Inventories

Critique sheet

Preceded by an action of investigation and recovery in the streets that have become the scene of encounters with a fragmented and marginal reality, Igino Panzino’s boxed works – brought together under the name Inventari (Inventories ) – lend themselves to infinite considerations and are arranged like a small semantic inventory.

The kind Panzino has been accustomed to since the 1980s. Only here, the finds are no longer the regular, orderly pieces of paper stapled together in a refined play of shadows, but unpredictable remnants of humble and poor consistency, collected occasionally and becoming a concrete and tangible symbol of a reality unknown in its entirety.

Like the poet who works on words and searches for their truest substance by stripping them of the superfluous, so the artist goes to the heart of things and intuits the secret they conceal. Thus the small and banal findings undergo an evident metamorphosis and are transformed into unusual talismans, into devices of heightened sense of composition that become a light, delicate, visual lyric. At the heart of the plastic compositions, in three-dimensional structures of shifting planes, a fragment of the real is enclosed. Feathers, stones, shards, twigs, nets, torn papers become, in the compositional structure, symbolic signs of an intellectual wandering that meditates on what appears negligible, on the apparent uselessness of forms, on the discards of everyday life, in short on what constitutes the essence of things once their original function has been exhausted.

critical text by Mariolina Cosseddu.

Biography

Igino Panzino, lives and works in Sassari. Here he studied at the Art Institute, under the direction of Mauro Manca, as a pupil of Aldo Contini, Paola Dessy, Gaetano Pinna and Giovanna Secchi. In the ideologised climate of the 1970s, he began his activity as an artist, which materialised in the first collective exhibition entitled ‘Geografia/4’, held in Rome at Sylvia Franchi’s Artivisive gallery, an investigation into peripheral artistic realities. At the end of the 1970s, he joined the Gruppo della Rosa, founded by Aldo Contini and with a strong conceptual imprint. The neo-constructivist language runs through his entire career, even in his more recent public works from the late 1990s onwards. Panzino has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions, in public and private spaces in Italy and abroad.

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