On the occasion of the 900th anniversary of the history of the free Municipality of Arezzo and the millennium of Guido Monaco's birth, we had the precious opportunity to place some of Andrea Roggi's most ingenious sculptures in the exquisite Sala del Sottochiesa of S. Francesco in Arezzo, exceptionally granted by the Soprintendenza ai Beni A.A. of Arezzo. This important artistic and creative event was dedicated to contemporary art in the land of Arezzo.
The exhibition, organised with the patronage and contribution of the Municipality and the Province of Arezzo, was inaugurated by the Director and the Municipality's Culture Department on Thursday, 22 October 1998. It was on that very occasion that we encouraged Andrea in his extraordinary work of modelling in clay the face depicting the 'great Roberto', a fellow countryman of Manciano; Andrea's Michelangelo-esque genius was already planning the creation of a large bronze statue to be placed in his town! On the occasion of the solemn celebrations for the important anniversary, the Municipality of Arezzo had invited Roberto Benigni on several occasions, but at that time the well-known actor was on a long tour in the United States to promote his film 'LA VITA E' BELLA'.
But in the meantime, Benigni's head, a sculptural work by Andrea Roggi, had conquered the headlines on local television and in the newspapers, but above all the people's sympathy... Andrea's perseverance and indomitable character achieved their first successes! From his skill came the first sketches of the statue and the numerous plaster casts... Meanwhile, Roberto won the Oscar, the smile and the sympathy of the whole world; finally, in the first days of May '99, the formidable bronze statue dedicated to Roberto Benigni came to light from the crucible of a well-known local artistic foundry.
Andrea Roggi is still young, Tuscan, and was born in Castiglion Fiorentino near Arezzo in 1962. He started painting in 1977, the transition to sculpture was gradual, but from the beginning he preferred to give his paintings a spatial configuration.
He does not belong to any school, as any conscious artist is very familiar with contemporary currents, but he is fascinated by the figure, by man. From his works, along with a strong plasticity, emanates a rarefied atmosphere, as if they belonged to a world that is both known and mysterious. This seems to us to be true art, which is not a craft, even if it makes use of the refinement of technique.
Art and emotion that becomes a message and therefore somehow rationality. Not the cold one of the philosopher or the somewhat boring one of the moralist. The rationality of art consists in communicating a state of mind that grasps, in its own way, the complexity of reality and transmits it to the viewer of a work. An emotional rationality that is not only an inner vibration, but also an understanding of the mystery of life.
Andrea Roggi has entered this artistic short-circuit; he manages to infuse his works with an expressive force and a fascination of forms that are transmitted with immediacy to those who admire them. The long formal tradition that belongs to Tuscan art, from Cimabue to the present day, is also manifested in him. His are finished forms, communicative and of immediate perception. That they also contain a diffuse sense of mystery is the unmistakable sign of his genius.
ANDRE ROGGI AND MARTIN KATZ
ENERGY OF LIFE FLORENCE
sa pulvinar et - sed dapibus donec lorem nunc eget nisi acmollis mattis arcu.
Proin id eros tempus, commodo dolor vel, lacinia nulla. Maecenas vel elit id dui blandit vehicula. Cras efficitur tempus vulputate. Integer sit amet dolor magna. Nulla egestas aliquet leo, eget sagittis elit faucibus ac. Aenean tempus nisl est, eget cursus massa pulvinar et. Morbi sed dapibus urna. Donec lorem nunc, condimentum eget nisi ac, mollis mattis arcu. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
Morbi vel dictum est. Duis vel sagittis risus. Proin tincidunt, leo vitae suscipit venenatis, libero augue posuere elit, in consequat lacus felis eu tortor. Vivamus vitae elementum ex, a porttitor nulla. Proin eget nulla enim.
Giving life to inert matter is a divine exercise that has always attracted and intrigued every sculptural artist. And the call of a genesis that has left its marks in the heart of the deepest cells.
It's as good a way as any to remind us that we are all at heart the product of a strange mixture, a crazy mixture of mud and stars. And that is why so, in that desperate attempt to manipulate matter, there is an act of great rebellion. One does not surrender to what is done, finished, accomplished, and one would like to redesign oneself, to explode in the universe above the skin, the thousand figures that dwell within the soul, to subvert orders, to overwhelm new universes and thus rebel, in a brazen way, against the laws that have always governed us. And in this journey towards the invisible goal, what exists is copied, a still emotion is depicted, frozen in time. But what we find in Andrea Roggi's works is perhaps something more, in them there is the drive of an inner energy that explodes until it freely penetrates the light itself, illuminating the air.
Like dancers who, at the height of their exertion, dance and hover in the air until they lose weight and merge with the sky, so the figures of this young artist from Castiglion Fiorentino, seem to naturally oppose the strong calls of the earth. Each of Roggi's figures presents transgressions. How else can one explain those geometries that transfigure the already perfectly harmonious and soft face of a woman to the point of making it even more beautiful? How else could one interpret those hairstyles that make the hair pierce the air, or that beautiful bronze that he calls 'Dream' and which shows us a portion of the female body that almost has the power to excite the observer's senses? If it weren't for those marks, those fingerprints so deliberately visible, but also so reassuring, that want to remind the beholder that life is elsewhere and that what they have in front of them is just fantasy that has become a body.
Travertine that becomes fertile landscape. Chromed tubes intersecting with stone and bronze, figures merging in a fertile attempt to fly into the oneiric. (...): Not to be missed above all to understand in his most beautiful works his most profound message, which he unwillingly confessed verbally: 'I am only trying to escape this destiny'.
Andrea Roggi is a sculptor. A problematic definition for our time, where the third artistic dimension has expanded far beyond classical canons and techniques. Andrea has constructed his own language within the traditional sculptural technique, exploring and choosing materials according to the theme. In order to better adhere to his intent, he wanted to make himself the total creator of his creations: it is he, in fact, who designs, sculpts and casts each work.
In this way he established a close link between the subject and the material of which it is made. Thus we see bronze connected, indeed literally fused, with the human image, while terracotta, marble, plaster or other stones are used to visualise dreams and thoughts. This continuous flow, starting from the idea to the finished work, greatly strengthens the visual impact and prompts the observer to stop, to turn around and wonder. The alienating and communicative function of art is thus well illustrated.
But the sculptor does not stop there, on the threshold of the image, he wants to leave a message, to visualise aspects of life in search of the principles that govern it and give it meaning. It is with this in mind that the spheres were born, each representing an aspect of human life: birth, meeting love, pain, etc.... Sphere and circle have always been strong symbols, albeit with different meanings within different cultures, and in the sense of vital energy they accompany all of Roggi's production. Hence, from this omnipresent circularity, the title of the exhibition.
The small spheres, gilded and otherwise, found in all the sculptor's works elude the simple need for a visual thread; instead, they depict the energy and strength of human thought, capable of transforming matter, of making it exist in the light of other and deeper values. They are therefore found in anthropomorphic subjects, see Spring, but also in naturalistic representations, see Cypress, to indicate the process of transformation of the landscape. In each case, the primary intent is to symbolise man's creative capacity. This, with all its vital possibilities, is undeniably the centre of the sculptor's artistic experience.
This does not mean that the representation is exhausted on the threshold of the figurative or the verisimilar; on the contrary, it wants to embrace the various aspects of the real on a broader scale. Of that reality which, of course, includes all manifestations connected to human existence, including dreams and the like. It is for this reason that the artist's language, or to use a more appropriate term, style, undergoes with the passage of time a sort of stripping away of surface realist notations.
His latest creations, Acqua or the Circle of Life for example, show a formal simplification, together with a conceptual sublimation of his favourite themes. This seems to me to be the way of that decantatory process of matter that testifies to the continuous growth of an artist's research. In other words: the concepts that the sculptor wants to express become clearer and more essential to his mind over time, and at the same time, the artistic form connected to them is modelled accordingly. Therefore, Roggi's artistic evolution is contemplated not in a chronological perspective, but in a synchronic dialectic between idea and representation. And this has always been the crucial knot with which those who make art measure themselves: bending matter to their own intentions, increasingly reducing the gap between the two terms.
Even if squaring the circle is not possible in this sense, surely the effort expended generates vital energy, meaning and in the happiest cases, where the waste is minimal, beauty. The artist's intention, says Roggi, once the work is completed, only partially reveals the concept it is intended to express. The work of art is in fact able to tell many more things than are present in the consciousness of the artist at the time of its creation.
It is because of this narrative, as well as visionary, capacity that Andrea Roggi's art making falls into that category, mistreated but never fortunately lost, of an art with ethical ends. An art in continuous movement, which does not surrender to the emptiness of thought, which is not afraid to investigate the immaterial plane of human life, but which strives in the search for meaning. So if life is not what it seems, since many planes of reality intersect there, one can also resort to dreams to better understand it. These, which are an essential part of our existence, an expression of what we cannot see when we are awake, materialise in airy structures with multiple points of view. Flowers of dreams then, in order not to be satisfied with a banal living.
ANDRE ROGGI AND MARTIN KATZ
ENERGY OF LIFE FLORENCE
sa pulvinar et - sed dapibus donec lorem nunc eget nisi acmollis mattis arcu.
Proin id eros tempus, commodo dolor vel, lacinia nulla. Maecenas vel elit id dui blandit vehicula. Cras efficitur tempus vulputate. Integer sit amet dolor magna. Nulla egestas aliquet leo, eget sagittis elit faucibus ac. Aenean tempus nisl est, eget cursus massa pulvinar et. Morbi sed dapibus urna. Donec lorem nunc, condimentum eget nisi ac, mollis mattis arcu. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
Morbi vel dictum est. Duis vel sagittis risus. Proin tincidunt, leo vitae suscipit venenatis, libero augue posuere elit, in consequat lacus felis eu tortor. Vivamus vitae elementum ex, a porttitor nulla. Proin eget nulla enim.
The monument to Santa Margherita da Cortona by the artist Andrea Roggi, erected in the churchyard of S. Marco in Villa, is a powerful addition to the artistic treasures of Cortona and Italian art, both in terms of its construction technique and artistic interpretation of Margherita's spirituality.
First of all, it should be considered that this is the only bronze statue of this size: of the saint at natural height we only have the one in marble, known to all, placed in the square of Cortona Cathedral, and others in wood or plaster.
It should also be emphasised, and this is more important, that while the other statues are of mannerist and devotional workmanship, i.e. they are a kind of portrait of the Saint, the one by Andrea Roggi, while retaining the traditional iconographic features (the checked dress, the famous 'taccolino', taken from the earliest pictorial image we have of the Saint, and the small dog), is the result of his personal interpretation, the fruit of a passion and sensitivity that, availing itself of an exceptional technical ability, managed to capture and artistically represent Margaret's spirituality.
To this end, the sculptor has made use of details that are in themselves quite obvious: one thinks of the dynamics expressed by the mass of the body hovering towards Heaven, with the flaps of the habit at the back honed in flight by the force of the wind, a mystical afflatus that is amplified by the moved position of the feet, naked, to signify the will to cleanse oneself of everything, even the simplest object such as a pair of humble shoes, can represent a link with earthly matter, as well as by the open arms in sign of a total desire to interpenetrate in the God of the Cross, that Cross that like a wound, a wound of repentance and expiation, in significant evidence is represented in his chest.
But the monument is not limited to the bronze part of the Saint's body and her little dog, no, it is grafted onto, and becomes an integral part of, the geometric stone figures of the base on which the sculpture stands, which offer a less obvious reading, because they are strongly symbolic, but no less significant, without which the understanding of the work would be entirely partial. And these figures can be interpreted in a dual register: one, if you like, of a more circumscribed character and inherent to the biographical story of the Saint, the other of a broader character, of universal scope, without which there is no true Art.
Thus the Triangle at the base of the monument can easily bring us back to the three places on which Margherita worked, geographically well identified and skilfully expressed by the undulating and engraved surface, almost as if to realistically portray the hilly nature of the territory on which Margherita lived: Laviano, Montepulciano, Cortona. But we can, indeed we must, read more carefully, transcend the sensible, and then we must observe that the triangle is the first plane figure, the simplest, because it is constructed with the minimum of straight lines; in our case then an equilateral triangle, the most perfect form among triangles. And the tri-angle is substantiated by the mystical number three: the threefold nature of the universe: heaven, earth, man; father, mother, son; in Christian terms, the Trinity and the equality of the three persons: Father, Son, Holy Spirit.
And on this foundation rests the Cube, the symbolic representation of stability.
It is not difficult, then, to think of the affluence, the economic solidity of the period happily lived by Marguerite with her beloved, but the cube is also the tangible representation of static perfection, and therefore of Truth, since from whatever perspective one looks at it, it does not change.
In the Trinity the Truth.
And on this stable Truth rests the Sphere, which offers an easy reminder of Margaret's inner intimacy during her last period of penance and purification, but whose meaning expands to identify itself symbolically with the vault of the sky, the world, the celestial bodies, the sun, the primordial form containing the possibilities of all other forms, the cyclical movement that has no beginning and no end, the abolition of time and space: eternity. Trinity, Truth, Eternity.
by liletta fornasari
New, although realised in accordance with a sculptural language based on criteria traditional technicians and on finished formsis the interpretation of the figure of San Donato realised Andrea Roggicreating an image faithful to the figurativebut iconographically unusual and capable of symbolising significant episodes in the life of the holy martyrbut without falling into the repetition of 'topoi' repeatedly replicated. La monumental sculptureconsisting of two separate parts, one in stonethe other in bronze, presents San Donato which, barely covered by a simple and poor tunicis in the act of lifting the chalicesymbol of the Christianity for which, according to tradition, the patron saint of Arezzo suffered the martyrdom the 7 August 362 AD.. The chalice refers to one of the main episodes in the life of the bishop saint from Arezzo. During a celebration Eucharisticwhile the rite of Communion and its deacon Antimo was distributing the consecrated wine to the faithful with a glass chalice, the pagani they suddenly burst in, throwing the chalice on the ground, which shattered. San DonatoAfter praying intensely, he collected all the glass fragments, reassembling the vessel. Although a large part was missing from the bottom of the chalice, stolen from the demon same, the sacred ornament continued to perform its function, without dispersing the liquid. The fact led to the conversion of seventy-nine pagans present.
The celebration of the miracle is the focus of the image sculpted by Roggiwhich in thegold of chalice visually concretises the divine forceto which the saint turns in supplication. There is no lack of references to the missing dowel of the cup, perforated at the bottom, and the liquid it contains, materially symbolised by the reddish sphere. La spherewhich has long been a constant element in the sculpture of Roggiis also interpreted here as a symbol of the salvation operated by the martyrdom of the saint himself, who died, as Christto save others and for the spread of Word. The solemn gesture made by the human image, perfectly moulded in the cast bronzefocuses on the interest in the objective reality of manthe founding theme of the art of Roggievokes a set of absolute meanings. Although related to the figure of San Donatothese are therefore of great value moralewith the intention of also documenting a cross-section of town history and respecting the link between subject and matter. The paganity of Arezzo, where San Donatonative of Nicomediaengaged in the preaching and conversion of many, is emblematised in the image of the famous sculptural version of the Minervajust outlined in the bronzecan be glimpsed in the back, giving the idea of disappearing inside the saint's body mass. At Christianity of the city postpones the stone of the base, in which, in addition to the direct reference to the evangelical significance of the stone itself, one recognises the outline of the pieve aretinasymbol of a recognised and deep-rooted spread of the Christian worship.
In the flow of time, the sculpture of Andrea Roggi is distilled into a symphony of rarefied forms e ancient matterin which the bronze and the travertine are stripped of their earthly weight to make themselves cosmic elements. Its human figuresslender and transfigured, they become icons of becomingsymbols of a silent meditation on being and the universe. In them, the tradition of lost-wax casting merges with the contemporary urge to tell the life such as circularity, such as encounter and dissolution. His works are suspended dances, dream flowers, fragments of eternityas the boundary between the real and the dreamlike dissolves in a lyricism that eludes all captioning.
Roggi does not represent: evoke. It does not describe: suggests. Thus each of his sculptures is a thresholdan inner vibration that penetrates the subconscious, like the rarefied music by Fauré or the astral compositions of Lieticapable of touching intimate, invisible, universal chords.
The world that Roggi sculpts is a living cosmosin which every form is energy that aggregates and disperses, a solar centre pulsating to the rhythm of mystery. In its dancing circlesin theperforated shadow that inhabits bronze, in the sacred light emanating from it, the eternal embrace between earth and sky, between matter and spirit.
L'Olive, an ancient and biblical tree, is transfigured into human bodies ascendingin a rite of metamorphosis in which the roots become arms, and the bark opens up like golden iconrevealing thedivine soul of being. The Perforated bell, the Sphere of Lifethe The Risen Christ are living archetypes, thresholds between dimensions, symbol-figures that narrate the reconciliation between man and the divine.
Each figure tends towards thehighin an attempt to touch the ineffable. La Resurrection become Spiritual Big Bang, l'soul becomes bronze dancing in the light, the form dissolves into ethereal texture. The Tuscan artist moulds visionsnot objects: every sculpture is a world.
The poetics of Andrea Roggi is a act of faith in the formunderstood not as surface but as manifestation of the invisible. His works, from the very beginning, reveal a deeply rooted in rural and Christian spiritualitybut capable of rising to a dimension universal, ethics, philosophical. Bronze, resin, travertine become symbolic languagesinstruments of a demiurgic fantasy that reinvents reality and gives it new breath.
In his journey, Roggi explores the infinite possibilities of form, closed in Euclidean lattices or dissolved in cosmic arabesquesalways driven by an inner force that tends to expand, a conquering space as a breath of life. His sculptures are embodied archetypes, ideas taking shape, tangible metaphors of human destinyof his eternal search for meaning.
As in Lucretiusmatter is neither created nor destroyed, but is transformed. And in the bronze it breathes, it opens, it rises, beats the heart of a travelling humanityfragile and powerful, which finds its most authentic voice in the whirlwind of the Cosmos: the voice of beauty.
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