Gianfranco Meggiato

"Sculpture is what is created by the force of removal." Michelangelo referred to it as the struggle with matter, the endeavor of freeing forms trapped in the imagination before they are freed in marble. Andrea del Verrocchio, on the other hand, captured in bronze the restless energy of horse and rider. The monument to Colleoni, the commander of the Venetian Republic, stands as a powerful symbol in Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice.

Venetian artist Gianfranco Meggiato, while his explicit references—Brancusi, Calder, Moore—are far removed from the Renaissance, found inspiration between the extremes of 20th-century abstraction and the primitive geometries that inspired them. He prefers metal, but at the State Art Institute of his city, he also learned wood, ceramics, and stone. His intricate, magma-like perforations delve into the darkness. He calls them intro-sculptures: throbbing openings of energy, unexpected glimpses, core samples searching for themselves, for meaning, for a dream to be unleashed by carving away.

Within the almost-contemporary masters he has chosen, and within himself, lies the solid feeling of Michelangelo, and stirs the vibrant restlessness of Verrocchio.

Meggiato's art inhabits interior spaces and interacts with the historical layering of urban environments. He looks to the essential nature of Constantin Brancusi, studies the spatial projection of Alexander Calder, and explores Henry Moore's balance between fullness and emptiness, which is as decisive as pauses in music.

In this way, he gives shape to labyrinthine tangles, feverish spirals, meandering cosmic brains, the ancestral prayers of totems, the fractured, porous cube, the meteorite with a fiery core that draws the eye into its web of darkness, waiting to shine in full light.