Not so long ago a well-known artist from Sassari, in the north of Sardinia, made a date 0with a friend saying, "See you at Wanda's workshop", meaning the rooms of the Man Ray Cultural Centre, of which I am responsible for artistic manifestations. To hear the term "workshop" applied to the Centre gave me an indirect confirmation of the work that has been done in those rooms, the goal of which was to transform them into meeting places and spaces for research. A multi-purpose space for the strengthening of synergies, where art is alive and breathing every day, where people come together and exchange ideas - where artists can manifest their creativity, even in a dialogue with the room at their disposal.

From this consideration came the inspiration for the exhibition "Stanze" (Rooms): a multimedial project bringing together the visual arts and various kinds of performances. The manifestation was divided into five triangular meetings of plastic operations and installations, within which performances of music and dancing were included. Each visual artist had to come to terms with the room he or she had chosen as the one responding best to the needs of the work planned, following a play of casualness and subtle understanding.

This meant three months of intense and participatory activity for which we thank all the artists.

Our thanks also go to the Regional Department for Culture and the Provincial and Municipal Aldermen for Culture of the Province and City of Cagliari. In particular we wish to thank Alderman Gianni Filippini for his trust and support in making the operation possible.

Wanda Nazzari

ROOMS

In the rhythmic cycle of events occurring in "Rooms", one catches a note of enchantment crossing the spaces, the works, the voids and the atmospheres, each time creating a surprise with its phenomenological presence: more than rooms, these are enchanted chambers, places that are constantly redesigned. They give the impression of expanding or fleetingly shrinking before the plasticism of the forms generated within them.

These magical transformations, which only an exhibition so organically articulated and temporally pressing could produce, is the result of a multimedial project conceived by Wanda Nazzari out of a desire to bring together and wed music, dance and the visual arts. This was the origin of an itinerary that includes the presence of objects and scenic and musical events and which makes expectation and revelation a primary component of the aesthetic operation.

The rooms become small islands offering reassuring or insecure anchorages, where the works trace their own confines, the lands of their being, independently of the architecture that has welcomed them, or perhaps have arranged themselves so as to interpret the variability and mutability of those spaces, which are neutral and innocent only in appearance.

Going through the rooms thus implies a mutation of scene, an ever-changing perception of a resonating space where the work exalts itself, in silence or sustained by musical echoes which, in any case, intensifies our sensorial fruition of the works. The space imposes a passing on tiptoe to perceive the charge of desires and pulsions gathered therein, in an attempt to arrive where the divining intuition is hidden.

Mariolina Cosseddu

Maria Lai

La stanza di Noè (Noah's Room)

In the small room on the left Maria Lai wove the threads of a tale as ancient as humankind: that of Noah and his work of salvation, which is an act of love and hope for the eternal salvation of humankind. The passages of this tale are materialized in the ritual objects and the simplicity of a clear and persuasive ceremony: closed within a rectangular structure so as to conserve its symbolic and narrative value, they have assumed the form of gifts stolen from death and offered for salvation: bread, a book, the olive tree and the gold threads that unravel and unite them. Universal symbols of life and pacification, Maria Lai's objects are presented in the materials with which she has always worked and in which operates the visceral relationship that unites her to her land and to her deep-rooted culture. Wood, metal, ceramics and bread assume the force of poetic and ritual evocativeness in that they are bound together by the mastery of the crafts of the universe of women, made up of humble and rhythmically repeated gestures. Since the end of the 1960s Maria Lai has never ceased to salvage from the reservoir of collective wisdom the recondite meanings of an existential condition that is difficult and painful, but which is at the same time enriched by the poetry of myth, legend and timeless metaphore. From the oral tradition, that is to say from memories transmitted and preserved, she revives the tales; like a true weaver, she weaves on the loom of thought, in the labyrinths of the subconscious. Conjugating those contents solidly rooted in her conscience with the needs of a personally declined conceptualism, Maria Lai has created an idiom of absolute semantic density and fascinating expressive freedom. In the "Stanza di Noè" (Noah's Room) the naturalness of the objects is, once again, the sign of what Salvatore Naitza called "real figurativeness" and which, moreover, was to assume the aspect of a "sacred representation".

Igino Panzino

Domestic flight

The space at the entrance contained the work of Igino Panzino, which was placed against the back wall like a domestic altar; from the composition there appears to emerge a subtle dialectic between sacred and profane. The installation is in two parts: a wooden structure framing a work on paper, white like a precious cloth with the material priming of an infinite number of passages of rays of light, where formal purity and severe clarity confer upon it a sort of discreet sacrality. Immediately afterwards this is contradicted by the sobriety of the materials forming the wooden base where a chorus of lightly-touched sheep bells produces atavistic sounds of vibrant deafness: signs charged with the ancient memory rooted in the original culture of which Panzino has perfectly assimilated the sense of industrious manual dexterity and the profoundly ethical value of his artistic conception. It is in this crucial node that Panzino’s work displays the combinatorial play: rigorous planning, which is always at the base of his works, dissolves in the echoes of intense emotiveness that such sounds produce, in the successful illusion of the work that communicates its existence. Panzino has worked for years on this assumption; he has modified his formal registers and techniques, but has never lost sight of the fact that the work, before any other consideration, must manifest its true being, its real presence as necessary and undelayable, and thus its nature as an object charged with mental and manual labour. In the knowledge that he is constantly moving on a land that cannot help but imply conflictual tensions between the theoretical reasons behind his work and the pragmatic necessities of artistic activity, with ironic detachment Panzino chooses the road of conciliation between the sacrality of doing and the dailiness of being.

Danilo Sini

Souvenir materials: cornstarch paste

In the last room, Danilo Sini's work on the wall emerged, as has become habitual with this artist, with the will to expose and deride, and thus non-violently eliminate the myths and dreams of our century. His destructuring procedure is of the kind that Laura Cherubini found in the past in De Dominicis: homeopathic: the annulling of pathological effects by using the same instruments used by the illness, but in the case of Danilo, with something more: if possible, doing it with a smile. In reality, the tenderness with which he proposes his images, from the rose-coloured teddy bears to this work in corn meal, purposely betrays the subtle cynicism with which the artist presents them and which, when all is said and done, is the only way of stemming the consequences. The purpose of his rummaging in the present, which so suddenly becomes the past, is to present the universe of the "souvenir" of which he gives a desemanticizing inventory: commonplaces and trite stereotypes, fetishes of mass culture and signs/symbols of power miserably run aground are the residues of an epoch that discloses its uselessness and emptiness. In Danilo Sini's latest works there is, in fact, beyond the irreverent tricks he plays, the bitterness of one who has been betrayed, a bitterness that is sharpened by the devastating effects that such "souvenirs" can still produce. The "Hammer and Sickle" and Fascist ideograms are nonchalantly placed side by side with little crowns decorated with satin ribbons, little bears or wreathed sweet hearts arranged on the wall like the inconsistent ghosts of a world of infantile mawkishness, of paltry certainties, of dreams of still out-of-reach well-being and happiness: a world, and a century, to be left by the wayside.

Gabriella Locci

Prova d´amore (Love Token)

The intention behind the installation of Gabriella Locci is unquestionable: to alter radically the perception of the space within which the artist has placed it and produce a substitute for the large room at the entrance, a place other than itself, a space re-created between the poetry of the landscape and the stages of an initiation. On descending the long stairs leading to the first room, one comes upon a sea of salt that creates a rugged and rough expanse which in the whiteness of its surface proposes a vision of an infinite and mystic void. But at the centre of the room we find seven rods, like naked branches, marking a trajectory, a path to follow, which lead and orient the eye towards the back wall, where a small work of etching defines the awaiting horizon to which that path leads. The image of the pathway is made more explicit by the seven shoe moulds that solicit the the eye to follow a precise direction and lead to two loaves of bread covered with wax on the salt pavement. The strongly symbolic value of the objects, the numbers and the materials confer on the room a sort of suspension of time and transform the field of vision into an alienating impracticability. But Gabriella Locci is not new to the kind of installation; on the contrary, this one at the Man Ray Cultural Centre appears as an ideal continuation of the work she has been doing for some years in the field of interdisciplinary experimentation and which has led to many different results. But it is the passionate research in the field of etching that is the privileged one for her sense of strict discipline and desire to delve ever deeper into technique and composition. If we bear these premises in mind, her latest work reveals an even clearer interpretation and becomes a manifest "declaration of love" along her artistic itinerary. The salt, the bread, the trees and the footprints are the linguistic fragments of this landscape of the soul and of the anxieties and disquiet that they hide from view. And thus, of the tiring, esoteric procedures that the work of etching requires, of the great expenditure of time necessary to bring out the image, they are tangible metaphores of a technique outside the limits of time in that they are charged with memory and history. The processional nature of the work with its strongly subliminal references creates a material situation similar to what we read in the etchings to which the artist dedicates the evocativeness of this work.

Roberto Puzzu

Come un tango (Like a Tango)

The smallest of the rooms, the one in the middle, greets the visitor with the surprise of a blatantly contemporaneous trompe-l’oeil: on two panels installed so as to occupy the entire visual field, slightly oscillating on different planes, the space replicates itself by being impressed on Roberto Puzzu's photographic paper. The work, which springs from the most authentic intentions of the craft of graphic designer, emphasizes the artist's consummate technical and compositional ability with the use of sophisticated technology to create a poetic image at full scale. The planning area, within which Roberto Puzzu has always moved, has allowed him to investigate in depth the methods through which the image develops. The faultless make-up of his works reveals the artist's need for rigour and formal orderliness, even when the emotion of image and sign are the strongest. The total mastery of the techniques he uses thus allow him to control emotions perfectly and keep them within the bounds of procedures of technological play, within the blandishment of illusion. And it is an illusive space that the image reflects: its double that negates the real physicalness within which it is placed. The image appears governed by the desire to expand the space it represents, to strengthen its narrow dimensions and turn inside out the coordinates of perception that keep the visitor from crossing the threshold. Real space thus frames imaginary space, englobes it in its intimacy and reflects it in the immateriality of the substitute vision. The gap between true and false, between illusion and reality, between physical space and mental space is mimimum, if it were not that a fragment of the first panel is seen macroscopically projected into the second figured band. Here the gaze becomes lost in the search for an order of things which has instead been annulled by the ground surface and the grainy texture on which signs of emotion have left traces that are slight but still sufficient to find a way out and return that fragment to the play of mirrors of the first band. There, one can hear and miss the echoes of the other rooms, faraway, untranslatable sounds, murmurs that become stronger and stronger and assume the illusive form of a harmonious music "like a tango".

Rosanna Rossi

No title

The room at the back is animated this time by the work of Rosanna Rossi, almost a double installation composed of objects and materials arranged on the floor and a triptych on the wall which reiterates in different terms the figurative and semantic value of the central work. A large, double circle of used bottles occupies the room to describe a dynamic and luminous tendency propelled by an opaque, black carpet of pieces of coal. The strong, evocative contrast that emerges, caused by the antithetic nature of the materials employed, immediately generates deep densities of meaning which the formal geometric definition allays in its implicit harmony. The contrast thus becomes a dialectic relationship between the warm and pressing energy of the organic material (coal) and the crystalline coldness of the glass, which is accentuated by the structure under tension created by the bottles composed vertically and the mass of the coal arranged horizontally which, as a splendid weave of stone, claustrophobically searches for light. The work is thus legible as a meeting of primary forces which, in their binary opposition, refer to the eternal conflicts of opposing tensions or, if one prefers, amplify the reflection on the very being of material, which can change its physical state into another. The circular architecture, of magic ascendency, accentuates the organistic vision of the installation and leads directly to the central theme of all Rosanna Rossi's work: the search for a stable equilibrium between reason and emotion. Her artistic itinerary is indeed crossed by recourse to the rationality of the geometric form softened by a more palpable and vitalistic emotionality entrusted to the existential use of colour. And Rosanna Rossi could not but search in colour for the verification of her material composition: the three panels that rise on the wall, accentuating its curvature, can be read as an ideal journey into colour used in the pure and primary warm and cold tints that wind themselves into the same number of dynamically suspended circles that echo the forms on the floor. The subtle play of light and shadows that stretch across the room confers upon Rosanna Rossi's work the strength and lightness of an animistic vision of reality.

Aldo Contini

Autoritratto con tre profeti (sala d'onore) The Three Prophets (Hall of Honour)

In the emptiness of the large room at the entrance - which Aldo Contini has jokingly named the "Hall of Honour" owing to the authoritativeness of the presences that his work evokes and the bizarre geography of the unequal spaces - there, on the large wall full of light, his work requires a patient reading and long contemplation. Three bright surfaces covered with real and false gold foil are framed by a rectangle of wood and hung on the wall like excerpts from an esoteric liturgy, an"exultet" which sings a hymn to the same number of prophets in Contini's private religiousness. John Coltrane, Ezra Pound and Casimir Malevic are the divine inspirers of the contemporary age, the ideal fathers of twentieth-century culture, at least in the artist's intimate literature. He leaves us his self-portrait, placing it between Pound and Malevic, but he subverts the material and figurative connotations. On the inside of a natural wooden panel is hung an octagon of real gold, the artist's icon and cipher of his presence and the debt he has with the poet and the painter. He, who as a prophet of more modern times, gives up the narcissism of gold and declares an intention that is more humbly represented (by the natural wood) but resistant to the wear and tear of time (in the use of real gold). One must thus wonder how much of the real and how much of the false gold attributed to the prophets may remain unaltered and cross the threshold of eternity. The play on appearance is in reality further meditation within the vast circle of the "Magnificat", on temporality conceived as the relationship between history and the past and, more in general, with a vaster circle of thought on the theme of eternity and immortality. The surfaces of gold, which replace colour, create an explicit reference to the tradition of the sacred, first in Byzantine art and then in the Sardinian-Spanish retables of the 15th century, and allow us to sense the presence of inaccessible depths. The aniconic cartouches, which bear the signs of the prophets they celebrate, consecrate their presence to the time of the infinite and consign them to the sacrality of myth. The dimension of the sacred and the sense of time are thus the poles between which Contini's metaphysical vision develops, a dimension that brings into play death and salvation, the futile and the sublime, contingency and divination.

Wanda Nazzari

"Le voci illese" (Unharmed Voices)

A work by Wanda Nazzari is never innocuous or defenceless: it springs from a painfully arrived at grasp of consciousness in the production of the work which bears the traces and signs of it. This is so even when it is possible to see in it an optimistic vision and a wealth of vital ferments as in "Le voci illese" (The Unharmed Voices), the composition placed in the smallest of the rooms, which is the one best suited to contain the virginity of a birth. From a fertile ground of humble and pasty soil emerges a group of small white heads arranged to form a triangle. They appear to rise slowly out of the soily substrate in search of the light. The still-astonished faces and the half-closed eyes declare the absolute innocence of the figures covered with loving care by the veil of a transparent glow that protects and assures their chastity. Painstakingly, Wanda Nazzari has performed a patient work of bandaging, up to the point of infusing in the plastic forms an aura of nascent life in the absolute whiteness of the form. A subtle web of gold and bronze threads covers the single figures and, with discretion and caution, preserves them from the senselessness of time but, at the same time, reveals to them the need for communication, the indispensable locus of all of Wanda Nazzari's aesthetic operations. Thus, here too she continues and reiterates the existential poetics that she has been elaborating for some time and which here, as elsewhere, becomes concrete in the value assigned to the technique of craftsmanlike skill on the one hand and the conceptual dimension within which she moves on the other. And it is on this plane that Nazzari's language is taking on the strata of symbolic echoes and evocative metaphores: starting from that of the nest, the focal point of her overall poetics, which here outcrops and grows to contain other courses of sense that involve form (the triangle), technique (the bandaging) and material (soil, bronze, gold). But she has warned us time and again that every metaphore can contain its opposite and that the anxiety of life comes from the pain of negation and death. And thus it is that the work, in the emotive reading that it necessarily requires, becomes ambivalent and hides, within the warm light that illuminates it, an obscure side of sacrifice and immolation; the space becomes a sacrificial altar. The sensation that one receives is once again an attentive suspension between a mystical place and an oniric dimension, but also, undoubtedly, the declaration of a radical faith in the function of the work and of artistic activity.

Aldo Tilocca

"Morte araba" (Arab Death) Visual Project: Aldo Tilocca Choreography: Maurizio Saiu Dancer: Cornelia Wildisen

For everyone it was a long wait that separated preparation from the completion of the scenic event. It was a time charged with expectation on the part of the public because of the anxious presence of the protagonists of this visual project: Aldo Tilocca, Maurizio Saiu and Cornelia Wildisen. A simple carpet and the nude body of Wildisen were for several hours the only signs of what, later on, was to reveal itself as surprisingly absorbing and profoundly thrilling. A sort of tragedy took place on that carpet, which had become the boundary and locus of the event, interpreted in the convulsive and flexural movements of the dancer. An insistent rhythmic movement slowly began, involving from the beginning minimum fragments of the body which then communicated with every fibre and muscle of an anatomy subjected to brusque contractions or bent by violent shocks. A controlled hysteria of trembles and silent laments, which the frenetically beating tongue heightened to a painful sense of alarming agitation while a rain of sounds of water and mud, of rubble and scrap invaded the room and saturated it beyond all possible endurance. The nervous movements of Wildisen's body thus reinterpret an orgiastic frenzy which in the tumultuous sequence of gestures seems to hide guilt to be expiated, obscure sins to be forgiven in an esoteric, propitiatory rite. The refrain of a Parisian song now and again alleviated the dramatic sequence of the repeated movements of the body of the dancer covered only by a drape magically obtained from a man's jacket, which is typical of Aldo Tilocca's poetics of clothing. The dance, which bent Wildesen's body, prostrating it and exalting it, even searching within it for an intense sensuality that vibrated in unison with the sonorousness of the room, is lost in the obscure depths of non-sense. As witness to the creative event remain a monitor, a carpet and a chair.

Paola Dessy

From "I giardini del sogno" (The Gardens of Dream)

An enveloping and estranging atmosphere is created in the small room at the back, where Paola Dessy's installation proposes, with the artifice of make-believe, "dream gardens" that can be travelled through. Physical space dissolves with the presence of a large plastified structure on which have been printed an interplay of elements alluding to a luminous and impalpable phytomorphism. The work has its ideal starting point: an illuminated surface, a sort of monitor placed on the floor, reproduces the plant motif which is reflected as a negative in an element that is perfectly mirrored and which in turn is macroscopically spread on the floor and on a transparent and vibrating mobile screen. The scene thus obtained becomes an invitation to be lived in, to be taken possession of as an unknown and practicable place, between the reflections of the images and their infinite multiplications. The lightness and suspension of the large screen contribute to modelling and refracting the white and unreal light, which is fed by the strong contrast with the black of the exasperatingly repeated graphic signs. The sensation of immaterialness and strong scenic illusionism that one receives from it does not subtract from the evidence of the logic of the work and the technical sureness behind Paola Dessy's work. Nor can these aspects surprise those who have been following the artist's career. From the beginning of the 1950s she has been dealing with the experience of the project which later became that of experimentation with different techniques, moving at her ease from the refinement of an innate manual skill to the most widely varying engraving techniques. This work appears to reabsorb and synthesize the work of the previous decades and expand what she is engaged in at present with the use of printing techniques as a pictorial and plastic function. There is no doubt that in the scenic situation at the Man Ray Cultural Centre Paola Dessy reproposes the use of black and white as the intensely pictorial values of light and shadow, form and surface, evocative figurativeness and metaphysical transparency. The projected shadowy landscape and the milky glow evidently do not allude to any naturalistic suggestion; if anything, they affirm the need for an itinerary travelling backwards with its destination in the present, once again in the search of one's identity. The pathway in space appears in fact as the transcription of a sentiment of time permeating thirty years of her existence and returns to the origins in an engraving of the 1960s, then magically evocative of dream gardens. Today, that work has expanded to become updated in a room which has become the place of a metamorphosis, a silent, essential place of decanted emotions and strong mental abstraction, almost a "secret Zen garden".

Anna Saba

Stone in web

A tall ascensional structure occupies the centre of the first room, imposing its presence through the architectural evidence of a geometric structure and the dark colour of the materials used. In the ineluctability of its being, a circle of soil embraces a heap of brown, porous gravel hindered in its attempt to expand by the verticalness of linear elements represented by poles of steel which meet at the top and hold a large stone enclosed in a net suspended in the void. On more careful consideration, Anna Saba's work is seen as a mixture of installation and sculpture in the strict sense of the term. The stone at the centre bears the signs of the sculpting it has undergone. The habitual procedures of the artist who, since the beginning of the 1980s, has used trachyte as the ideal substance for her works, are thus also present in this work, on that is rich in visceral tensions and strongly centripetal in its relationship to the space around it. The use of trachyte, which in Anna Saba’s artistic itinerary has signified a structural discovery and the aesthetic comeback of this material with respect to others that are more precious and elegant, is felt as the search for a historical and cultural identity and therefore assumes the accents of a dense symbolism, not necessarily for the purpose of celebrating a fortunate relationship with primitive and mythological nature, but more in the sense of the representation of a violated and contrasted nature. This is the meaning of the cages into which on other occasions she has imprisoned her smooth stones in organic and vital forms to accentuate their intimate essence and implicit decorative arrangement. Metal cages which here assume the form of a large-meshed net that tightens but does not close, hinders but does not hide; thus a net that still offers the possibility of being opened and which allows communication. The stone, which is born from the soil of which it is a live part, chained in the spires of industrialized civilization, here seems to claim a possible freedom. The archaic aura of the forms in Anna Saba's work wishes to do no more than signify the originary and atemporal dimension of their nature and, from here, the manifest reference to the primitivistic solutions coming from the matrix of expressionism. In the installation at the Man Ray Cultural Centre, which brings together materials of different kinds and forms of opposing nature, Anna Saba proposes a possible equilibrium between nature and civilization, order and disorder, casualness and intentionality.

Giovanna Secchi

Operazioni di carteggio (Operation with Letters)

The guests in the room that stretches out under the vaulted ceiling form silent lines that sail across the floor and up the wall to the small window: they are paper boats, the kind that children make out of pages of newspapers and play with, carefully arranged along one side of the large room. The work of Giovanna Secchi, who adopts the historicity of an ancient symbology, proposes a discreet and poetic metaphore of her artistic itinerary and existential voyage. The small boats, all identical and all different, sail loaded with the words that the printed paper bears, a cargo of letters, indelible characters, dark shadows now composed confusedly in the minimal structure of the form. Writing that speaks the languages of the world, declined as they are in the most varied idioms and thus crossroads between the destinies of the languages themselves and of the other languages. Beside them, and for the evident purpose of invasion, a small group of boats made of black cardboard creates a fortunate luministic counterpoint and accentuates the enchantment of this "collection of letters". More than as a menacing appearance, the fleet of invaders intervenes to strengthen the semantic value of the initial metaphore. The voyage through one's past leaves space for the pathways of the subconscious which, through unpredictable detours, emerges and infiltrates our inattentive daily lives. The sense of a voyage is thus seen not in terms of its destination but as the voyage itself, as possible routes which, on passing through many territories, give structure to memories and things learnt, give form to the past and point towards a perceivable future. No obscure sentiment, no lacerated or distressing vision of things, but rather the slightly ironic game of one who after some years of silence reasserts the sense of his or her work, leading to a more serene and relaxed meditation. And this could not help but involve, once again, the use of materials and methods which in the past were channeled into the problems, first of the informal and then of the conceptual. Only the recent past has witnessed a more decisive opening up to the narrative possibilities of composition which, without sacrificing the rigorousness of the project, solicits new pathways over which the sign can travel. Thus in this installation at the Man Ray Cultural Centre, which in the space of its action brings into play two panels (black and white) with plant and geometric motifs to mark the territorial limits of the work in apparent movement. These are recognizable forms in the investigation into nature conducted by the artist in the recent past which, together with the image of a voyage, appears to delineate an unavoidable stage in her research and a crucial point in her vision of existence. With minimal gestures and extreme simplicity in her choice of materials, Giovanna Secchi has created fragile poems of paper, fraught with affectivity and heightened lyricism which lead to a more penetrating understanding of herself with the joyous wonder of infancy.

Salvatore Coradduzza

Opera aperta (Open Work)

In Salvatore Coradduzza's structural work there is a strong centre of attraction: a reflecting surface that captures the images at the centre of the room and returns them trapped in the web of an impending mesh of wood. The beam of light seen on the floor is produced by a series of mirrors which first widen to form an ample modular square and then proceed until they encounter the final limit of the wall. Light but inexorable black sticks weigh on the mirrors and fall randomly on the large panel like a gigantic game of skittles. Surprisingly, however, the mirror offers an altered vision and the sticks take on a red hue which, on englobing the reflected images, changes the playful atmosphere into one of tragedy. The work is one that calls for the public's playing an active role, that of unwitting protagonist of the event. The purpose of the corridor of light that stretches out to iterate the installation is to oblige the visitor to follow a path and, if anything, to double the illusion of the image caught in the wooden web. And the work, in its totality, never ceases, even for a moment, to absorb and refract reflections up to the point of a self-exasperation in the gigantic shadow that it projects on the wall - the tautological and ephemeral vision of the work of art. Illusion and multiplication of the work, orderly seriality and apparent disorder: these are the subjects of Salvatore Coradduzza's meditation. The strict discipline he applies to his work makes casualness the result of a meticulously controlled project. But Coradduzza, whose manual skills have always offered unsuspected possibilities for the opening of his work, does not intend to give up the reference to the child's game and the scenic juxtaposition, as in the evocative vision of the "shadow play" which stretches out eerily on the large wall.

Antonello Ottonello

"Sulcis"

Observed at a distance and framed by the curve of the arch that leads into the small room at the back, Antonello Ottonello's work is an immediately effective and seductive setting. Heavy-light, dark-light, solid-aerial: these are the strong ambivalent sensations that arrive, determined to communicate a two-fold and symmetrical poetics of space. The work develops in two dimensions: one earthly, flat and regular, produced by an enclosure of coal bearing a violently intense material and chromatic physicalness on which a white light implacably shows up the natural venous ripples of a substance extracted from the earth with back-breaking toil. The second dimension is ethereal, obtained by means of innumerable small white bags hanging from the ceiling on very thin threads and lightly swinging in a sudden and hidden gust of wind. The image, which is fixed indelibly in the emptyness of the room, carries with it the traits of a discreet and evocative theatricality. Ottonello's research today moves in a direction clearly indicated by the use of natural materials, on which he focuses his lucid attention to catch their structural and chromatic aspects and their loving participation in the great story of which they are a part. He is thus constructing, side by side with a more legible collective symbolic system, a biographical landscape of signs outcropping from an imagination fed on a "warm" conceptualism on the one hand and a precious decorative sense on the other. Thus in the last few years constructions populated by objects found and gathered from the great reservoir of nature: stones, pieces of bark, leaves, thorns and canes which, with maniacal order, interpret the pictorial scene of a nakedly feticistic project. The operation of filling some objects, such as suitcases full of images, boxes full of stones, bloated cushions or stuffed bags, appears to be significant. On this art of environmentalist inspiration there is thus the infiltration of a psychoanalytic paradigm of existence, of which, however, Ottonello investigates the more socially difficult aspects as well, as in the work exhibited at the Man Ray Cultural Centre, where the black soul of the Sulcis District mirrors the white soul of "sweat, fatigue, tears and love" closed within impalpable containers of our lives.

Gianfranco Pintus

No title

A wake of signs like a great return wave crosses the ceiling of the room, while a large panel of water is placed at the centre of the floor. Gianfranco Pintus' work is on the boundary between the invisible and the visionary - light and ethereal like a breath that becomes dense in space. On the vaulted ceiling, arranged in concentric circles, we find the verses of a purposely anonymous poem. The verses are illegible because they are written backwards from right to left: the meaning they contain cannot be understood. But if one circles round the room and looks into the watery mirror, the verses fall back into place in their linearity: the writing loses its exclusive semantic power and becomes an infinitely circular shudder. Playing with the anamorphic image and forcing observers to look and look again, in a continuous raising and lowering of their gazes from the real image to the reflected one, Pintus transforms the room a into a place of meditation on the very nature of art, a secret mirror of hidden narcissism. But the work requires more of the observer, who must follow the multiple pathways that the graphic trajectories force he or she to follow, in a slow and incessant poetics of the environment. The perceptive space slowly loses its features; it divests itself of its physicalness and offers itself as an estranging space where the ego, in the slowed-down and bewildering kinetics, can reach the point of annihilation of the conscious and self-control. The intervention is thus oriented in the direction of the exaltation of the value of loss, which involves those who adventure into the spires of poetry and art, and those who have followed the paths of such spires through the long period of their execution. In perfect tune with the productions of figures and objects in his recent past, Gianfranco Pintus pushes the aesthetic operation to the extreme limit to touch the descent zero of sensorial experience.

Mariolina Cosseddu