Sculpture as a shift in point of view. Sculpture as an approach to space and time. Sculpture as a common spirit. Affiliation and tension, creation and transformation: this is the elective dualism that leads Michelangelo Consani and Emanuele Becheri – Tuscan sculptors on the Livorno – Prato axis born in 1971 and 1973 – to make the inside and outside of existence communicate with matter.
Michelangelo Consani | Emanuele Becheri, “A due #2: Opere / Costellazioni”, exhibition view, 2024, Galleria ME Vannucci, photo Ernesto Mangone, courtesy the artists and the gallery
The two artists do not represent a couple in the contemporary art scene, but two different cores with a common gaze. In A due #2: Opere / Costellazioni in the ME Vannucci Gallery in Pistoia, Michelangelo and Emanuele choose to look at each other to see things in life differently. Subjectivity and objectivity, vital and eternal elements, static and dynamic. A dialogue as fused as the material that belongs to it. Consani’s sculptures are a succession of self-portraits with a metaphorical rather than literal aspect: they are works that tell of the self through the other, stopping time as a reflective and transparent filter of passages from the past to the present. On the other hand, Becheri’s sculptures swirl the body in a precarious equilibrium: they are plastic works without cuts or additions, alive and uniquely suspended in evolution, of which the gesture is the primary matrix.
Michelangelo Consani, “Il Malatiello”, Belgian black marble, wood, 34 x 32 x 133 cm, 2023, Galleria ME Vannucci, photo Ernesto Mangone, courtesy of the artist and gallery
In the gallery, the two artists place the works in such a way that each one tells something about the other, in distances established as a yardstick of changing knowledge and unshakable discovery. As minor bodies of a larger system, as the title suggests by choice, “constellations” is Michelangelo Consani’s intimate philological union that traces a new whole in space, while “works” is the reference to the three classical themes of sculpture that guide Emanuele Becheri. Both sculptors look to the masters from the past as promoters not only of techniques or materials, such as bronze, marble, clay, terracotta, but rewriters of truths. The intention is to leave a trace as a herald of plastic matter, to explore and reflect contemporaneity.
Emanuele Becheri, “Testa”, terracotta, oxides, h 27 cm, variable dimensions, 2018, Galleria ME Vannucci, photo Ernesto Mangone, courtesy of the artist and gallery
The pivotal example that underlines the akin conjunction of the two artists is in the display of two works intent on looking at each other inside and out. Consani’s Il Malatiello and Becheri’s Testa, in black Belgian marble and terracotta respectively, are arranged one in the middle of the room and the other on the opposite wall. Just works of different workmanship, one recalls Gemito, the other Rossi, not so much in their execution as in the emotional idea they arouse. Blackness blurring the drama of life, earth reviving corporality. One before the other, eye to eye, the ego and the id, everything and nothing. From several vantage points, the two works reveal details and conceal others, an ‘unfinished’ that transcends matter and is inherent in the gaze. Sculpture as naturans: an alternative form of life.
Michelangelo Consani | Emanuele Becheri, “A due #2: Opere / Costellazioni”, exhibition view, 2024, Galleria ME Vannucci, photo Ernesto Mangone, courtesy the artists and the gallery
The double exhibition is embellished by a text by Francesco Carone, a sculptor friend of the two protagonists, which seals Michelangelo and Emanuele’s dissimilarity as synchronous plasticism of existences and materials, of philosophies and research, of re-knowledge and confidences.
Massimiliano Bastardo
Info:
Michelangelo Consani | Emanuele Becheri. A due #2: Opere / Costellazioni
text by Francesco Carone
28/01 – 21/04 2024
Galleria ME Vannucci
Via Gorizia 122, Pistoia
www.vannucciartecontemporanea.com
Art Curator and Art Advisor, graduated in Visual Arts and Cultural Mediation, with Master in Curatorial Practices, born in 1995, lives in Naples. He collaborates with Galleries and Independent Spaces, his research is mainly focused on Emerging Painting, with a careful and inclined gaze also on other forms of aesthetic language.
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