Villa Pisani Bonetti ‘16. Scultura intervento, 2016

corten steel, 300x900x77 cm
Villa Pisani Bonetti, Bagnolo di Lonigo, Vicenza

“The work for the Villa Pisani illustrates Staccioli’s artistic focus on context, which has never been surpassed in terms of uniqueness and consistency. He forms a creative relationship with the Palladian building, adapting what is for him the invention of a new form to some of the vectors and dimensions of the site. He has chosen to work on the fringes of the space around Palladio’s building, ideally relating to the left- hand corner of the main façade. Looking at his sculpture from the building, we can see how it forms an imaginary bridge between two great big trees, optically fitting in between them, and also creating a physical relationship with the perimeter wall. The reddish colour of the sculpture sets it apart as an entity created in the present (unlike the natural environment and the Renaissance building), and its form is that of an anomalous cross-section of a sphere. The short side of its approximately triangular shape is rounded into an elongated ogive, which produces a dynamic effect of movement and a further suspension of its already intentionally precarious position. In a variant of what he later created, Staccioli had also worked on the possibility of a shape that would have been less elongated and that would have related to only one of the trees that now constitute the imaginary frame for the work. He abandoned this solution, however, in favour of the more relaxed form we see in the space around the house, like a great vector of the future.
The suspended balance evoked by this “intervention sculpture” is a recurrent feature in Staccioli’s work, particularly since the Eighties, and the triangle is an explicit reference to his previous forms. The sculptures closest to this morphology include the one he made for the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in La Jolla, California, in 1996. Designed for one of the terraces, it uses a big, elongated red triangle to interpret the relationship between the post-modern building and its physical and conceptual opening towards the Pacific Ocean. These components are modified in the intervention at the Villa Pisani by the elongated ogive, emphasising the intentional, significant instability of the work: the geometrically anomalous section is the way the form comes to life, bringing about a more organic flexion and greater dynamism, contradicting and extending the primarily orthogonal lines of the Palladian architecture.
In his sculpture, Staccioli imagines and reinvents every place as a real possibility for experience. In the case of Palladio’s architecture, we see the unravelling of an essential, elementary geometry, and yet one that is astonishing for the precision with which it interprets our relationships with the spaces we experience and go through. His works have always been characterised by basic forms, with very slight changes and inventions, but in spite of their geometrical structures, they refuse the reduction of form that is inherent in Minimal sculpture. Staccioli’s approach distances itself from the high-tech self-referentialism of Minimalism, with an awareness of its humanistic essence. This always relates to an experience that is never purely perceptual and formal, but also, and especially, historic and meaningful. It is indeed an intervention with the language of art, but in a space and time that is constantly part of the human experience.”

Francesca Pola, Mauro Staccioli: umanesimo del formare il mondo, pp.23-26, Catalogo della mostra, 2016