The Lia Rumma Gallery is delighted to announce the opening on Saturday 6 April 2024 of the solo exhibition by the artist Paolo Icaro, the first to be held in the Milan gallery.
The poetics of Paolo Icaro – one of the leading figures of the art of the 1960s, close to the “Arte Povera” movement – is marked by his continuous attempts to go beyond the idea of sculpture as an object and transform it into a process and experience. Sculpture therefore becomes more a need for existence rather than for form, which gives rise to images of gravity and lightness, matter and abstraction, restraint and excess. By deconstructing the language of sculptural action, Icaro conducts an ongoing exploration of space and the way it is perceived, and of the infinite statuesque and metaphorical possibilities provided by different materials. “Sculpture comes about when I give form to the idea that lies in mental space,” states the artist.
“The overall vision of the exhibition at the Lia Rumma Gallery,” explains Paolo Icaro, “is conceived as a work in different times and different spaces” arranged on the three floors of the gallery. At the entrance, on the ground floor, visitors will see the work Geometria eccentrica (1967), a large structure made of elements of black steel which, like a skeleton of “eccentric geometry” (as it is defined by the artist), designs an inhabitable space to be experienced by the body (the body of the artist who constructed it to match his own size and that of the visitor who will pass through it), to be measured in a physical and mental sense, to be explored in the becoming of time.
Moving up to the first floor, there is a multi-coloured landscape called Racconto dei racconti or “Tale of tales” (1969-2021). This environmental installation is made up of numerous parallelepipeds of materials, with which the artist has varying degrees of “empathy”, on which the word “racconto” (story or tale) is inscribed. The “racconti” are placed on the floor on measured sheets of lead. "In order to interpret the silence of the “Racconti”,” says Paolo Icaro, “I felt the need to involve the musician Alessandro Petrolati, a pianist and composer of electronic music who has prepared a minimal “effect”, so delicate and interrupted by silences, that it is almost inaudible, in the form of a “hum” that animates the air in which the 64 “Racconti” silently breathe".
On the second floor, a series of works on paper, entitled I tempi del disegno (2019), create a new relationship between the sign of the drawing and the paper. Paper is treated as a material sheet made of cellulose, marked, drawn and, lastly, cut: the line on the paper actually enters the paper.
