Per Cornelia II

An armillary sphere made out of a tangle of copper wire is suspended in the void from two wire-shaped iron rods welded to a black-enameled sheet of metal in the shape of a crescent moon. This is a “light”, gentle sculpture, part of the series of “space-cosmic-astronomical” works (as Bruno Corà called them) that marked Mattiacci’s output from the 1980s on. Here we see the elegance of a new, creative, fairy-tale imagery, linked poetically with the birth of the artist’s daughter Cornelia in 1985. In this period the artist draws on the cosmic energy of celestial bodies. He has abandoned the physical, corporeal element of materials that characterized his early years and developed airy images that soar in space. The cosmos, the universe – these are the themes that draw his attention, and his language adapts, with uncluttered, synthetic works in which the “design” dominates the material, demonstrating its power and energy. In the 1970s Mattiacci had written “I like to get into things physically, to lay my hands on them, analyse them, compress them, cross them, because they exist. This is why I used so many different materials, I’m intrigued by the way they interact, how they bend”. Now, maintaining his interest in materials and the interweavings of forms, he has nevertheless changed his relationship with them, viewing them “in transparency” and watching “how they move and vary in the air, the sun, the rain”.