On the occasion of the twenty-second Giornata del Contemporaneo promoted by AMACI, Valente Cancogni opens his studio to the public. The Breath of Form continues here, in the place where the works are born, giving visitors the chance to meet sculpture before it becomes an exhibition object: among materials, tools, finished pieces and works still in progress.
Cancogni’s research starts from a principle as simple as it is radical: form is not imposed on matter, it is recognised when it appears. Terracotta, bronze, steel, marble and clay are not tools but interlocutors, and what the artist calls breath is precisely this exchange, the moment when matter stops being inert and begins to say something. The result is a practice that works by subtraction, removes the superfluous, leaves the marks of fingers and tools visible, and welcomes the unexpected rather than correcting it.
This edition’s theme, Geographies of the Contemporary, takes on an intimate meaning in the studio. The geographies these works explore are inner ones: the sea each of us carries and that never stands still, the question that turns on itself and rises, the gesture of diving into the unknown knowing there is no way back, the face that has not yet finished arriving.
Top Model, the work chosen as the image of the event, distils this sense. An eroded bronze, thinned to the very limit of mass, in which only the posture remains intact: a woman whose pose already contains the next step. The subject could not be more current, the runway; the sea-green patina makes it seem recovered from the sea, as old as a kore. It is the present seen as a place in motion, where what has just happened and what has lasted for millennia inhabit the same body.
The route presents a selection of recent works, including Top Model, [TO BE CONFIRMED: Tritone, Fiamme, Tuffo, Testa nascente, Il piccolo principe], alongside earlier pieces that trace the passage from the full figure to the archetypal form.
The artist will be present throughout the opening and will guide visitors through the works and the processes behind them.
Free admission.
