Giorgio Bevignani/SHAPES

by Isabella Falbo

First italian anthology of Giorgio Bevignani after his stay in New York, the Shapes project opens the doors to the artist’s private residence, a special setting in an isolated location between the hills of Castel San Pietro Terme, with large spaces, suitable for exploiting the big sculptural installations on show. 

The project develops a logical fusion between location, sculptural installations and performing arts, redefining the exhibition space which becomes an artistic, poetic and theatrical platform.

Giorgio Bevignani’s artistic practice has always oscillated between painting and sculpture, creating - through an experimental approach to the use of colour and form joint to the re-elaboration of philosophical and scientific concepts filtered from history and the contemporary - works defined as “pictosculptural”

If the contemporary we are experiencing is destabilising, Giorgio Bevignani, through his artistic practice, investigates our "here and now", rapid and changing as a spatiotemporal event included in the "all existing". The very fast changes, the conditions of instability, the gradual loss of references, are as indices in an attempt to regain what remains of the eternal and they become suspended structures, preserved semantic fragments in deflagrated bodies, sculptural collage set-ups with modular elements according to an operative logic following a rythm of full and empty. The viewer, as in a sort of dance in an era of the disenchantment, is invited to inter-act with the call for clarification.

There are nine selected art works, the Grande muro blu, Muro rosso 1, Muro rosso 2, Le nove terre di Siena, the most recent Cirri, Pharma, Lampsaco, Perpiero and Lucandrea, made from 1989 to 2007.

At first glance the visual impact instils in the spectator feelings of charm and contemplation to appear soon after in all their semantic and aesthetic complexity and ambiguity, due to the discrepancy between the single element and the final composition. In Shapes sculptural installations, the appearances and the configuration of the "created objects" is in contrast with the meaning and with the content and the substance of which they are composed. 

The walls series was made in connection to the fall of the Berlin Wall. If it is true that every time that a man loses his way, he goes back to copy from nature, Giorgio Bevignani, so receptive to epochal changes linked to the events of the 1989 turning point, simulates the stone, making the weft unfold again through the use of wax and a searing spatula. 

Using the material connotation of Burri, the "theatral" action of Pollock and permeating them with significance through colour, Bevignani reproduces marble blocks as the constituent elements of sculptures, representing something which in reality they are not.

In the Grande muro blu, colour works as a visual concept and the blue, proposed in 42 nuances, represents freedom. Bevignani’s wall is a deflagrated barrier, almost transparent. The arc-composed structure, losing its stiffness and hardness, creates an internal fluid space interacting with the spectator and welcoming him into its centre.

Starting from the same setting, Muro rosso 1, Muro rosso 2 and Le nove Terre di Siena, get their true meaning through the endogenous analysis of final form of the installation, and through colour, where red stands for "truth".

Created to be seen in the dark by ultraviolet light Cirri comes as a visionary apparition of “light severity”. The simplicity of the forms, the innocence of the composition and the grandiosity of the size evoke in the spectator contemplative abandonment. Composed of 144 modules of different sizes, forms and colours, the installation is based on Fibonacci’s numerical theory and set on the platform symbolic of the tilted square.  

Cirri’s space is infinite, deflagrated in fragments, "stones suspended" that move and swing, are interwoven, rotate, and change colour. The physical space of the installation vanishes as container and becomes the interior space. 

Cirri speaks in the silence, stripping the spectator’s soul, moving him inside, questioning him on the "truth" of human existence.

The sculptural installation Pharma, composed of 55 modules made in 55 variants of the colour marine green, is designed to be suspended at a great height. Developing itself on a vertical plane diagonally tilted, Pharma appears in the dark like water from a waterfall or, in the daylight, an avalanche of boulders in free fall. Based on the logic of aesthetic ambiguity, the modules represent both the stones of the river bed and the water itself. The strength is returned from the random forms of stones, made by the artist in a logic of “Deriddadiana” deconstruction where the new, the fact and the hand of sculptor are erased. Liquidity is represented by phosphorus which touches every single form as luminous water. 

If the characteristic scene of the contemporary world is the escape of nature from the landscape, Giorgio Bevignani with Pharma reconsiders the binomial humanity-nature, putting it outside its usual structuring and evoking in the spectator the lost sense of the sublime. The suspension of Pharma in the exhibition location deconstruct the space, time becomes the perception of the intangible.

Having no beginning or end, Lampsaco is a fragment of a wave of light that continues ad infinitum, a spiral polymer sequence that twists on itself, suspended in space without any reference to gravity, a constant curve. Sculptural installation, composed of 21 modules in terracotta, follows a register of reiterative alignment in a logic of infinite space. A metaphor of the present, with Lampsaco Bevignani interprets nihilistic fulfilment connected to the "post", representing the eternal “here and now”, characteristic of our time composed of fragments and multiple points of view.

Lucandrea is a playful and spectacular representation of the new material theories. It is an agglomeration of 34 modules, a magnified fragment of energetic nebulous composed of imploded particles around a wave. If the artist is as a hunter in the dark that shoots and sometimes hits his mark, Giorgio Bevignani through his artistic research tends to play the role of the pre-modern or post-modern scientist who thinks with the senses and feels with the mind through the synthesis of science, philosophy and art.

Suspended triad spatial/chromatic composed according to a fascinating balance of colour, form and space, Perpiero is composed of three large spherical modules.

The installation is formally inspired by the backs of the three characters in Giotto’s Lamentation in the Arena chapel in Padova and coloured in the orange, black and blue cobalt sequence like the three characters in the frescoed scene Identification of the true cross by Piero della Francesca in the church of San Francesco in Arezzo. The key to reading the installation Perpiero is the importance of the scene, the creation of a space alien to a defined time dimension and the idea of elements generating life.

ISABELLA FALBO, critical text for the exhibition Shapes. Giorgio Bevignani’s solo show. Curated by Isabella Falbo, Castel San Pietro Terme temporary location (Casa I Calanchi artist residence), ottobre 2006.