Mario Porcù is a Ligurian artist - a sculptor, to be precise, who has found a way of representing reality in white and pink marble, as well as in clay, by infusing the modelled bodies with a sense of the sublime. A fully respectable sculptor, then, whose masterly skill can be noted even in his drawings. A sculptor’s drawing has always been known to be another thing altogether form a painter’s or a decorator’s. Drawing is constructive even more than painting - it might be defined as sculptural, inasmuch as it can evoke figures by means of a series of contour rings, or delineate them with a colourless interpretation that nonetheless contains and anticipates the actual relief, and sometimes the very flavour of matter. The Zumino gallery, in Milan, was the venue of a recent exhibition of Porcù’s works, with a catalogue edited by Daniela Palazzoni. Observing the drawings, a few of which are shown here, one notices through the linear analysis a casting of the contours and of the hazy shapes as they are transposed on a yellowed sheet. Some artists seek more sober schemes, and represent a human visage with the least number of strokes; Mario Porcù plays with the empty sheet enthusiastically and dizzily. It is no paradox to say that with Porcù, it is in the drawings representing animals and female figures that his fullest expression can be found, his most stringent lyricism, illuminated by the artificial glow of its brilliance and its relievo, showing the refined caricatural finesse of his lines and revealing his Italian origins. Porcù’s drawings are clearly not preparatory work, but accomplished works in their own right. They supply a full vision of the art of Porcù; they have the same straightforward eloquence of his best statues, and display a world of calm and sobriety that we are invited to enter. His monochrome technique conveys a sense of supreme austerity, highlighting the severe and consummate creation of shapes; the monochrome is so firm and definitive as to suggest a painting in grey and white rather than a drawing. The drawing of a sitting woman with her head resting on her arms is superbly replete with form, preserved in shades of grey, in the sfumato, with murky shadows and soft shadings firmly enveloping the bodies’ curves. They emphasize the various body parts and vigorously underline the rhythm of their creation. In drawing Porcù finds his most sincere expression, which is certainly not subordinate, but primal, and lets himself go discovering spaces, bodies, grandiose statuesque shapes. The nudes spread out on the smooth outline while at the same time rising in a snow-white, firm, corporeal relievo. This enthusiasm is not, nor does it purport to be, a passionate search for truth, but the vibration of matter and form, the same breath of life pursued by Arturo Martini, whom Porcù held in great esteem. Among the forms at once spontaneous and premeditated we must also include the cut that characterizes all the drawings, and by which they are animated and yet quietened; it is recognizable not only in the slant of the figures’ eyes, or in their features, but even in the hair styles, that can be recognized as typical of the 1960s. All forms are statuesque in Porcù, an artist the likes of which are not easily to be found in our days, and who is continuously attentive to the classical values of art and statuary, where harmony is never fragmentary nor reduced to notation but has an active function of a monochrome vision through which evocation is gratified by immateriality. Porcù’s female figures are sensuous and fleshy, and even the animals, especially the kids and the rams, reveal an uncommon imagination, an instinctual plenitude, a game in which the three dimensions of plastic form unfold before our eyes. This collection of drawings – preparatory studies, if you will, by the Ligurian artist (native of Albisola), is the most genuine expression of his artistic development, and above all the best of his production, appearing as a reading of form, a sort of progressive investigation of the linear life underlying the appearance of humans and objects, a world once investigated through the drawings of Dürer and Leonardo. (trad. Interpres- Giussano)