Kant said: An artist creates because he has to, not out of knowledge.
Fiorenzo Zaffina always sought in his art research the essence of creation in matter and space. In this ongoing search he now voided matter, showing how difficult it is for us to approach the absence of it. His research is thus symbolic and spiritual in nature, and expands the concept of sculpture in the arts.
This is evermore true in his recent group of works made mainly of crystal clear acrylic glass blocks. Shiny surfaces create fluid reflections where the artist’s hand manipulated them, giving rise to an antithesis game: light and shadow, color and non-color, concave and convex, shiny and matte, smooth and rough surfaces, all conveying a feeling of both solid and liquid matter. His sculptures often have an opening, a slit, a cavity in which the artist wielding matter enhances the value of the void, of infinity, of mystery and transcendence — disrupting and distorting the balanced image of the forms created. His sculptures being dynamic forms, which maintain an ongoing communication, allow Fiorenzo Zaffina to play with ambivalence. The strength of his objects, which are close to being illusionistic, hypnotical, is their ability to reflect and distort at the same time.
Like in other works by him, Zaffina stresses here the potential of objects to become something else, initiating once again a dialogue between him and the observer in which forms, by materializing, become a way of learning. Of making the world one’s own.
The result is a compendium of brightness and color, which tells us that the artist longs not to leave that world. However, his dreamy gaze betrays the false brightness he created. He suggests a cosmic fluctuation, which is yet temporary when it comes to our existence, more cyclical than chronological. Fiorenzo Zaffina’s world so merges with the universe establishing a kind of communion between man and the cosmos.
by Massimo Scaringella