There is something stubborn about the way wire takes shape. A composite, repetitive production – as if to seek out, revive a hazy obsession through the repetition of images.
And Art Gallery,
Contrà Frasche del Gambero 17,
Vicenza
There is something stubborn about the way wire takes shape. A composite, repetitive production – as if to seek out, revive a hazy obsession through the repetition of images.
The lines traced by wire cut through space with precision; like the thread that the Fates, aloof and exact, spin in the shadows. Every curve, every tension, every knot is a silent presence that resonates in the mind of the viewer, in the air split and crossed by the wire, unrecognisable and familiar at the same time – like destiny, which repeats itself in different forms but is always recognisable to those who pause long enough to notice.
The objects inhabiting these sculptures are familiar. A chair, a table, a lamp: the furnishings of an ideal space, reduced to pure intention. The wire does not imitate, it does not deceive; it reveals the hidden structure of things, what holds them together before they are covered by material and rendered opaque – just as the thread of life runs invisibly beneath the surface of every existence, becoming tangled where we cannot see, snapping where we least expect it. The void between the wires is as meaningful as the material itself: it is the space that gives meaning to form, the breath that makes the vision possible. Removing the material does not detract from the object but liberates it, restoring it to its original concept.
The household object, so familiar in daily life, here becomes transparent, see-through. The ideal space that houses these sculptures is not physical: it is a threshold between recognising something and seeing it for the first time, between living and knowing how to live. The lamp does not illuminate, but is itself light. The table supports nothing, and yet props up a whole idea of coexistence. The chair seats no one, and yet retains the memory of a body that was, that might return – like a thread that slackens without breaking, held by hands we cannot see. Every object is a memory that has taken shape, a presence built on shadow.
The coherence of this work lies in the partial gaze, in the subtle balance between suggested volumes and the slightest chiaroscuro; a visual grammar that reveals how, by constantly passing things by, we become blind to their complexity, to the materiality we glimpse in everyday objects only absent-mindedly, without ever being truly present. It takes works like these to remind us that looking is not the same as seeing, that familiarity is often the subtlest form of blindness.
Figures shrouded in a silence laden with meaning leave traces of an existence that is fragile, yet resilient: everything speaks of an absence that is also a form of faithfulness, of a loss that does not give up its form. The humble wire, pliable but tenacious, invites us to seek our own shadow line: that time in childhood when we approached the world without thoughts or prejudices, when everything was still whole and awe-inspiring in its newness. When the boundary between things and their essence had not yet been drawn. A tapestry of forms that no one can touch, but that everyone somehow feels, because the wire does not lead us forward: it leads us home.
Nicola Bertoldo
