Open hosts Pompeii Imprints of Life.

The works of Andrea Cagnetti, aka Akelo, an internationally renowned Italian goldsmith, designer and sculptor with an extremely articulated creative path. 

 

POMPEII, IMPRINTS OF LIFE

"They have been dead for eighteen centuries, but they are human creatures that can be seen in their agony. There it is not art, it is not imitation; but it is their bones, the relics of their flesh and their clothes mixed with plaster: it is the pain of death that regains body and figure...". These are the words of the writer Luigi Settembrini in his Letter to the Pompeiians on his return from Pompeii, where he had seen the first plaster casts of the bodies found under the blanket of lava, lapilli and pumice from the eruption of Vesuvius, which in 79 A.D. submerged the city, completely destroying it, along with Herculaneum, in two days.

Men, women and children return from the past like shadows that suddenly regain three-dimensional depth. 

It was precisely these casts that inspired Akelo, reproducing some of them that, in turn, generated the sculptures on display here. They tell of the infinite pain of men and women with no way out, clinging futilely to the last throb of life.

Handmade with industrial residues of ferrous material, rough and strong - the result of a shrewd upcycling operation, and therefore already respectful of the sense of limit -, rough and deliberately unfinished, the works appear free from the yoke of the mass. And they develop into dynamic, aerial volumes interpenetrated by light, in a dialectic and osmotic relationship with the space that contains them.