edited by Elena Gollini
Angelo Perlotto’s sculptural culture is animated and nourished by a millenary tradition and an ancient history carried out from Canova to masterclasses held by Rodin, Giacometti and Moore that fits into the dialectic of a high creativity, marking a return to ancestral roots to which he belongs by right of birth and by vocation, beyond evolutions and formal developments. In facts, his vocation is revealed by his attraction toward his father’s forge, a master in the iron craftsmanship, from whom he learned all the secrets of the manual processing of this metal.
There he learned how to chisel it plastically, by fire and by hammer he sculpts and engraves, giving to iron “a soul” and transforming it in a dynamic, vibrant and lively sculpture. His works are projected towards a substantial revelation of being, to the identification of the essence of the soul through a metaphoric and symbolic language, which makes its presence visible and perceivable in the structural forms of birth and of mysteries of life, through the religious and sacral component of intense fascination. In a time when a man lives the frantic anxiety of the new millennium almost in the constant restlessness of a sudden mutation of processes initiated by innovative technologies, Perlotto reasserts the primary key values of man, of traditional culture and of the archaic civilization. The sculpture proposes itself as a “monument and a symbol pillar”, as a concrete and tangible evidence of the indelible remembrance of the perpetual collective memory.
His creations in the absolute domination of the ferrous material, of which he is a skilled smith and chaser, embody a sublime spiritual intensity, and express innocence and semplicity of the most spontaneous human feelings, of joy, of hope, in the name of universal love and pure and untouched beauty. He demonstrates innate aptitudes and qualities, focusing his work on the concept of re-evaluation of man and his intrinsic value, that represents a milestone of the achievement in itself. He gives clear and loud answers and solutions to share with the observer.
Disinclined to trendy fashions and ideologies only based on cutting-edge technology, losing the direct control of the transformation mechanism of the surrounding reality, of facts, of actions andof information related to it, he moves toward an experimentation that examines the certainty of fundamental existential principles, that in the iron wonder show their sense and impassable meaning of strong and consolidated structures. Forms that have been evoked from the inside expand, dilate and distribute themselves outside, impressing a vision on the sculpture, so that it becomes the image of “an event of “nature”. This sculpture will thus represent the emotional tension caused by the attempt at explaining the concept of reality in its totality, which can be applicable to everyone, in social contexts and behaviour, and that can extend to the animal and vegetable world as well.
Perlotto shows the vigorous strength and the temper of the primeval man of the origins, who faces nature elements, gives them a shape, transforming them in an “absolute shape”, as even the imagination can do when driven by emotion. The raison d’être of his sculptures lies in the celebration of the naturalness and at the same time in the celebration and in the cult of beauty, evoking the ideals perpetrated by the philosopher Socrates to “learn mysterious and simple words about the love, the insatiable desire to get the primary unit again, to what we have lost losing our soul.
And more, we can mention Emperor Hadrian’s words when he said: “I’m like our sculptors,
the human satisfies me. I can find everything in it, even eternity”.
The art of Perlotto can be inscribed in a history of a richer culture, immersed in the impulse of the soul and emotional pathos, which reconfirms the size of his artistic thought to man and to his vital dimension. The load he impresses represents the propulsive momentum of unconditioned surrender to a language unaltered and real, that puts the spectator in a deep contact with the sacred space of life, acting like a liaison between the contingent and the absolute, conveying a clear cut shape, a mark of what will not change anymore, and that will be fixed in a state of harmony and freedom.