The fundamental elements of Alberto Gianfreda’s sculptural works are soil, wood, fabrics, paper, glass, ceramic, earthenware, marble and metals: the exploration of the material is at the centre of the sculptor’s research.
In particular, Gianfreda studies the ability of the matter to adapt, pushing it to extreme degrees of mobility with assembly systems and unique formal variations that allow him to constantly re-assemble his sculptures, enabling them to exist in that specific moment.
Time is an essential part of the language of the sculptor. He replaces the concept of site specific with that of time specific: sculptures do not derive from the specificity of being, but from an attitude of becoming.
The sculpture of the artist is redesigned each time in a process of making and unmaking that allows it to rethink itself, as the sculptor writes, «right in that instant, possible in that moment but probable everywhere».
In the sculpture Via Lattea, (‘Milky Way’, 2013), exhibited at Tempo al tempo, the artist has managed to break down marble, the most static material, solid and eternal, to recompose it in an almost soft shape that rests gently on a support as if it were a drape.
The artist introduces the concept of “resilience of the icon”, the ability of the work to change itself while remaining recognisable in its mutability. The sculpture, which has been conceived, designed and planned in detail, claims its freedom, taking back that autonomy that makes it unique.
The same ability of the shape to adapt is repeated on a wider scale and in different contexts, such as in public and holy spaces—meeting places between the dimension of transcendence and the continuous flow of immanence in time, in which liturgy represents a fundamental element for completing the message of the work.
In this era, which is the period of immateriality and the absence of the body par excellence, the task of sculpture is to speak to man. Alberto Gianfreda communicates with the world through the sculptural shapes that, despite being abstract, do not lose their narrative and evocative power.
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Alberto Gianfreda was born in Desio (Monza and Brianza) in 1981. He graduated in sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera, where he is currently a professor of sculpture techniques, and where he specialised in art and anthropology of the sacred, a highly interesting field for the artist to test the languages of sculpture between function and reflection.
Gianfreda devotes himself to the study and the research of the language of sculpture, investigating the ability of matter to adapt through mobile assembly systems and deflecting the language of sculpture in different physical and thematic contexts.
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