Until the June 30th 2024 L’former Church of Santa Chiara to Piacenza will host the sculptures of Christian Zucconi. By theArchitect Manuel FerrariDirector of the Cultural and Ecclesiastical Heritage Office of the Diocese of Piacenza-Bobbio, the exhibition entitled Waiting for the darkwith a cycle of works carried out over five years, was born from a development of the concept of absence.
The Church of Santa Chiara, rebuilt in 1600, overlooks, without a churchyard, onto Strada Gambara better known as Stradone Farneseand is part of an ancient monastic complex which the sources, together with extensive archival documentation, attest to XIII Century. The building, with a baroque facade with exposed bricks, gabled on two orders, has a Greek cross layout created after the reconstruction carried out at the beginning of the 17th century on the previous structure built in the area occupied by the Franciscans in 1229. The interior was enriched by furnishings, written traces of which can be found in the chronicles of pastoral visits, and by the sumptuous illusionistic decorations on the walls.
On 13 April 1605 the Bishop His Eminence Claudio Rangoni laid the first stone of the Church which he consecrated on 18 January 1608. In 1854 Maria Luigia of Austria sanctioned the birth of a pious retreat for the welcome of religious women and women in difficult situations. Thirty-one cloistered nuns once lived in that place of peace, Discalced Carmelite nuns who inhabited the monastery. In 1964 it was the nuns themselves who decided to abandon the convent and move to a more recently built one.
The “Closed Church” hosts the sculptures of the exhibition
The “Closed Church” of Santa Chiara was thus able to reopen at public to accommodate the sculptural exhibition, entitled Waiting for the dark, by the well-known and esteemed Piacenza artist Christian Zucconi. A state, the absence of light, in which one risks more easily not seeing the stumble, because it is easier in the dark stumbleand is it not perhaps precisely in the dark moments of life that we best perceive, in that solitude, how each of us is the consequence of the many different civilizations that flow in our blood?
But being Waiting for the dark, and being so in Santa Chiara, can suggest a double truth. A first, concrete and irrefutable, relating to the existence of a place in silence for centuries with a violated, emptied body, which would have demanded more respect and perhaps even the salvation offered by a look of mercy on the ruins of the past, so as not to let the beauty of the past fall into oblivion and make recovery still possible; the second date from poetic pure and serene works of a Master of stone aware that art is above all humilitythe need for one creativity which to be lasting must invent forms full of its own ideas and meanings and which only with these matured visions can it have the possibility to prepare to look at the darkness when it is not yet dark, when the darkness is not yet there.
Christian Zucconi, the sculpted bodies, the works
The sculptures of Christian Zucconi, silent presences given birth with closed eyes will also await their own darkness. The stones worked in the time of challenge of the authentic sculptor, the one who risks all of himself in the work, reveal themselves gracefully in a place of ancient celebrations to prepare for your own. Those bodies obtained in the porous rock with that physical sense of skin on bones give the sensation to breathe our own air.
Before the eyes the statues appear rhythmically chasing each other in the place of their debut in life where it is still possible to have an idea of what was and where today the linear tension, crystallized in the fixity of the travertine, it shows contrasts, rests and volumes that are they outline in the space joining perfectly to the inner ghost of those who created them, and are nourished by the process of decomposition that surrounds them.
In the past, contemplative nuns who chose monastic life took the path to stoke the fire of faith so that it could continue to burn in an ever new way, to warm the church, the world, and so that it remained wide open the door of suggestions in support of the challenges that all living beings are forced to face on their journey. Look for new languagesnew ways, new tools that can spread love and penetrate the existence of interiority burnedit is the inexhaustible power of artistic creation that allows us to live life deeply.
Madonnas, sibyls, women free from matter, emerged from chaos of a work that is different and identical to itself each time and reaches purity when it manages to reproduce the reality of a vision free from constraints, between creativity and genius in the tiring evolution of one’s world that time works like any piece of pointed stone lives for a long time immersed in a river. Christian Zucconi’s sculpting is re-writing the present in silent space which is substantiated with the matter of human figures discovered by the coherent rhythm of their own precise harmony, passed into custody in naked bodies as fragments of a whole.
And if the water of a splinter he makes a smooth pebble in the exercise of searching for the unfinished form, burdened by the afflictions of life, by interrupted speeches, by imperfections, in the same way the matter, in the path of constructionacquires increasingly purified natural values to teach lost humanity that to heal it will have to confront itself in the encounter with nudity.
Nudes to learn more about grace of bodies in their continuous form, with their own thickness of eternity in one dimension aware and never forgets the gravity, the heaviness of the darkness, of listening to the other, to reach that expressive force that delivers to the gaze not only the body worked but the projected shadows of the gesture.
Zucconi presents a topological treatment of the sculpted body where the set of joint points, the places of twisting, develops a tensive sweetness typical of his style. Each sculpture is part of a different semantic field but composes a harmonious chorus of memories beyond individual experiences, bearable only if returned with the work of the artist who imprints himself in the stone, while traces reality and dissolves in it in the exhausting continuous attempt to reconfigure the territories of interiority.
But the wait is quiet
Those hollowed out, interrupted, headless, mutilated, dismembered female bodies have the power to spread alchemy that disperse ghosts. I am sovereign forms of space where the whole produces the sensation of the simultaneous presence of their way of living in the world only with eyes completely closed, to listen to the night that is inside all thingsbecause only the silent observer reaches true inspiration without getting lost.
Waiting for the dark is research in the continuous and tiring gesture on the material which, having reached the fulfillment of the internal idea, breathes naked, alone, without the fear of falling into current forms; protected, it gives itself as a path that rises to reach the pinnacle of its expression, declaring itself imperfect, never concluded because it is always lashed by life, yet made human and cutlery in order to be silently observed in the slow encounter with the structurality of the plastic form of ineffable and synthetic figuration.
Information:
Open until June 30, 2024 | Free admission.
Friday 3.00pm-7.00pm | Saturday and Sunday 9.00-12.00/15.00-19.00.
Extraordinary opening: Saturday 15 June 8.30pm-10.00pm.
Tip.Le.Co. editions catalogue.
Who is Christian Zucconi
Born in Piacenza in 1978, Christian Zucconi initially trained in the Emilian countryside and the rectory of Campremoldo Sotto, where in an environment still full of ancient traditions and folklore he approached the sacred and its representation; he later continued his apprenticeship between the Carrara quarries and the “Gazzola” Art Institute under the direction of Paolo Perotti and the advice of Piero Molinari. Having completed the “Cassinari” Art High School with top marks, he abandoned the Brera Academy and opened his own laboratory in 1996. In 2003 he began his collaboration with Alain Toubas’ Compagnia del Disegno, which, in addition to organizing prestigious public exhibitions, was very important figure of reference until his death in 2021.
Today he lives and works on the beloved Piacentini Hills.
The publication of the photographic images in this article of the ReWriters Digital Magazine was authorized by Christian Zucconi.
