01 Critical essay

In 2014 Paola Ravasio was the first winner of the Sangregorio Prize and today, twelve years later, she returns to exhibit at the Foundation with a selection of recent works.

Her sculptures arise from agglomerations of white matter, be it plaster or resin, and become, to use Giancarlo Sangregorio’s words, “one with the light (matter–light, not light that rests on matter)”: true metaphysical Scrigni di luce, caskets of light.

Theirs is an intense, milky light; one could even use the adjective “snowy”, for its degree of purity and intensity, but also for its compactness. And the forms follow this rule: they move in bundles of nerves, coil upon themselves in constricted spaces, among geometric blocks with sharp edges, perfectly squared tips and smooth surfaces, icy and just as white.

It is almost a struggle between those shapes, which seem to derive from architectural fragments or industrial parts, and the elastic ribs that stretch, bend, wrap around, enter and exit the Euclidean hollows like amoebas, driven by the tension that animates them, eager to soften and bring to life even what is not alive. It is a clash between opposing worlds, in form and consistency, yet made seemingly identical by the luminous white that pervades them.

Needless to say, those sinews, muscular and taut, are what remains of man, his ultimate essence, what Sangregorio might have called “the innermost joints of an organism”, a human image that is not abstraction but pure vital force.

In the drawings too, in those vigorous black lines with their reasserted, closed contours, one reads the same determination, the same desire for volume and structure, and even the importance of light, in the voids enclosed within the black borders. And, to quote Sangregorio once more, who so admired the work of this young sculptor, in those drawings there is the “sign of a truth”.

Lorella Giudici