Critics
A sculpture addressed to the man, to his feelings.
It is not correct to say that critical texts are factious conjectures, at the most these are interpretative assumptions of a language that the artist has considered congenial to the construction of his creative path. The nature (things and people) had its origins perhaps only, and I say it by jesting, to be reproduced: the wonder, the fear were such at the origins, that the man is obliged to appeal to cautious imitation and, subsequently, to transfigurations. Each element had to be filtered by knowledge and sensitivity, exterity and melancholy, in order to be able to come back to life a second time, perhaps inside a canvas or a piece of marble.
That the work of art continues to remain secret
and mysterious falls within the order of things, as
well as a God has to remain secret and mysterious.
A saint asked himself: “Is it God who would be
the one letting the others know his own mystery?”
But the artist is condemned to live his research
of mediation and transfiguration: the reality is only
an excuse, a gratifying provocation which has
value for the sentimental symbologies that we put
and recognize in it. The history of the languages
is only the documentation of the handmade articles
that reality suggested and suggest to man in order
to signify an existential season typical of a
civilization, peculiar, and obviously this implies that
the variables which participates in the events are
infinite, and the results astonishing. From the
origins the darkness of the tam-tam of the forest
arrived until the light of Beethoven’s Ninth, and
the graffiti of the caves got as far as the language
of the Sistine Chapel. Each artist always introduced
himself in his own artistic work, so that to rejoin
with nature by donating to it his creative synergy
and by stealing from it neutral meanings that it
already contained. The stone gives its inner idol:
it is the task of the artist to remove it from its
darkness and to give it back to other meanings.
In Versilia the marble of the Apuan Alps was used
as noble catalyzer for artists of all over the world
and of all the times, starting from Nicola and
Giovanni, and then from Michelangelo, who used
to come to Versilia to be the “Masters of the pulley
block”: here exist the forge and the fusions, here
lives the world of the projects and of the perfect
execution.
To pass by Pietrasanta means to put
ourselves listening to the creative rigour, to the
sign of the fantasy held out to its creative freedom.
Here also Eugenio Riotto came to work, with his
past of worker occupied in various efforts, of
researcher of experiences suiting his feeling. His
memory is constantly devoted to the human
shaping, to the modulation of female bodies caught
in their intimate and extreme delicacy, neither
perturbed by interior hells nor projected inside
ephemeral sequences of life: it passes through it
a naïvety that arises from far away and that relates
to the simple feelings of a common existence.
The plaster with its whiteness participates in the
game of the shapes, and the coatings create the
silence of the surfaces where the frequent absence
of the arms brings the bust to keep more intense
meanings, but also the pain for some lack, forsome impossible gift of its own entirety.
The “Lovers” combine their forms in only one bodily
fusion, which emphasizes their sensuality, while
the “Kiss” rises to a purity of vision precisely by
virtue of the disjunction of the two bodies, with
the roundness of its limbs invaded by the same
desire. It is almost always implicit a deep affection,
and it is true that the anonymity of the faces –
stylized in their roundness –takes away the
possibility of examining thoroughly the
psychologies of the characters, but it makes rising
to an essential category an “imagined” and still
secret expression. And since I saw excellent
charcoals and mixed media for portraits of ancient
figures – testifing his descriptively analytical
capability in faces and hands – I am obliged to
think that the stylization of the heads is only a
stylistic device in function of a greater purity, with
a note of a spurce, formal secretiveness. It could
be noticed also in “Fatherhood”, where the child
does not find arms to receive him, almost in order
to accentuate an affective “lack”, which the delicate
execution would not seem to confirm, while “The
Awaiting” modulates the bodies of the composition
according to a scansion of the spaces, that smacks
of distress and existential restlessness. Similar to
“Woman’s thought” where the imagined thought
is combined with a discretion expressed with
elegance but also with a secret male vigour. It
comes out a “tale” of remarkable, formal interest,
a confession of nudes open to the serenity of the
donation of themselves, to the suggestion of their
exposure in delightfulness. Something unifies and
something divides these bivalent figures, brimming
over with an energy available to the continuous
embrace and to the indifference, also when they
seem to divide and withdraw themselves, always
united though by an original and blood bond,
which brightens up the purity of forms and colors.
In these sculptures it is prevailing the presence
of a very tender, loving spirit, a sculpture almost
apart, far away from the “isms” of the avantegardes,
which in Pietrasanta have anyway found
ideal sites and notable approvals.
If Riotto did not want to abandon the reference
to the human figure, he certainly owes it to an
education of his acquired in the workshops and
in the studios of those masters who were close
to him, in the South, in France, and elsewhere.
He did not forget certain sculpture of the
nineteenth-century, and also Messina and Greco
fascinated him in their primary forms – neither the
primitive invention nor the non-representational
eccentricity attracted him. Therefore he remains
bound to his original and eternal affections, and
by working he becomes the continuer of a vision
that stays strictly coherent to his world. With the
hope that it would become customary to him also
the sculpture as “art in taking away”, as people
used to say in the sixteenth century, in such a
way that the chisel could become a restless
researcher of the subterranean veins of the stone:
“by taking away the superfluous” Vasari used to
say, the “concept” is created, that is, the thought
and wanted work, and moreover, I add, it will be
easier to testify with the forms – besides the delicate flirtation – also the cruelties present in
nature and life.
Different is the matter when Riotto comes to the point to treat the “basrelief”, which Leonardo considered to be superior than the “full relief”, and in which the plastic representation rises a bit from the bottom level. In these basreliefs Riotto seems to go back – as it should be – to the pictorial surfaces, where, besides the considered “realities”, even the perspectives shade themselves. The basreliefs allow the narration of the stories, with now lower then higher shapes, sometimes with even sunk or raised bottom surfaces. And Riotto uses them to get closer to newer shapes, with the addition of mechanical and naturalistic elements (wheels, stars, shells, balls, flowers, etc.), in such a way that a complex tale would be generated, a sea of elements in contrast with each other: he refers to a war of distinct or contrary things (“Mediterranean”) or he retrieves animals and devices with remote, ancient symbols (“Egypt”) or he tries a rejection of the increasing mechanism in favour of a poetic “humanitas” (humanity), which would try to survive in the signs, in the lines modulated on the surface, with a bitterness that was extraneous to it in his loving works.
It is here that stands out his
indignation for a not shared social system, where
the mechanization and the materiality prevail: the
open hands or a fist indicate a sign of fight and
of defense against the arrival of the brutality
triggered off by polluted productive paths.
Everything is inclined to balance itself according
to spaces distributed with an established mental
order, in name of a modernity that seems wanting
to add itself – as a moral necessity – to the previous
figurative work all dedicated to love.
We wish to Riotto a continuous re-examination
of his work in view of further creative richness and
drama of vision.
March 2004
Dino Carlesi