Piergiorgio Sconfienza

The project, composed of 44 works, is inspired by the book "Invisible Cities" by Italo Calvino. I've been reading the book several times, and at each reading the stories and characters are renewed in my eyes, giving me the feeling I've never thumbed its pages. Cities change and evolve, like when you walk the same streets and you realize that something added or replaced details that made the spaces always the same. As in the book, but with the help of painting and sculptural process instead of the words, I traveled from city to city, following paths that only the passionate and enthusiastic eyes of travelers are able to see. As in the book, each work develops a particular theme: cities and trade, the name, the memory, the sky, the dead, the desire. In many of them you can recognize realistic architectures, familiar forms, but they are the result of pure imagination. Cities are invisible, impalpable, fatuous; but sometimes they become matter and person, sometimes they hang in the air again and develop in up or down, to nowhere or towards the whole. We can imagine them as we want, built with quality materials or made of dingy sheets. We can imagine people moving between their streets and their walls, on bridges, in the gardens, while their lives and their attitudes change the structure and nature of the city itself. The city is a great allegory of life and of human creation, is a manifestation of man in his talent and in his misery, feelings and passions, it's the place of experience, relations and trade. The invisible cities, imaginary, are the symbolic place of the experience and share the link with the absolute of poetry. This work, through each city represented, is a mental journey, an inner journey through reality and imagination, through things and their opposites, the good, the bad... It 'a stimulus to the imagination, which urges us to see the invisible cities materializing before our eyes, to make them our own, to imagine how we would like. And maybe, by resorting to the heart rather than the exercise of rationality, it's an encouragement to dream, travel, create...