Luciano Garella
Superintendent archeology, Belle Arti and landscape for the municipality of Napoli
Art invades the city of Naples. It is the external sense and the true meaning of ideas and language of the artist that marks and characterizes with the three-dimensional sculptures some of the most relevant open or closed urban spaces of the city, not excluding some particular details from this contextualization spatial interstices. The sculptures / installations so want to be symbols and also signs of a strong ethical appeal to some of the values that should permeate our society, ethics that the artist strongly feels to be her own. The works are therefore pieces of a logical-artistic-narrative path and their related function is not only to stimulate a reflection on the substantial inability of the recovery of what the consumer society discards or produces as waste but also represents the attempt of the transformation of that same material in a work of art. A warning and, at the same time, a chance to start, on the wave of emotional structures that are now owned by many, a serious discourse on the conservation of the environment and on the qualities that we would all like to have without, at the end, being willing to make any renunciation of our way of life. The four sculptures, positioned therefore in different and particular city locations, evoke, in their own way, tradition and culture, reaching, after all, with the simplicity of their forms, sometimes static and sometimes dynamic, to solicit responses precisely to the questions that they pose with their own existence. One work in particular, the one entitled Trìunphus, is not randomly cube-shaped, solid with perfect and crystalline proportions, and finds its cultural and symbolic and emotional roots in the arc of Roman triumph or, better to say and to be precise, in the Arch of Janus in Rome. Two cubes-two arcs, similar not only in the reciprocal proportional relationships but also in the ability to perform the same contemporary function of fullness and emptiness within the same volume as well as being a time symbol and memory of the message entrusted all at the same time. It is obvious that the constituent materials are different: one is in fact made of precious stone; the other is made of compacted aluminum strips, a material that was of little intrinsic and extrinsic value even in the beginning of its short life.
What unifies the two works/sculptures/monuments, on the other hand, is the hypothetical possibility of having an infinite physical life, albeit for different reasons, since the Roman arch will always be considered, as it was for about two thousand years, a praiseworthy and unalterable historical and artistic testimony of its time while Trìunphus may be subject to modifications and absolute transformations but its material will always be subject to recycling operations from which its durability could and will derive.