|
Linzalata is a Mediterranean
artist; he is from Southern Italy, namely from Basilicata, this Magna
Graecia land, ancient and primordial, whose cultural heritage still
bears the intertwining influence of the painter Corrado Levi and of
the poet and writer Rocco Scotellaro. Our sculptor
is very fond of this land, where he lives, even though his art has now
reached every part of Italy. He is a deeply innovative sculptor and
artist, in that, even though he works in a provincial environment, he
has triggered in his work, carved in stone or wood, an upward movement,
pushing away from any figurative representation, except for that symbolic
allusiveness which has always been a distinctive feature of his art.
We
have large stelae, representing warriors, great motherly figures and
divinities, bearing the signs of an ancestral culture, of a culture
departing tout-court from all the most recent norms of research. So
this sculpture, even though new, in the shapes which simplify and almost
ossify the image, takes on a natural greatness and becomes a menhir
of modern days, retaining within an ancient history, in which the world
art has strived after the great utopias of man, his desires and needs,
his apprehension and fears, the archetypes which govern everything.
Well then, Donato Linzalata is a non-figurative sculptor, if by figuration
we mean something which is attached to reality; since in these schematised
images, which are very often in pairs or in groups, lodges an inner
soul which has the flavour of prehistory, of realities which are far
away from modern civilisation, industrialised or post-industrialised.
Even the preliminary works, such as those which we are publishing here,
take on statuary shapes, where sign delimits these forms, by objectifying
their history and perceiving the feeling of time which holds and sizes
history itself, having gathered its fundamental seeds, those which leave
their traces in art.
There
is more than a simply artisan taste in these forms which rise to the
sky, but have respect for this conquest of space in which sculpture
recognises its own destiny. Linzalata enables you to perceive these
images with an unusual plasticity, thanks to a primordial approach which
never has a reductive purpose, but confirms, if anything, the maturity
of his awareness, both from a particular and a universal point of view.
Our artist communicates with his images without losing touch with reality,
which always surrounds, like a landscape full of tension, every development,
every metaphor, every mobile exploration, every spatial script. In brief,
he makes room for these objects, which appear like new and ultramodern
“Penates” of our age, almost revisiting some sort of constructivist
avant-garde, which relates matter, light and environment to each other.
The most distinctive element which transpires from the plastic approach
of Linzalata’s sculpture is a humanity in transit, whose language, volumes
and fanciful imagery carry the scent of man’s ancestral dwellings, and
in the intersecting of these planes, in the outline of these ramifications,
the eye of each spectator perceives a symbol, a truth, an architecture.
(traduzione Interpres sas-Giussano)
 |
|
