Vol. 12, no. 1 (2020)

Nicola Renzi

Each of us keeps a dream in a drawer, more or less within reach. Nicola Renzi's, perhaps, is to manage to bind great buildings in his elastic bands, enormous structures, maybe those that fill Perugia, his city, or the small treasure-filled towns that surround it. It is as if Nicola Renzi wanted to measure the space, the capacity, the very structure of objects, whether already existing or created for the purpose, by wrapping them in rubber threads of varying thickness. The first time I saw one of his works, from some ten metres away, hanging on the wall of a gallery, I could not make out what it was. Indeed, for a few moments I took it for a painting; then, as I drew closer, I realised what it was, though something not entirely disclosed went on presenting itself to my eyes, and for that very reason it held me. It was made of small coloured elastic bands set upon a metal mesh.

The effect was painterly, yet not in the most trite and perhaps debased sense of the word, that of decoration. It was like digging into the very soul of painting, into its secrets, in order to make it visible. As when an anatomist strips the skin from a part of the body and out come the muscles, the veins and all the rest. A kind of unveiling. Then, over time, I went on looking at his works: the great spherical sculptures, like the beach balls that youngsters, above all in years past, would toss to one another on the sand. The temptation before works of this kind is to step up and give them a kick, to watch them sail off into the air, but no: the balls are tremendously heavy, with a dense heaviness in which the elastic bands let nothing of the soul show through. Everything seems light, almost transparent, but it is only an illusion. The elastic has given rise to an autonomous matter through sheer accretion. And so one longs to look at them, to study them millimetre by millimetre in search of the starting point, as with a skein of wool, yet here there is no softness.

This is one of the most captivating aspects: as though Renzi wished to create a kind of ambiguity of matter. At the start of these brief notes on Nicola Renzi I ventured that perhaps, though it is only my own supposition, his dream is to bind an entire structure. Even if, it should be stressed, this is no exercise in Land Art after the manner of Christo. Thus in some of his works, including among the most recent, such as Nel mezzo del vedere e sentire [In the Midst of Seeing and Hearing], an installation for the interno&dumdum gallery in Bologna, a kind of surveying of space, the elastic bands pass from one side of the walls to the other, follow them around their perimeter and cover them. One seems to stand before a fabric able to “warm” surfaces, even the coldest.

A pliable fabric, rubbery yet at the same time strong, irreducible. So too in the work for the Reggia dei Carraresi in Padua: the effect is astonishing. Optical on the one hand, material and painterly on the other, and then the elastic threads that emerge as if from a loom. This is one of the most fascinating aspects of his precise, daily research, like that of a weaver of old.

Those who worked day after day, for a whole lifetime, at the loom. One of Renzi's peculiarities is to give his works elaborate titles, at times ironic, at times not. Among them there is one I am especially fond of: il tempo cambierà le cose [time will change things], given to a weave of galvanised metal mesh interlaced with brown para rubber (one of those I like to call paintings, in this case a monochrome). So it is with his works, in which the matter lives, changes, adapts, fades, shifts over the course of time with no possibility of foresight or alteration, exactly as in the life of each one of us.

Angela Madesani

Critical presentation

The silk road, the open way, the paths less travelled. Journeys real and imagined. There is an authentic passage through space and time, yet for many there is only the anticipation, or the after-the-fact reflection, on what the way, the road or the path might be like. In many of his most recent works Nicola Renzi, with his meticulous visions, brings together physical and artistic elements. Well known for the use he makes of single chromatic units, carefully laid down and applied to a variety of surfaces, he has given us conjoined abstract images that work as geometrically patterned mosaics in public spaces or as fabrics woven into private ones. The way he unites the unit of colour with degrees of independence belongs to the former type; the aesthetic weave of uniform surfaces, to the latter. Renzi has a strong sense of how the essence of an idea, and of its realisation, can be carefully expanded to give shape to something larger.

Although some works could potentially be larger, they are not in fact gigantic. Were they so, they would betray their essence and their elements would be diminished. Despite his use of materials salvaged from the industrial world, whose physicality can be visually demanding, the essence is explicitly preserved, never allowed to be contaminated by the canons of ornament.

Such is the case with the new works belonging to a series that makes use of guardrails. Everyone has in mind these imposing forms that trace the edges of our roads and serve as protection. Traditionally dark grey, they do not catch our attention except in their function, and they certainly do not stir our imagination. And yet Renzi diverts the forms of roads and motorways from the everyday and transforms them masterfully, rendering them almost, but intentionally not quite, recognisable.

Turned inside out, the guardrail's function, and indeed its industrial essence, is pared away. Yet the expanse of streaked colours and geometric motifs pours over the form like a spring rain. Thanks to Renzi's vision and hands, the transformation is brought to completion. A new map is created. In a sense the artist manages to fashion a landscape of colours and forms that reaches to north and south, but also across hills and valleys. Here echo the figures of Henry Moore, which turn into landscapes to be remembered. Displayed like an icon in a crypt, this work expands visually beyond its tangible limits. It stands as a potential route marked by the innocent symbol of the road. The transformation wrought by Renzi points us towards a new path, an unexplored road, a new way.

Joseph Antenucci Becherer

Wasting Time

Whenever one comes to speak of sculpture, one inevitably reckons with the unbearable heaviness of matter, the resoluteness of form, its encumbrance in space. More than any other language of art, sculpture carries within it the sense of the definitive, of an irreversible substance that will not change over time. Sculpture, in its very essence, is destined to endure, to take on those traits of immortality of the work that have filled the history books and the collections of museums. It matters not that it be beautiful, innovative, revolutionary; what is essential, rather, is that it remain, that it be handed down, as testimony to the effort and toil that charge the work with the sense of an undertaking. This may be why sculpture, of all the techniques, is the one that finds it hardest to be accepted as contemporary.

Untimeliness is innate to it. Some artists are the exception, and in their work there surfaces, by contrast, a strange and unwonted lightness, capable of throwing the ultimate meaning of sculpture into crisis and, in so doing, renewing it. One of these is Nicola Renzi, whose installations, though three-dimensionality, whatever one chooses to call it, always derives from sculpture, are marked by a gentleness, by an apparent absurdity that leaves them unable to measure themselves against the rules of time. By means of thousands of coloured elastic bands knotted one to another until they form long filaments, the Perugian artist creates stage wings, spatial wefts that alter the perception of the places in which they are set up. Renzi joins floor to ceiling, wall to wall. Like a latter-day Gian Lorenzo Bernini, he goes beyond the notion of the single vantage point and develops a relative scenography in which the observer's point of view multiplies, potentially, to infinity. A multitude of threads under tension runs along the walls, enveloping beams, columns and whatever else it meets along the way. These are provisional coverings, meant to last only as long as the exhibition; a visual feast that wholly absorbs the viewer, but that will inevitably be taken down once the show is over. Rather than the contemplation of the object, Renzi's works are about participation. He concentrates on the present, on the importance of a gesture only apparently pointless. He proceeds slowly, taking all the time he needs, lingering over the aesthetic experience of the mind. The interlacing of the strands is a long, repetitive, wearisome operation, a great waste of time. It is precisely for this reason that Renzi works alone, letting himself be teased and flattered by the skill of his own making, by the idea, as futile as it is sublime, that the mountain might bring forth a mouse. Stepping out of the blind alley of representation, he builds his stylistic signature around the practice, which, however, is never an end in itself: his choices of language reflect a precise vision of the world and point back to deep psychological and existential dynamics.

His impalpable, evanescent installations stand in contrast to the drive towards the frenzied consumption of visual messages to which we are accustomed; they hold themselves apart from the context that pervades everything globally, too crowded with solicitations, too convulsive in temporal and spatial terms. Since it is not given to man to know the future, still less to determine it, the artist concentrates on the present, on the symbolic dimension that art takes on in daily life, on its emancipating function. It matters little if it will not last forever. After all, art, like culture, is not merely a thing for the “classic” museum or the traditional exhibition. Life is unrepeatable. Every one of our gestures happens only once. And yet we live as though this were a negligible fact, for otherwise existence would turn into a paradoxical nostalgia. Nicola Renzi attempts to reconcile this metaphysical notion with the realism of everyday living.

Luca Beatrice

Biography / Curriculum Vitae

Nicola Renzi (Perugia, 1972) studied at the Koninklijke Academie in The Hague and at the “Pietro Vannucci” Academy of Fine Arts in Perugia, where he is currently a tenured lecturer, teaching Painting and Sculpture in the two-year specialist course and Sculpture in the three-year undergraduate programme; he is also an adjunct lecturer in Methodology of Design for Public Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ravenna and in Moulding, Technology and Typology of Materials at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. From the very outset he has focused his artistic research on new and unusual materials, which he transforms with painstaking care. From the intricate weaves of elastic bands of the 1990s, which when assembled give rise to fully-fledged environments, through to his most recent works, he probes the ultimate constituents of art, translating and betraying them so as to let them go on living. He has won a number of public commissions and works, among them the XL Premio Suzzara, Mantua (2001), the Premio SEAT, PagineBianche d'Autore, Umbria Region (2006), the two squares for the new Regional Palace in Udine (2007), a work of art (a painting) for the “Casa Galazzini” building, the new municipal offices of Breguzzo, Trento (2007), a permanent installation in the spaces of the new cemetery complex in Gubbio (2008), the Premio Aldo Ajò, contemporary ceramics, Municipality of Gubbio (2008), a bas-relief for the new fire station in Terni (2008), a work of art (a painting) for the Provincial Command of the Tax Police Unit and Company of the Finance Guard in Pisa (2011), the liturgical furnishings for the chapel of the Tempio Pausania–Nuchis Penitentiary, Olbia (2012), two mosaics for the Forestry Corps barracks in Nocera Umbra, Perugia (2012), a third-firing ceramic bas-relief for the new State Forestry Corps barracks in Gualdo Tadino, Perugia (2012), a work of art (a painting) for the new State Forestry Corps barracks in Città di Castello, Perugia (2012), a wall artwork for the “Anna Frank” primary school in the Municipality of Castelplanio, Ancona (2014), the bas-relief for the new fire station in Piacenza (2015), the sculpture for the school building in Brentonico, Trento (2015), two works of art (paintings) for the new Town Hall of the Municipality of Fonte Nuova, Rome (2015), the Premio Artline, Campori Foundation, for the creation of artworks set within the municipal territory of Soliera, Modena (2017), a work of art (a large-format painting) for the haematology–infectious diseases unit of the S. Chiara Hospital in Trento (2018). Among his exhibitions are: Almost home, Grand Rapids in focus, Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, Michigan, U.S.A. (2016), Ricognizione 2014 – Contemporary Art in Umbria, Italian Centre for Contemporary Art, Foligno, Perugia (2014), Tell mom everything is ok, Palazzo della Penna Centre for Contemporary Culture, Perugia (2013), Dialoghi, contemporary artists in dialogue with the Museum's collections, Giacomo Balla–Nicola Renzi, Museo del Territorio, Biella (2012), 54th Venice Biennale, Umbria Region, Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto (2011), ArtPrice UICA, Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA (2011), XI Premio Cairo, Palazzo della Permanente, Milan (2010), Fuoriluogo 14 Internazionale, Civic Gallery of Contemporary Art of Termoli, Campobasso (2009), Arrivi e partenze, Mole Vanvitelliana, Ancona (2008), Premio Lissone, Museum of Contemporary Art, Lissone, Milan (2005), XIV Esposizione Quadriennale, Anteprima 2, Palazzo Reale, Naples (2003), Premio Maretti Editore, Gallery of Modern Art, Bologna (2003), Italia&Cile, Gallery of Contemporary Art, Caserta (2003), In Ralenti, Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation, Palazzetto Tito, Venice (2001), XL Premio Suzzara, Civic Gallery of Contemporary Art, Suzzara, Mantua (2000), Atlante, Masedu Contemporary Art Centre, Sassari (1999), Produzione Resistente, Museo Virgiliano, former Gonzaga convent, Mantua (1999).