OGGETTI SMARRITI

Alex Pinna

29/01/2019 – 29/03/2019

BABS Art Gallery is pleased to host “Lost Objects“, the solo show of the artist Alex Pinna in which the collection of artist’s jewels created exclusively for the gallery will be presented. Inspired by “The way to get lost”, one of his most important sculptural projects, the series of wearable works wants to tell the difficulty of contemporary man to find certainties, strong points to cling to within everyday life, where everything is precarious. Since the origins of his production, Pinna has resorted to the stylization derived from childhood comics and illustration to obtain very thin, elegant and yet fragile figures, tightrope walkers sitting on the edge of the precipice (like those of the series Deep is your love) that, with a minimum movement or the simple bending of the shoulders towards the void, seem to the perennial search for a point of equilibrium.

Yet, in Pinna’s works this uncertainty is never loaded with drama, on the contrary it is seasoned with an exquisitely contemporary irony, which seems to urge a light and ironic approach to life. Lightness becomes a predominant value in his research and is pursued primarily through sculptural elements: it is as if the work absorbed matter instead of emanating it, so that all men stylized and long limbs of Pinna, whether they are conceived as slender sculptures in bronze, lead or knotted rope, or in their variant “walking” in gold, silver and bronze, bring to the extreme the lightening of their volumes. They reach out into space without invading or weighing it down, they evoke, they suggest, without ever imposing themselves with heavy formalisms or indisputable concepts. The way of salvation is then perhaps to be sought in a nature rediscovered and made its own thanks to the curious “leaf-men” of the series Lost, found and lost, born from the hybridization between human body and plant forms and transformed into pendants and rings to wear, Or, ironic paradox of dance reminiscence, salvation can take the form of a dj met a night at the disco, which stretches in the gesture eternized by John Travolta Saturday night fever to become an earring or a choker.

Of this, however, we will never be sure: Pinna’s works put the viewer in front of questions and sensations that challenge common sense, leaving doubts unresolved but offering in return an aesthetic satisfaction that, in the case of his artistic jewels, makes it admirable every day.