Pino Di Gennaro’s themes bring to light with immediacy utterly original and autonomous visual results. We are talking here of a plastic art that presents a relevant variety of solid, chromatic materials, developed in three-dimensional narratives and scenes of spaces that escape physical limitations, developing into complex volumes made of undulations, scans, fouling, strains to verticality, mysterious sign paths of archaic reminescence.
Here we find a remarkable sensibility for manipulation, the ability to craft, beyond the traditional methods, interesting plastic structures in which a diverse range of primary and compositional elements – bronze, steel, aluminum, polyester, wax and even papier-mâché – are blended into a metamorphic flow where materials often melt into a unique whole, the result of which reaches levels of expression of extreme, cultivated refinement.
In the expressive context of abstraction, Di Gennaro bets on the shapeless shape, being convinced of the elective affinities of his materials, that become a whole, heading towards truth and aesthetic issues that represent, somehow, a very contemporary way of living life.These sculptures are the objects created in response to perceptions that are connected to a macro-cosmic and not so man-friendly nature. When bronze depicts a great astral circle, referencing emblematically a solar Moon, if papier-mâché pays tribute to the magic and primitive writing of graffiti, or when the sculptural mass rises in all its grand and complex structures like an imaginative and thought-provoking architecture, in all these scenarios the sculptor manages to communicate with a sense of fresh lightness.
The unusual results to which these poly-material blends – that constitute the most salient feature of the visibility and abstract recognition of a wise artist – seem to want to leave room for reflections on a man imprisoned by unsolvable questions, and on the un-understandable distance between his own ephemeral absence and the indifferent universe surrounding him. Against the crisis of our language and culture, Di Gennaro intervenes with the uncertainty of abstraction, adopting an informal style, with figurative allusions, opting for an allegoric vision where the sculptural mass is testimony to the necessity of men to live of energy and light. He thus fulfills his idea of creation, measuring at times its incommensurable entirety, fragmenting it at times, into infinite smallness, reestablishing in his own way the Pascalian say that puts man half way through two grand and abyssal infinities. All of this research starts from formal, recognizable presumptions, to get into a spectacular definition of the cosmic space, recognizable through the alphabet of astronomic science, then translated into a poetic, youthful, energetic language. The transformation of bronze and wax thus become the ritual acts of the aesthetic acceptance of a mystery, that leaves room to helpless astonishment and contemplation.
The vibrate modeling of the shapes and colours unveils an artist of deep emotions, able to master a quite persuasive chromatic and volumetric peremptoriness. His sculpture draws a map to a terrestrial and astral journey, that seems to suggest a rational order, and thus a static interpretation of the gravitational attractions that belong to the cosmic laws and – the analogy is inevitable – to human passion.
From: “Le Scelte di Sgarbi” (Sgarbi’s choices) by Vittorio Sgarbi, published by Giorgio Mondadori Editore, 2004
