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.