allafinedellarcobaleno (attheendoftherainbow)

Critique sheet

The solo exhibition dedicated to the Ligurian sculptor Alex Pinna displays a collection of works that investigate the concept of nature using different canons and hybrid languages. These are either stuffed mice that invade the museum spaces – inviting visitors to play and interact with an artist who continues to remain a child and a Pied Piper – or large threadlike sculptures and wall-mounted works that recall the poetics of recent years. “The move away from the colourful and unreal spectrum of the fantasy world of the first production,” writes Fenu, “has become more and more marked and the relationship with nature and with life in general has become more intimate, fragile and melancholic: a world of lines that acquire the concreteness of form without losing the lightness of the sign, lyrical fragments of a precarious existential condition, like leaves. They are beings elongated to the limit of the possible, almost filiform, consubstantial to a leaf, precisely, at once home and world, sometimes uterine, sometimes a springboard towards an impassable and feared void. Beings that have an ancient history and noble fathers: from the most mysterious Etruria to Giacometti, from the graphism of the endless alphabets of Emilio Scanavino – also from Liguria – to the precarious and dancing balances of Calder, to arrive at the oblique, metaphysical, absolute spaces, catalysts of worlds and of a suspended time, inhabited by the hybrid and androgynous creatures of Gino De Dominicis, for whom art, as for Alex Pinna, was and remains a magical act. Bronzes, wood, rope, fabric and even leaves dominate the interior of the Museo Organica. They are silent but not mute materials, in their turn and in their own way ‘organic’ that impose meditation and sharing, a participation free from a certain mannerist environmentalism that induces the observer to become bronze, wood, rope or leaf and to listen.

Biography

Alex Pinna (Imperia 1967) lives and works in Milan. Having graduated in painting from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, where he now holds the chair of sculpture, he immediately focused his production on sculpture using heterogeneous materials. He began exhibiting in 1993, participating in solo and group exhibitions in numerous Italian and international galleries and public spaces. Abroad, his work has been presented in Shanghai, Tel Aviv, London, New York, Los Angeles, Monte Carlo, Cologne and Lugano. His latest exhibitions include: ‘Time’ at the Museum of Archaeology of the University of Pavia (2023), ‘Sali’ at the Port of Tropea (2020), ‘Twixt Land & Sea: Tales” at Palazzo Bevilacqua Ariosti in Bologna (2018), “Estate Italiana” at the MOAH in Lancaster, California (2017), “Biennale le latitudini dell’arte” at the Vigado Museum, Budapest (2017) and “Ti guardo, mi guardo” at the Rocco Guglielmo Foundation in Catanzaro (2012), “Italian Sculpture of the 20th Century” at the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation, Milan (2010).

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