MAON, 19th and 20th century art museum in Rende (CS)
21 April 2018, 6.30pm
JANO SICURA
MÀTAKSA
edited by Tonino Sicoli and Tommaso Evangelista
sculptures, installations and drawings by a Sicilian-born but German-educated artist
Al MAON, the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Art Museum of Rende (Cs) will open on 21 April 2018 at 6:30 pm the exhibition “JANO SICURA / Màtaksa” curated by Tonino Sicoli and Tommaso Evangelista, which presents sculptures, installations and drawings by an artist who was Sicilian by birth but trained in Germany.
Born in Ferla (SR) in 1950, Sicura moved to Germany in the early 1970s, where he studied at the "Free Art School" in Stuttgart and later at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe. He received scholarships from the city of Filderstadt/BadenWurtternberg, the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe and, in Italy, from "Villa Romana" in Florence. He began working with various collaborations and cultural exchanges between Italian and German associations such as the "Goete Institute" and "The Italian Cultural Institute" in Stuttgart.
“Sicura – writes Tonino Sicoli – develops installations of skeins, threads, contortions, neo-objects, aggregations of plastic forms and signs on paper to make the two-dimensional and spatiality interact. There is a sweet structural precariousness in these works drawn in the air and on surfaces to represent soft districts in indefinite fields, between jolting splinters and contained movements. These are abstract calligrams, flourishes, which fix tubular, minute and rhythmic paths, with twisted movements, lumps of black, knots and threadlike eyelets with latent sensuality. Ribbons and rods rear up in minimal structures, which hover in the ether and in the conceptual space of denied, thought sculpture. In the wake of a path conducted by the hand and the mind, these objects of light matter, which simulate stems and branches of an artificial nature, breach a world of meta-organic, amoeboid forms, genetically attributable to filamentous cells. Forms of life and artifice of shavings, which transform into primitive-looking accumulation-organisms. Small silent writings of a variegated dissemination of circles, irregular polygons, marked curls write visual palimpsests of a scenographic text. Writings to be crossed and perceived in the rhythm of a configuration without completeness, which opens to a journey among bushes of non-sense.”
Tommaso Evangelista explains: “Jano's works are extreme dynamic, non-linear abstractions, vitalized by an exasperated gestural charge in its circular and centrifugal tendency. The visualization, in the sketches, of a movement of torsion and neurotic signs with a high symbolic functioning, is transformed into precarious and fragmented plastic constructions based on the open and autonomous dimension of concatenation and intertwining. The object creates the void and specifies for itself the direction of a personal monumental and minimal action. The expressive tension - both symbolic and active - determined by the constitutive skeleton of the molded matter that radiates with singular intensity into the surrounding space, now arranged in monads, now in more complex nuclei in dialogue on the edge of representation, transmits a dark energy, pulsating as if from a sub-atomic world, plastically expanded and reabsorbed into reduced and light fragments.
Through a complex assembly, Jano's structures, self-sufficient and hermetic, chaotically decompose the planes and, using above all the voids and the negative, define complex prominences, mobile reliefs loaded with molecular assemblages. Rejecting formal continuity, replaced by a continuous sensation of fracture, the artist develops a sculpture based on the principle of suspension, applying to the sign a centrifugal force that disarticulates the compositions and dislocates the assemblages.
Such plastic energy, without focal points or symmetrical centers, emersa from an unprecedented gravitational plot, leads to the development of thin, disjointed and twisted elements to form open architectures, with fractured and curved trends, and identifies an extraordinary spatial traction of extreme lightness that contrasts with the heavy physicality of the material.”
The exhibition, which will remain open until May 26, 2018, is organized by the “A. Capizzano” Center of Rende, with the patronage of the Municipality of Rende, the Municipality of Canicattini Bagni (Sr), the Alpeh Center of Lamezia Terme and the Association L’Arco e la Fonte of Siracusa.
