For whom the bell tolls at Forte Belvedere

Forte Belvedere has opened its summer show, Gong, staging the works of Eliseo Mattiacci up on the regal ramparts of Florence’s fort.

All photos by Andrea Paoletti

The Marche-born artist proved a pioneer on Italy’s contemporary art scene, a craftsman of experimentation and renewal in sculpture and an inspired inventor of spatial and conceptual relationships between art and nature, humans and the environment.

It’s a monumental show of 20 sculptures exhibited on the battlements and inside the villa, in addition to around 80 drawings that allow us admire Mattiacci’s outstanding graphic output. It is a shamanic-esque exercise, exploring the sublime of the cosmos, the orbits of the planets and stars, the rhythms and geometries that belong to the infinite universe, so as to draw stellar maps that today, just like millions of years ago, also function in symbolic, ritualistic terms.

From his earliest works, iron sculptures that are assemblies of a new, as yet unseen archaism, Mattiacci blends and reunites gestures that are human while belonging equally to the metaphysical imagination with the unfathomable nature of life in the universe and the immeasurable energy of matter and among the stars, with the cosmic cycle of life and death, of being and nothingness, the forces that are visible and invisible in space and time, such as magnetic attraction and gravity.

On his works, Mattiacci commented, “I feel attracted by the sky with its stars and planets and all that lies beyond, by our galaxies. It’s an imagination that goes beyond, as if it seeks to challenge the imagination itself, as if in a dream. I would like to launch one of my sculptures into orbit in outer space. It would be a magnificent dream to know that one of my spatial shapes is orbiting out there.”

Gong. Eliseo Mattiacci at Forte di Belvedere

Via San Leonardo 1, Florence

Until October 14

Monday-Saturday 9.30am-1pm, 2-5pm; Sunday and holidays 9.30am-12.30pm

www.musefirenze.it