Nanni Valentini

Il Ponte – in the lounge space – resumes the close-up dedicated to an artist with Non solo terracotta. Opere di Nanni Valentini, in collaboration with the Fondazione Galleria Milano.

On this occasion some works of the Seventies and the Eighties are presented, among these some terracottas and mixed techniques on cardboard, plaster and “gauze”, up to a large composition in stoneware from 1982/84.

In 1975 Valentini writes: “I’m still interested in the four elements earth, water, air, fire. As well as the gaze, the memory, the prediction. I like manipulating the earth, seeing through a canvas, bathing things in color. I try to understand what is in the interspace between the visible and the tactile. Perhaps it is a desire to make fluid what is crystallized. Clay, canvas, paper are the supports I use”.

But the material from which all of Valentini’s work develops is fundamentally clay, a tangible reality, which is suited to him and towards which he almost listens, researching what it hides and how to reveal it. And Valentini writes again in 1979: “They are signs, still signs in and of the landscape, shadows, glitters, scratches, cracks, voids, glances, expectations, therefore visible signs. The invisibile ones, which we seek, are still jealously guarded in the earth, but the omen already runs through them, they are behind the walls, under the skin, between the folds of the fabrics, hidden in a memory without codes, preserved by the soul of time with all subsequent signs.”