Angiolo Delsanto's artistic talent, inherited from his grandfather, a sculptor, has found expression only in adult life. Although he did not learn the craft in the family, he has always had the marked sensitiveness, the inner restlessness of the artist, which has remained latent for a long time. Only at the beginning of the 90's, a retrospective exhibition of the work of his grandfather, a protagonist of the cultural scene of the early twentieth century, gave him the opportunity to approach sculpture and provided the stimulus to undertake a research process whose fundamental phases can be clearly detected in the works currently on exhibition in Massa under the sponsorship of the local Administration.
Initially, he experimented with the human body, punctiliously seeking anatomical precision and formal balance, a search overshadowed by the fear of the comparison with his grandfather's achievements but characterized by the determination to go through all the basic stages of an artist's training.
The small groups hide an inner strength that impresses the visitor through an
essential language that seeks the eloquence of a gesture to show the complexity
of human feelings.
The intensity of love captured in the "moment"of the embrace; the innocence and
light-heartedness embodied in a young girl but suggesting at the same time the
truest and most instinctive essence of a woman; or the suspended figure immersed
in an indefinite but clearly perceptible space exhaling from its own volumes and
representing the absolutely intimate space of "dream". As the artist himself has
stressed when defining the this first phase of the process, these are not studies
of figures, but introspection of the human soul.
The same inner strength emanates, with even greater intensity, from the subsequent works, where the interest focuses on the interplay of light and shadow, of full and empty spaces, of lines and volumes, and where the synthesis, so far suggested only cautiously, is achieved with greater effectiveness. Here, the viewer can perceive the delight the artist takes in experimenting new formal solutions though preserving the primitive rigour and the sense of balance, so much so that many of these sculptures could well have larger dimensions. The artist plays with silences and delicate chromatic nuances, experiments the bas-relief, first dealing with it as a full relief and playing with delicate plane variations and eventually discovering the strength of the line and the outlines to which he entrusts the great effectiveness of the last work, "inner window". This is the proof of an inquiring soul searching for ever different answers, which foreshadows a very fecund future.
Art critic
Massa, Italy
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