“Antonella Zazzera. Copper and the goddes Venus” by Viviana Tessitore, 2006
In mythology and alchemy, copper has come to be associated with the goddess Venus. In fact, it is the symbol used by alchemists to represent that copper is the same as that used by astrologers to represent the planet Venus. Moreover, the goddess Venus, born from the sea, moved to the island of Cyprus, an island that is the principal extractive copper region. It is important to remember that, after the Sun and the Moon, Venus is the most luminous object of the sky. The result is a perfect connection between harmony and extraordinary gleam. Light captures the copper, or viceversa, and everything takes life. Everything “condensed in the curve point” and in pursuit of “instant Harmonic” that the copper interweaves. It creates a very thin nervous system and in its continual expansion and multiplication it makes material, object and sculpture. This is Antonella Zazzera. A multiplying hand that makes tangible what can not be tangible: light, glow, reverberations and reflections.
It is a story that finds its beginning in a plate of Vetronite (fiberglass). On this surface, Antonella began to work. She subtly attacked it, performed signs and incisions, she scratched and minutely dug until, in a small visual miracle, she captured everything in photography. And so, through the sensitivity of the photographic film, that which cannot be perceived with the naked eye was made extraordinarily visible.
Photographs were born like gems, with images that look like broken glass in the colors of imperial topaz, where the brownish yellow mixes with the splendid warmth of the orange. Step by step, the impalpable became concrete matter, to the point that the signs turned into real copper threads. Antonella has spoken about the materialization of the photographic track markers and her precise goal: to make light corporeal, taking the light that we see in her photograph works to achieve a real solidification.
Only copper, an extraordinary energy and heat conductor, could satisfy this desire. A very ancient material, copper is able to intercept and return. It is ductile and malleable and allows for skilled hands to intertwine, weave and overlap it. With an immense confidence in the curved line, Antonella’s works are composed of threads wrapped around each other, intertwined and composed in different directions. These threads are sometimes very thin and sometimes very thick. They are pure and uncontaminated lines that compact and form “carpets” of amber reverberations. There is the appearance of calm in which everything is moved by rustling and trembling reddish overtones, drapes that rely on the barely perceptible variations of color on color, fabrics whose sculpture is thickened and lightened through the diversity of light and form. They sprout from the walls and grow from the corners. They rest on the floors and reach the edges. Each of its elements admirably manages to inhabit “the void of space”.
There has been talk of sculptures capable of emanating energy that find maximum splendor if “struck” by sunlight. Antonella loves to exhibit her works outdoors, laying them on grassy lawns and making sure that the natural green threads take refuge in the dense weaving and find space in and between the wefts. The work is left to invade and contaminate. It is subjected to the interference of other bodies, so that (in the magic of opposites!) the shine of the metal can unite with the opaque green of the grass. The space managed by the artist has been called a “super-space” and its matter called “hypermatter”, appropriate terms to define the pursuit and careful and almost “maniacal” work of this very young artist. Antonella heralds from the Academy of Fine Arts in Perugia and has already been awarded the DopArt Painting Award by Piero Dorazio and Graziano Marini. This year with the work “Harmonic XXI” (which will become part of the academic collection), Antonella was the winner of the 2005 edition of the Young Person Award 2005 – Sculpture,, awarded in Rome by the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca. Pietro Cascella presided over the jury and the committee included Nicola Carrino, Angela Cipriani, Carlo Lorenzetti and Pia Vivarelli. The other finalists included Carlo Bernardini, Matteo Berra and Patrizia Murazzano.