Massimo Casagrande
Artist and indipendent Curator

Focusing on the most recent artistic production of Massimo Casagrande, which title of Ferro su gomma exhibits an equally minimal and Apollonian artifact of foam and iron laces, we would be entangled with interesting reflections on the polysemic and ever-current value of the artwork.

 

First of all, we would first be considering this soft construct for wall viewing as one of the classic examples of the objectual art that characterizes an innovative part of the Italian artistic research since the Second World War, which has been experimenting with and proposing actual objects that are valid for themselves, as an exquisite and exquisitely aesthetic value, uniquely linked to the artist's most genuine action.

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Under the aegis of that "freedom based on the absence" of every sentimental and semantic implication inaugurated by Piero Manzoni, these are works that go beyond the pictorial tradition, and come out of the frame to present themselves as pure developments and intertwining of shapes and colors in a sort of both intimate and cosmic intuition, the fruit and representation of an extreme rigor and conclusion in themselves.

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Thus, also in this latest Casagrande proposal can we witness the spectacle of a pure and almost aniconic expansion of materials, which breathes soft and placid in a monochrome gray show that is enlivened by a symmetrical pulsation of matching brown strings, according to the dictates of such attention to (beautiful ) shape, to balance, to measure that has always connoted Italian art since the Renaissance to nowadays’ offerings.

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And just the word “Today” immediately comes to disclose - and to discover us - in truth during our longer contemplation of the work, as it does raise a cogent and ever more imperious reminder to our most intrinsic human condition, further contemplated in these times of global pandemic emergency.

 

Massimo's Ferro su gomma, as is moreover typical of this artist's entire career, is a process continuously in progress that starts from the object and then becomes a mental construct and an evocative warning of the intrinsic human fragility, which is revealed here by the constraint of the symbolic laces rather as well as by the constitutive weakness of the soft polyurethane.

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This latter, however, in its ingenuous appearing also as the improbable mimesis of a concrete block, finally seems to remind us that the ultimate goal of art is to always and in any case constitute a barrier to the evil of living, whatever it may be, by drawing from the above mentioned full aesthetic viewing - and from the inner and free world that it thus raises - an ever renewing radiant force.

Giorgio Fedeli