The sky at my fingertips
Pino Di Gennaro’s solo exhibition, held for the twentieth anniversary of the Previtali Gallery in Milan, takes its title from his sculpture The sky at my fingertips (‘Tocco il cielo con le dita’, dated 2018), which perfectly captures the poetic essence of an abstract thought that has been made matter. This way of making sculpture is based on the relationship between brain, eye, and hand in the way they approach the immaterial and describe an imaginary journey from Nature to the Cosmos.
His skilled hands work to give shape to a symbolic element that is already contained within matter and is able to touch different aspects of existence, while alternating between ‘adding’ and ‘removing’ material. An established and respected craftsman and sculptor, a student of Alik Cavaliere in the early seventies and Arnaldo Pomodoro in the following decade, two masters who have shaped him without devouring him. He proves as much in this exhibition, in which he explores and conquers ascending geometries, semantic forests charged with tactile and material tensions as they research new spatial possibilities. Our gaze is led upwards while, here on Earth, matter is manipulated so as to transfigure Nature’s deeper meanings, as an integral part of the Cosmos, though never imitating them.
Such an artist, analytical and meticulous in his ways, is capable of bringing together the dreamlike and the real, activating whole flows of energy through his vital touch. Wax thus becomes bronze, papier-mâché, and other materials, in order to materialise his now germinating cosmic compositions. Concave and convex sculptures come into being, vertical and horizontal, ever-changing, metamorphic. Nature and Cosmos are here convergent, like heaven and earth, night and day, juxtapositions that counterpoint and complement each other.
This exhibition stages a metaphorical act of blessing through works of such volatile lightness, of such alternating presence and subtraction, of such contrast in light and shadow, that bronze can appear to be papier-mâché, and vice versa. In this gallery, in the outskirts of Milan, Di Gennaro goes beyond the material by creating an imaginary space in which he himself is transformed. Nothing here is as it seems.
Di Gennaro is known for his bronze sculptures, favouring the material for its ductility. Through a selection of works produced from the year 2000 to the present day, the exhibition is an expression of his constructive vocation for plastic forms of an airy and rhythmic lightness, in which the artist can place himself in relation to the gallery’s spaces. Stepping away from the city’s chaos, fast-paced and overly dynamic, the artist finds time to listen to the natural world and the cosmos, and draw from a dimension transcending human existence.
With underlying references to Klein, Di Gennaro dovetails endings with new beginnings, and life on the surface, the Milanese gallery, to what dwells below, deep in the earth; like a note on a musical score, each sculpture traces essential and mysterious geometries, variable graphisms, in their flights of fancy towards what is infinite.
Millefiori (2023/24), a group of small polychrome ceramic sculptures, can be paired with another installation, Clipboard (‘Appunti’, 2013/17), in which bronze and papier-mâché tiles of various sizes put us in mind of a mosaic. These single elements are articulated within the space through extraordinarily balanced and varied compositions, as if representing musical rhythms. We find a similar spatial effect in the marvellous new series titled Cells (‘Alve-ari’). Here, pigmented wax structures display a range of luminous variations and juxtaposed abstract markings: their contrasting colours and material inserts evoke vital possibilities by remaining deliberately nondetermined, in an inscrutable array of geometry and poetry that would have fascinated Paul Klee.
Prayers (‘Preghiere’, 2000) evoke the scrolls one may find in a remote Buddhist temple, a tribute to primitive and magical writing and its compositional beauty and complexity. The polymaterial concoctions we behold cause us to reflect upon the relationship between man and nature, engaged in a dialogue with the cosmos.
Having abandoned the Informal style that had marked his early works, Di Gennaro began experimenting with different pigments and materials, now mainly preferring wax and papier-mâché for their sustainability. He thus takes a stand and aligns himself among those artists currently engaged with environmental issues, against the causes and devastating effects of the Anthropocene. One notable example is his installations centred on bees, guardians of our ecosystem.
In exploring resilient lifeforms, Di Gennaro embeds an element of moral intersubjectivity in his works, one that is based on the ethics of sharing with the audience; an active part of his works, it models what can be understood as an ecology of the spirit, one that is threatened by a stifling overabundance of images made possible by digital media. To get in touch once more with the works of art beyond their visual fruition is an act of resistance against the dematerialisation and the dark variables of AI. And if the sky “is at my fingertips”, I too can partake of its endless expanse.
Without being peremptory, Di Gennaro presents us with a mindset involving nurturing our own existential and spiritual dimension, one that can instruct us on how to better transversally re-think the world so that the higher heavens are crowned with trees, whose roots are grounded in ultramarine, where entities transcending the natural world as we know it can freely germinate. In the landscape of such a paradox, we are all connected to nature and the powers of the universe.
Honey Tree (‘L’Albero del Miele’, 2023) is particularly striking, juxtaposing a golden rectangle with a perforated cobalt blue square that is not unlike Lucio Fontana’s ‘holes’. Here, a small window frames a microscopic golden honey tree; this symbol of universal life bears a clear ecological message, and stands as a meditative icon for an imaginary Eden, urgently essential in this day and age. But Di Gennaro also finds time to amuse himself by subverting codes, as in Past the heavens, trees (‘Sopra il cielo gli alberi’), dated 2019, in which the sky is spangled with trees, and not stars. Sea blue, the limitless cosmos blue papier-mâché and metal describe life in its calm and metaphysical immobility; such blue are the trees that touch the sky and inscribe themselves in the space between one shadow and another. The tree is a recurring motif in Gennaro’s works, and is parallel to his columns, his Pillars of Heaven (‘Pilastri del Cielo’, 2001/2011), and his ‘ascension’ sculptures, totem-like, like coral reefs nourishing a new world that will someday come to be.