Stefano Canto – Carie

Mostra personale.

Comunicato stampa

“This is what I thought I had understood in that distant journey of mine to Isfahan: that the most important things in the world are empty spaces”.
Italo Calvino, Collection of Sand (Essays).

In 1975 Italo Calvino noted this sentence down in the notepad that he put together during a trip to Iran as a comment on architecture and, at the same time, on life.
Opposed to the “fullness” of the world, this assertion reads as a calling to reflect on emptiness.

This same thought accompanies and has always accompanied Stefano Canto in his metropolitan “journeys”: walks mainly undertaken in Rome, during which the thought of the artist focuses on architecture and nature, on the mutually syncopated union that only cities are able to host. At the sides of the streets, on the sidewalk and in some corners near green areas, Canto encountered tree carcasses, eradicated trunks and emptied logs due to “caries”; themselves a result of the ecological work exerted by fungi and bacteria which takes place within the tree marrow due to the degradation of the lignin and of the cellulose.

These are the empty spaces where the artist has installed his germinal architectures, the spaces where the vision of a reciprocal intertwining of architecture and nature has immediately been sedimented before our eyes in recognition of a new archeology, one that fossilises contemporary artefacts, crystallising them in our present.

Excerpt from the exhibition text by Giuliana Benassi