Eliseo Mattiacci, capta spazio

The formal message of Mattiacci’s work is conveyed with rigorous simplicity and immediacy: there is the sense of a balance of forces that presents us with surprising stillness and a magical suspension. This is seen in certain works in the show, such as Equilibrio (2001-2002), a huge iron disc held vertically by a potent magnet, made immaculate and fresh as the dawn by its ancient geometry. Then there is Collisione, created some years earlier, which is a kind of gong or suspended star, run through by a long, slender thread-like lance, the same as that found in Centrare il bersaglio (2002), in which it hits the disc in the centre to underline emblematically the artist’s interest in its pure form.

La mia idea del cosmo, an installation conceived in 2001, occupies a whole room and seems an immense universe from which emerge from a myriad of atoms, mysterious planetary forms: aluminium spheres are placed on a lead floor which in turn is covered by a thick mat of little lead balls. The energy implicit in this apparent immobility derives from the capricious instability of the material that leads the elements of the universe to become dense or to thin out according to the perennial movement of variable forms that are always on the point of becoming fixed. It is a random, unorganised entity; it is the metamorphosis of insignificant industrial products into the poetry of a star-studded sky. The installation has distant roots in Mattiacci’s imaginary, not too different from the diurnal and nocturnal matrix that is the foundation of many other works of his. So it is in syntony with Porta del Sole and Porta della Luna (1993) now shown in their most recent form. With these works the artist means to demonstrate how every creative process takes place within the coordinates of night and day, in a constant metamorphosis that dissolves in the gradual mutation of one season into the next.

It is in this context that we are again proposing to the public Carro solare del Montefeltro (1986), an all-important reference point for interpreting Mattiacci’s dialogue with the past. This large installation owes its formal balance and its innovative appearance to the artist’s regenerative mnemonic ability: it is a direct reference to Piero della Francesca’s triumphal allegory at the back of his portrait of Federico di Montefeltro. On iron rails the artist has placed, slightly at a tangent, a cart with two large disc-shaped bodies joined by an axis that curves upwards and supports a third, smaller disc.

The exhibition was curated by Veit Loers, director of the Städtisches Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach, and by Fabrizio D’Amico, author of many fundamental contributions to research into Mattiacci’s work. The catalogue contains essays by both and will be centred on the meaning of the works on show. There is also a furfher text by Daniela Lancioni with biographical and bibliographical notes. Claudio Abate, who photographed the works illustrating the catalogue, has interpreted them through their interaction with the artist and their setting.