In 1976, in Pallanza, an exhibition and a book, Aptico. Il senso della scultura, summed up the situation. In it was reported a discussion between the artists Fabro, Nagasawa, Trotta and the art historian Jole De Sanna, as they engaged in a dialogue and inter-temporal comparison with the topoi of antique and contemporary art. The conversation, within the context of a continuous flow of artistic declarations from Bernini, Canova, Fontana, Rosso, Donatello…, denied an interpretative vision of a linear historical development, replacing it instead with a dynamic genealogy of ‘genetic’ cognitive legacies, of artistic inheritances, legible and retraceable beyond the external form and the techniques used. The structural boldness of the work consisted in the production of a theoretic ‘model’ which justified a process of continuity within the discontinuity of temporal fractures, particularly the most gaping fracture of all, caused by Modernism.

Again in the pages of Aptico, Nagasawa observes: ‘[…]sculpture should not have a place, nor a concept, nor time, it must stay in the air’. Herein are the extremes of an apparent paradox, or else the coordinates of a field of action, the restraints within which to operate: space, time, weight.

Laura Vecere, Heavy matter, text in the catalog