They are dug up from the void, the immaterial, the air. This is how they appear: delicate, evanescent, transparent. In Fiorenzo Zaffina’s recent sculptures made of acrylic glass the solid materials of his previous work belong to the past. Instead of cracked walls, crushed brick and chipped marble the artist now prefers matter-non matter, the incorporeal, the absence.
The new Zaffina is an ethereal sculptor, who pierces synthetic glass cut into parallelepipeds with a mill, slits it to obtain asymmetrical gaps at a corner, on a corner, on the polished face.
The breaches appear like large scratches showing color marks, some of which are curved, with a few of them curling like waves. The light that filters through the transparent material takes on the task of animating an inner dynamism offering multiple and changing visions depending on the observer’s point of view. Just moving around the transparent solid one discovers new perspectives, or new images, as one does shifting the point of view to above or below the solid. The inside refracts light in stripes and spirals, with always new and different effects.
Intense colors and primary forms and signs create ethereal and delicate “statues”, vague propositions of a process developing towards post-modern and linguistically elementary infra-sculpture. It all reveals contaminations of design art combining some conceptualism and some industrial design. Still craftsmanship and manual work prevail in Zaffina’s work, whose forms recalling square blocks and monoliths are crafted with drills and cutters, sanders and grinders.
Indeed “We are all saints” (Siamo tutti santi), a site-specific piece fashioned at the MAON in Rende (Cosenza), is a project with acrylic glass, which in this case, however, it is set over a sheaf of grooves in the wall, and spreads downwards and out, like a fan, from a single point at the top — it sort of represents light. Put in other words: symbolic light and real light meet on a halo illuminated from within, which hints with irony to a profane holiness.
by Tonino Sicoli