Andrea Roggi
Amalfi

Andrea Roggi returns to Amalfi with the widespread exhibition Lĕvĭtās, leggerezza. From 18 July to 31 October, thanks to the collaboration between Galleria Ravagnan and the Municipality of Amalfi, five monumental works by the artist connect with the architecture and landscape of the Amalfi Coast, drawing strength from it and at the same time restoring living energy to those who pass them along the way.

Writing tries to detach itself from the ground with the poetic word. This is why the ancients imagined it “winged”. The daring feat of sculpture is to overcome the force of gravity, to make matter forget that it is matter, blowing life and movement into it.

There is an instinctive consonance in the bronze of the Amalfi Cathedral's doors and in that of the Tuscan artist's five vibrant signs, scattered throughout the heart of the port city, from the alleys to the sea. One and the other delimit and open wide the threshold of the sacred, connect with "the Energy of Life", he writes: "Love and Creativity make the World go round".

Roggi conceives open, dancing, acrobatic forms. He multiplies the viewpoints with studied twisting effects, emphasises the gesturality of human presences between circular geometries and aerial architectures. Golden globes, jagged crusts of celestial bodies, primordial waves, celestial roots are his language, his poetics.

And the tree that is dear to him has the shape of the olive tree, so common even on the terraces of the Amalfi Coast: Athena's useful gift to the city that bears her name, for preferring her as protector to her competitor Poseidon. He, god of the sea, believed he could impress a people of seafarers by making a stream of salty water gush from the rock. She, goddess of wisdom, conquered them with the ordinary majesty of a tree that grows slowly, but bears fruit and shelter for a long time.

Andrea Roggi's weightless sculpture is like this: it is planting an olive tree as an act of trust, with no guarantee of being able to sit in its shade, but only imagining it, detached from earthly ballasts, stretching into the future.

The five monumental bronze works featured in Andrea Rogggi's open-air exhibition in Amalfi:

“Lĕvĭtās”(2024, lost wax casting, dynamic casting and fire patina)
This is an unpublished work related to the theme of the Source of Life. This sculpture presents itself as silky, flowing streams with a vaguely spherical conformation. In other words, this particular sculpture, thanks to assiduous ingenuity and meticulous labor-limae, succeeds in expressing all the energy and all the clarity of water, through the power of bronze. From these waves, anthropomorphic, living beings spring forth, representing the vital principle that this natural element has represented since antiquity. Ultimately, the work is declined, within Maestro Roggi's poetics, as a constituent of that essential unicum that corresponds to the Energy of Life. It is for this reason that the enjoyment and analysis of this entity is indispensable for understanding Maestro Roggi's art in toto.

“Famiglia in volo” (2014, lost wax casting and fire patina)
The concept of family expressed by Maestro Andrea Roggi is rooted in the intimacy of the artist in question, since it refers to his childhood, spent in the Tuscan countryside, contemplated through the eyes of a child born into a peasant family. The simplicity and immediacy of this bucolic experience, in fact, were never perceived as a limitation by the artist; on the contrary, they were perceived as a crucial stimulus in favour of virtues such as curiosity and passion. Hence, Roggi developed the thought of a tribute to family, a tribute to that affective and everyday dimension that laid the foundations for him to achieve the awareness and artistic sensitivity that have determined his excellent sculptural career. The family, indeed, in Roggi's works, is represented as involved in an ascending motion that accompanies it towards heaven. This is the family love experienced by Maestro Roggi, which almost seems to approach a divine spark, an immediate contact with a metaphysical, if not, indeed, eschatological dimension.

“Le Radici della Rinascita” (2023, lost wax casting and fire patina)
Le Radici della Rinascita shares the themes of The Tree of Life but focuses more on the human rather than the temporal or ecological. This sculpture, in fact, represents anthropomorphic entities contaminated by plant elements, hovering towards the sky. It is an act by the artist to emphasise the inestimable value of love and altruism: they are phenomena capable of freeing human beings from preconceptions and captious logic and, perhaps even more importantly, they are an inalienable part of the human being itself; together with consciousness, they are its very essence.

"Koi no Yokan" (2022, lost wax casting, dynamic casting and fire patina)
This is a Tree of Life, a theme that has always been dear to Maestro Roggi. This sculpture is the result of a reflection on time, linked to the social structure of individuals. Within Master Andrea Roggi's production, the Tree of Life acts as a link between the more theoretical and universal meditations and the more practical and singular ones.
Just as time can be divided into past, present and future, in fact, the Tree of Life can be divided into roots, trunk and branches. The roots correspond to the past since they draw nourishment from the earth, that is, from what exists before us, such as culture and tradition. The trunk corresponds to the present and takes on anthropomorphic traits since it is the only existential segment within which we can act. It is not enough simply to act, however, Master Roggi seems to tell us: we must act with love. This is why the trunk consists of two individuals immortalised in a passionate embrace. Finally, the branches, which sprout from the trunk as a relative and natural continuation, represent the future, i.e. the effect of the encounter between past and present. They are loaded with fruit, since the values and education received in the past, combined with the actions dictated by love performed in the present, determine a virtuous, positive future.

“Il Cerchio della Vita” (2019, dynamic casting and fire patina)
This is a piece of abstractist taste by Maestro Andrea Roggi. This work was created entirely through the technique of dynamic casting and represents the concept of time, through a bronze circle with a lavish appearance, which originates from a small golden sphere. This work substantiates the speculative concept of the Eternal Return in constant cyclicity, which, inexhaustible, becomes itself in an asymptotic and infinite interweaving in the meshes of time.

For more information about the exhibition visit: https://comune.amalfi.sa.it/Novita/Comunicati/Levitas-ad-Amalfi-in-mostra-cinque-opere-di-Andrea-Roggi#page-content