The first exhibition "Double Dream of Art XNUMXRC between Artist and the Artificer, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva, was presented at the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation in Milan. Conceived as a traveling exhibition, it collects XNUMX years of the graphic production of XNUMXRC, which has collaborated with the greatest artists from the post-war period to today, including Francis Bacon, Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana and many others.

Who said that "life is a dream"? The bearer of this statement, we want to keep silent about his name, evidently spoke by considering himself in a waking state. He pronounced the sentence standing on a threshold from which to look at the world, something in a clear state of sensibility allowed him to think of being out of this dream, in a place sheltered from any irruption, perhaps placed high up, in a raised position above the heap of a newspaper that forms and frays out of any warp of reason.

The great exhibition that the Foundation dedicates to the work of Valter and Eleonora Rossi deeply involves me, because they are “accomplices” in my own graphic adventure. Without them I would not have been able to develop research in this field and to create, from the seventies to today, a production of graphic works, which are a deepening of my work on the recreated bas-relief, with a different strength and value, on a material. particular like the paper.

With their patience and enthusiasm Eleonora and Valter convinced me to try my hand at graphic work, which has always posed a problem to me: to keep the plastic aspect of the engraved and hollowed surface on the sheet of paper, with the shadows, the footprints and the signs of my expressive language. After a series of tests and experiments, we have developed, resuming my way of working in sculpture, a new and complex technique of chalcography: I work the original plane in negative in clay and from this I obtain the positive in plaster and subsequently the cast of epoxy resin which acts as a matrix. Once this matrix has been obtained, the specific graphic process begins with a series of interventions on it and also on additional copper plates which, overlapping, complete and transform the work and strengthen its graphic value. In the series of Dreams, the great works of 1994 that take up the theme, important and evocative for me, of the cuttlefish bone, we have even used etching, aquatint, intaglio and collage.

As for the color, when the simple white of the paper is not used, our chromatic choices have turned to shades ranging from ocher to rust, up to the various shades of brown and black, in order to recreate the patinations that the bronze, exposed to atmospheric agents, assumes over time.

As happened with me, Valter and Eleonora have worked with many artists, experimenting with great creativity and finding the most suitable technical-expressive solutions to enhance the style and poetics of each of them. Now, this exhibition offers a retrospective panorama of their extraordinary experience between artistic invention and technical reproducibility, between artisan tradition and creative flair.