Valdi Spagnulo’s artistic research focuses on the combination of different materials—stainless steel, iron and plexiglass—and on the chromatic and reflective effects of sculpture in its variable dimensions, which adapt according to the different settings they are destined to.
With a distinctive mark that is almost pictorial, the artist works the surface of plexiglass using a milling machine and graphite, marking it and making it opaque. The light, penetrating through the transparent plexiglass, confers particular effects of brightness in the irregularity of cuts and chips.
Spagnulo’s pictorial sign has been transformed into a gesture of space capable of embodying the irregularity and the precariousness of its structures.
The work Lembo di cielo (Strip of sky, 2006), exhibited at Tempo al tempo, is composed of a double trapezoidal structure tied by a knot made of a circle of stainless steel: the two parts are united and, by hooking onto a fragment of plexiglass, they create a space that ideally represents a fragment of the sky. The light refracts on the burnished steel bars which alternate with those in polished stainless steel, and it shines through the plexiglass, creating a play of visual balances. The rectangular steel tubes used to build the structures are designed and worked in torsion by the artist to structurally support the irregular shaped sculpture and to create optical effects of physical and visual permeability.
Spagnulo’s structures, made precarious by the use of imperfect materials and shapes, become a metaphor for existence, for the extreme delicacy of every action. The artist inserts scrap materials—leftover fragments of plexiglass or pieces of ferrules in metal—to overcome the physical dimension of reality and open up a dimension that goes beyond the defined space of sculpture to that of the sky.
Spagnulo’s sculpture defies attempts at interpretation according to historically established methods and canons. The attempt to draw mental segments that investigate space in a fragmented manner emerges in the informal gesture that the artist uses to intervene, deforming the linearity of metal.
Valdi Spagnulo makes the inherent weaknesses of metals visible, revealing the fragility and the fluidity of a material usually characterized by solid and strong rigidity.
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Valdi Spagnulo was born in Ceglie Messapica (Brindisi) in 1961. He moved to Milan in 1973, the city that opened up the European scene to him and where he graduated in architecture at the Polytechnic University of Milan.
The Eighties marked his debut as a painter and the beginning of extensive exhibition activity with several solo exhibitions and many participations in group exhibitions in various exhibition spaces, including the Galleria delle Ore of Giovanni Fumagalli and the Spaziotemporaneo of Patrizia Serra.
He currently lives and works in Milan where he is a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera.
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