passages in Italian art at the turn of the millennium”, curated by B. Pietromarchi, exhibition catalogue, (Rome, MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo), Venice, Marsilio Editori, pp. 201-217.

Foto Agostino Osio - Alto Piano

Acquisizione

Installation