Gateano Cristino
From Pino Di Gennaro: The Arcane Metamorphosis of Materials
The sculpture of Pino Di Gennaro is characterised by shapes and spaces in which questions, memories, desires and prayers coagulate. The volumes of his works, open or closed, reveal not only the empowering and creative action of the artist, but also that of all of his and (ours) living drives. It is life itself that nourishes his plastic style and his extraordinary inventiveness with shapes that, if apparently abstract, thus far from a well defined realism, lead us well beyond appearance, going for substance, the intimal structure of things. The threshold towards which the artist takes us is a synesthesia between different types of knowledge. All five senses are involved in the perception of his works, he pushes us to take into account both the esprit de finesse and the esprit de geometrie.
Marina De Stasio
from The Development of Shape
In Di Gennaro’s work space enters sculpture, in the big panels or the discs or the sheets that create cosmic maps, and sculpture in its own way penetrates space and transforms it with the installations: those for example where the little, bright desert roses, mineral shapes recreated on the bronze surface, are arranged on the foundry ground, or on the anthracite dust. They are called Meteorites: stones on the ground or stones in the sky, the difference, we were saying, is unresolved.
Paola Gastaldi
from Pino Di Gennaro: Head-up Sculpture
…the imagination of the artist often draws from the cosmic dimension. Anything that happens well above our heads, at many kilometers distance from our capacity to perceive and control, it disorientates us deeply; eye and thought are not able to follow the sudden movements, apparently chaotic and multidirectional of star clusters, like the protruding ones from the sheets of the Mappa Stellare (Stellar Map), or the bronze of Tracce Spaziali (Space traces). Thus, like a Flemish painter eliminates the natural flaws of the human gaze and inverts the perspective, allowing the spectator to stare closely at every little detail of the painting, to penetrate the microscopic structure of things, also Di Gennaro takes us closer, like a powerful telescope, to what is almost invisible to our naked eye.
Guglielmo Gigliotti
from The Big Bang of Sculpture-Writing
Sculpture is a terrestrial creature, gravitational and volumetric, its nature thus stands ad odds with the orbital flotations of celestial objects, but Pino Di Gennaro has found a way to redeem it from its physical and historical limitations, he discovered how to liberate it from its sculptural conventions, by inventing Astro-plastics, a three-dimensional cosmography, the material-meteoritic landscape. In other words, Pino Di Gennaro has outlined a way to reinvent the universe with each one of his works, conceiving them as the writing of asemantic, imaginative signs, like an astronomic alphabet that follows an imaginary grammar, a glance at the universe from the telescope of the mind, a telescope that wants to get into things, to find another sky hidden somewhere.
Anna Maria Martino
from Colours and Shapes of the Soul
The works of sculptor Pino Di Gennaro are not static, they are dynamic and they express both thought and action, they are the inner journey of an artist that through them spells a life path that leads to the rediscovery of the eternal values of ‘doing and being’. He transforms material, moulding it, filling it up with the values and feelings of his soul, thus transforming and evolving himself.
His works are those of a an all-around artist, thus sublimating the universal values that mankind has been reaching out to from the beginning of time.
The artist expressed, through colours and shapes, our warm and welcoming Mediterranean character, the colours and shapes within it: the blue of our sky, the green of our charming hills, and the gold of our wheat fields.
Francesca Pensa
from Baghdad
In all these works some of the peculiar elements of the art of sculptor are evident: we are talking about artwork that – although presented in the different appearances given by colourful papier-machè, bright bronze, opaque lead – seems to be structured in the space and from the space, that becomes a real, determinant factor, and not just a lifeless, manipulated element. Sculptural material and space weld inextricably through movement, something Di Gennaro picked up from the remarkable skill of Boccioni; but where the Futurist master gave his sculptures a violent movement, that should have been the image of a perpetually upset universe, shocked by an endless dynamism, the work of Di Gennaro moves according to the harmonic trajectories of geometric pathways.
Roberto Sanesi
From Sagittae
I believe that the most evident and relevant effort, that comes to fulfill in the sculpture of Pino Di Gennaro is that of avoiding the ‘plastic’ question (the visual ‘weight’, connected to the intention to occupy space, to include it in the object, making it material for that object) to establish rather the paradox of a ‘sketched’ sculpture. Having material as tool and ‘subject’, in a single act, with the air and the space that the artist work bring through.
Francesco Tedeschi
from Fragments of Celestial Space.
The work of Pino Di Gennaro is part of a modern tradition and does not give in to the lure of an easier and more conceptual style, to face a sculptural language that start from a single piece, in its volumetric, plastic and spatial value. It does not stop though, Di Gennaro, to sculpture per se, he searches instead to relate it to the environment, to space as a physical place, and as metaphysical connotation. For some time the astronomic space, stars and infinity are the metaphor of an aerial, suspended location, of works that challenge the gravity law and are filled of the different possible meanings of the representation of astronomical objects.
