“Antonella Zazzera” by Lara Conte, 2012
In Antonella Zazzera’s work, it is as if there is not a before and after, or a beginning and an end. Her creativity is situated in a fluid dimension, where the boundaries are evanescent, uncertain and not necessary. Thus the sign – that sign which Antonella herself defines as “Segnotraccia” – meets the copper in its own natural and necessary propensity and becomes a sculptural experience. “Copper retraces the discoveries of man. It proposes again the whole and brief life that it has in space and in the whole of reality. Copper’s brevity and intensity are noted and found in history. Through the thread, we have conversion. Conversion in this case is art”, Mario Merz memorably wrote. In the same way Antonella, through copper, explores the becoming, starting from the zero degree, from that archetypal and ancestral gesture of patiently weaving the thread of different thickness and chromatic gradation through a slow process of overlapping and sedimentation that brings matter back to time. The time of experience and memory.
In the magical paradox of creation, the work reveals itself to its author during the creation, so that the vocation to form is only apparent and misleading. It is, once again, unnecessary. Indeed, it is in the most accidental encounter of form with light that the work reveals its true essence. It is situated here and now in space. It contaminates it in a total way, and, at the same time, it vibrates ancient harmonies of memory.
In this journey, the sign is traced to the search for sculpture, preserving in itself a profound memory of different experiences of the art of the past. “When I work, I have in mind Divisionism, Segantini and Previati’s large paintings, Futurist painting, Balla’s studies on light and also those of Dorazio”, Antonella explains. There are other specific roots which nourish Antonella’s “Segnotraccia”: Fontana’s neon that hovers in the air and becomes a space for sculpture, the sign-writing that transports the informel beyond the informal, calling in discussion the boundaries between languages and geographical horizons. As happens in Antonella’s sculptures and papers that live in the precarious equilibrium, or rather in the continuity (of fullness and emptiness, of shadow and light), in that “curve” Antonella defines the foundation of her creation: to unite earth and sky, self and world.