Fondazione Sabe per l’arte, founded in 2021 by Norberto Bezzi, entrepreneur in the maritime sector, and Mirella Saluzzo, sculptor, with the aim of promoting contemporary art in Ravenna with particular attention to sculpture, opens the 2025 program with its tenth exhibition, after the public success of the recently concluded group show “PHOTOGRAPHY AND FEMINISM. Stories and images from the Donata Pizzi Collection”, which more than doubled the number of visitors. The protagonist of this important stage is Alex Corno (Monza, 1960), who for the occasion returns to exhibit in Italy after years of activity in Texas, presenting his most recent research. The scientific committee, coordinated by Francesco Tedeschi, professor of contemporary art history at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, and composed of Claudio Spadoni and professors from the Bologna University Claudio Marra and Federica Muzzarelli, selected the project for its relevance to this year’s exhibition theme, namely the relationship between sculpture and color, as anticipated by artistic director Pasquale Fameli. Future initiatives will also follow this thread, such as an exhibition curated by Claudio Spadoni dedicated to the informal sculptor Andrea Raccagni (Imola 1921 – 2005) which will open in spring and then a project within Ravenna Mosaico with two artists (Alice Padovani and Laura Renna) who will reinvent the discretionary logic of this ancient technique with current objects and materials.

Alex Corno, “Costruire il cielo”, installation view at Fondazione Sabe per l’arte, installation view, ph. Daniele Casadio
The exhibition “Costruire il cielo”, curated by Pierluca Nardoni, summons into the meditative dimension of the exhibition structure, a renovated nineteenth-century building, works created in the last three years together with some forays into the previous phases of his more than forty-year career. The title links the new course of Corno’s artistic research to one of the great strands of abstract sculpture born with the twentieth-century avant-gardes, namely the attempt to create ideally weightless, almost immaterial structures, the great challenge of the historical constructivists. In the gallery we are welcomed, therefore, by a collection of sculptures that mark the environment with a plastic and chromatic rhythm cadenced like an immobile dance, which induces us to consider each of them as one with the space by which it is wrapped and activated. Some start from the ground and suggest an anthropomorphic measure, others, of smaller dimensions, are placed on bases slightly lower in order to allow us to also consider the interior. Most, the more recent ones, have opaque but lively chromatic tones that go from pink, to lemon yellow, to light blue and red, while the older ones, tracing and emphasizing the rough appearance of the materials, recall an industrial archaeology. The inclusion of the latter makes the exhibition itinerary similar to a walk in a varied urban landscape where visual emergencies of different nature and era coexist, thanks to which it is possible to visualize the evolutions and persistence of the local architectural character.

Alex Corno, “Costruire il cielo”, installation view at Fondazione Sabe per l’arte, installation view, ph. Daniele Casadio
Alex Corno’s work stems from an attraction to iron and industrial materials rooted in the historicized path of constructive sculpture from the second half of the twentieth century, in which assembly based on the recovery of waste materials rethought and reconstructed through welding techniques, imposes itself as a new artisanal manual skill aligned with the production processes triggered by the Industrial Revolution. What was a provocation in the first works created with these criteria by Julio González (1876 -1942) and Picasso (1881-1973) became a method after the Second World War, whose most emblematic exponents include artists such as Anthony Caro (1924-2013) and David Smith (1906-1965). Corno’s structures, fully inserted in this vein of the history of sculpture, are abstract-geometric totemic structures obtained from the forging and welding of heavy iron sheets and other industrial components that do nothing to hide their nature. The volumes rise and expand starting from a centrality that aspires to channel the gaze and, by perceptual means, also the physicality of the spectator, circumscribing a welcoming space despite the brutality (always exhibited up to a certain point) of the materials.

Alex Corno, “Costruire il cielo”, installation view at Fondazione Sabe per l’arte, installation view, ph. Daniele Casadio
In the many environmental sculptures by the artist installed in various public spaces, such as small provincial villages, artistic parks or urban crossroads in Italy and abroad, the iron tongues of which they are made openly declare the effort required to tame and transport them. On the contrary, in the smaller works an opposing tension towards lightness has always transpired in his work, detectable in the rhythmic modelling of thinner strips that return on themselves to include the void, almost as if wanting to reduce the specific weight of the whole. And it is precisely this aspect that remained almost latent in his previous production due to the chromatic seriousness of the materials, in the new works exhibited that appears liberated by a decisive orientation towards an increasingly lamellar and flaky modelling and a multicoloured chrome plating. It is as if the artist, in this way traceable back to the instances manifested by the first experiences of historical abstractionism – one name above all, that of the essential Alexander Calder (1898-1976) – wanted to test the intrinsic poetry of materials that would not seem suitable for taking flight, projecting them into an ambiguously immaterial dimension.

Alex Corno, “Costruire il cielo”, installation view at Fondazione Sabe per l’arte, installation view, ph. Daniele Casadio
In order to infuse lightness into these heavy agglomerates of steel and stainless steel, the renewed chromatic palette developed by the artist takes on a preponderant role, dissolving the impression of weight and stylistic orthodoxy in a free flourish of forms increasingly tending to accommodate the biomorphic suggestion. This solution – Francesco Tedeschi underlines – would have been highly contested by certain American critics in the 1950s who demanded from the works the appearance of a “definitive rigor” inherited from the ideologies underlying historical constructivism, making us reflect on the importance of color in determining the perception of sculpture and in impressing on it an epochal and existential mood. To confirm this, it is enough to remember how even the aforementioned David Smith and (above all) Anthony Caro at a certain point in their research opted for similar colors. The title of the exhibition, “Costruire il cielo”, underlines the implicit oxymoron in this process, in which lightness is the result not of a subtraction, as one might immediately think, but of an addition (that of color) capable of modifying the connotation of the forms to the point of suggesting an ethereal mental representation of them, no longer inexorably compressed by the force of gravity. And lightness is also made of “Evoluzione” (2024), a voluptuous metal sculpture by Mirella Saluzzo selected to accompany from a secluded position the creations of Alex Corno, with whom she shares the fact of having been a student of Luciano Caramel, professor at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore and among the most active art historians in the field of criticism, and invited by him to the XIV edition of the Rome Quadriennale in 2005.
Info:
Alex Corno. Costruire il cielo
curated by Pierluca Nardoni
18/01 – 6/04/2025
Fondazione Sabe per l’arte
Via Giovanni Pascoli 31, Ravenna
www.sabeperlarte.org
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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