Boundless amber seas lay on Tuscan ground in summer: splendour of wheat and sunflowers that, enlightened, become vexillum of a land, mother of civilization, knowledge and expression, nevertheless daughter of the exertion and devotion of those who have walked there. In an ancient cottage, among hills, upon those inestimable expanses where community works wearily every day, in Castiglion Fiorentino, Monday 2nd July 1962, a child was born; his emotional path would have turned him into one of most astonishing innovators of visual arts of XXI century: Andrea Roggi.
Roggi spends his childhood in the Tuscan countryside and he is educated according to traditional values that make him a playful and spontaneous boy, anyway he constantly looks over the cultural horizon that surrounds him: he deeply feels the necessity to externalize some intuitions, so ineffable that they cannot be expressed by words. He is frequently hit by the implacable desire to communicate to the whole world what he perceives, sensing the indefinable perception to possess the key to transcend semantic language. During his adolescence, Roggi studies numerous disciplines – from painting to chemistry, from metallurgy to poetry – searching untiringly the meaning of his inspiration: for the young man is synesthetic the conception of a luminous ray, between love and creativity, that connects every living being, as a unique entity. However, theoretical analysis is not enough for the copiousness of Roggi’s fantasy, thus he begins to travel.
He visits the most important Italian cities of art, receiving the measure of aesthetics and elegance, moreover in Florence – in the same way of Stendhal and De Chirico – he is affected by a shocking vision that indelibly changes him. Once in the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella, Roggi feels the mysterious energy of his disquietude, carrying him in front of Holy Trinity – a fresco by Renaissance painter Masaccio, who lived into Tuscan countryside – revealing to his soul the fundamental essence of his intimate tension.
Roggi realizes to be himself the answer to his questions; he realizes to be himself the key that he was looking for. He understands to keep inside the pulsating tissue of his thoughts, the nodal substance of Tuscan spirit and to be able to elevate it to eternal paradigmatic symbol, thanks to the interests he developed year after year. Roggi comprehends that superfine facets and physical concreteness, the gentleness and the strength of irreplaceable emotions, common among human beings, thus contradictory but unavoidably evident, can be shaped only through sculpture. Back from his journey, the artist frequents for some months sculptor Enzo Scatragli’s studio to improve his technique. Thanks to his knowledge, Roggi constructs his studio with his own hands, creating essential tools for the lost-wax-fusion of bronze – Etruscan method of metal manufacture – such as the furnace, the forge and the melting pot.
In 1991, after many practical experimentations and thanks to a superb technical preparation and the vivid ambition to continue the route indicated by Humanist maestros, Roggi inaugurates his workshop, baptizing it The sculpture of Andrea Roggi. That place – a smithery of innovation and ideas – soon becomes a lively artistic space in Valdichiana, welcoming apprentices from all over the world; only the bests remain with the sculptor to help him to model the hugest artworks. There, Roggi creates his sculptures, personally participating in every production phase, from theoretical conceiving to conclusive completion.
Ten years after the opening of the workshop, the Tuscan Maestro has consolidated his fame, having crossed national borders, in fact his sculptures have been required from all over the world. Despite his personal and economic success, Roggi feels the urgency to spread his love for art and his philanthropy, thus he decides to found the Park of Creativity, suggestive garden, decorated with some of the most significative artworks, shaped in the close studio. Thus, the Park of Creativity becomes theatre of the cultural movement Art for Young – instituted by Roggi himself – aimed to accost young people to art and help emergent artists to extend their reputation and find their way.
During the years, the Movement has been developed – according to the artist’s intention – in a series of autumnal events, hosted at the Park, which have turned in a kaleidoscopic exchange of perspectives and hopes, consecrating that place as the intellectual heart of the whole valley. During the following twenty years, Roggi’s art has duly evolved but it has never lost its coherency and character that, since its dawn, have distinguished the trait. As the sculptures, even the studio has prospered thank to the construction on site of an avant-garde atelier and, later, of a series of art gallery, The Circle of Life – Art Galleries, situated in the most evocative Tuscan villages, as San Gimignano, Pietrasanta and Cortona.
The poetry of the Maestro has reached even more distant destinations through collaboration with a lot of different international art galleries, placed in European metropolises such as London, Paris and Rotterdam, and in America and Asia. After 2015, the inexhaustible dynamism of Roggi’s mind has brought a surprising regeneration of his own activity, enlarging the attention for the primary matter, from bronze to marble – according to the noble memory of Renaissance sculptors. The skilled hand of the Maestro has elevated the stone to concept: the candid Trees of Life – exquisite sculptures, exposed in some artist’s boutiques – proof that. Nowadays Roggi follows the dreams he had since he was a child, incarnating the exemplar of fine contemporary artist, keeper of Renaissance and Romantic heritages, dearly chained to his native land, Tuscany, but sincerely always looking to the future.
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