Untitled

Against a backdrop of plain red, tongues or stray wisps of smoke emerge from what appears to be a trellis. The result is an image that – more than from nature (with which Calzolari nonetheless said he wanted to maintain a relationship) – seems to come from a hallucination or a dream.
The artist has used all kinds of material in his creation, plucked indiscriminately from the natural world, commonly used objects or the factory forge: ranging from neon fluorescent tubes to other icy-lighted surfaces and cylinders; from film to video; lead, copper, plastic, fabric; the human body or that of an animal; feathers or tobacco leaves ... Often there is a sense of an environmental vocation or an implication of duration, which is also made explicit in the work’s execution. In the 1980s – as if to confirm his omnivorous desire to explore every artistic potential in his subjects without imposing any hierarchy on them, along with his ironic approach – Calzolari also used paint, while still maintaining an uneasy balance between his most extravagant dream and his undoubted emotional involvement with Informalism.