“Antonella Zazzera’s Sculpture” by Jacopo Ricciardi, 2010

The sculpture is not subjected to its surrounding space, but rather creates it. It creates its own space, and transforms real space into one of its secrets.

What Antonella Zazzera does with sculpture is not at all simple or trivial. She brings out the glow that is structured in the most intimate and secret background of the space. Zazzera reveals intact that precious harmony, the energetic center from which things radiate and show themselves.

Zazzera sculpts – and makes possible – the harmony that rests in the secret of the world, conserving its light. The loaded light travels trapped in the multiplicity of the cross-linked overlapping copper wires which are indeed united as a whole. This whole allows the glow to remain intact and to reveal its secret body in the light of day.

Zazzera sculpts what cannot be sculpted. She provokes and extracts, and brings to life the secret heart of the flame.

In that glow, which can not escape her sculpture’s light body, one finds the sweet and cruel call of human existence in this world.

When the multi-surface of the copper wires extends and has enough body, it bends and wraps itself. The light travels away from our eyes and the recess of the shadow, but then returns from the opposite side of the light body of the copper wires, charging it again with a celestial incandescence that seems to want to speak to us.

A sculpture without dimensions, the center of itself always. It appears light and suspended, standing in the space from itself, from that scattered glow that both creates and holds back it.

Behind the things, the spark ignites the image of the mind in nature.

A flame can descend from a branch without burning it and settle silently on the grass beneath, in the shade. There it can rest, traversing nature in silence.

The light is charged in the sculpture and is not dispersed. It is placed in contact with the natural space that reveals its excruciating wonder and a beauty that is so strong that it wounds. One cannot escape the world or its order.

The sun seems to be caught within the density of multiplying itself and ordering the copper wires. Yet, thus entrapped, it is extracted and shown the heart, that degree of light that penetrates, lights, explores and makes the mind live.

But even this complexity reaches an organic stage and recalls the electricity that passes from neuron to neuron in our brain. It feeds all that exists around us, without which the world as we experience it would not exist.

Here we are. A tension of existence is created, which passes through things. It does not mutate them but unites them in the myriad of potential relations which they hide from each other.

Antonella Zazzera’s sculpture is the interface that reconnects us to the world by showing us our patient and violent nature.

 

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