Massimo Chiappetta
Remembering Dwelling Thinking
There are personal memories, cultural memories, universal memories. The form of memory is remembrance and vice versa. Without remembering we do not dwell, we do not think, without memory we are not human. For there to be the form of memory and memory to show itself in a form, the sign of remembering must emerge and remain within us. When we remember individually, a shared, exposed memory has not yet emerged; it must manifest itself through the production of a sign. There are ephemeral signs and lasting signs, some aspiring to the perennial. Signs serve as traces of memory, manifesting it.
The Municipality of Serra Riccò has decided to honor the memory of the writer Beatrice Solinas Longhi, 1923-2015. Born in Serra Riccò, she became well-known as an author of children’s books. A place dedicated to her was the best way to remember her: a garden with a work of sculpture, a monument.
(Monument comes from the Latin monumentum which means: I remember)
To entrust the creation of the work, and due to a favourable circumstance, a suitable author was identified in Gabriele Risso. A young sculptor who spent his childhood and youth in the town of Serra Riccò, Gabriele studied Sculpture at the Ligustica Academy of Fine Arts in Genoa and later at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brera, Milan. Graduating with top marks and honors from both institutions, he furthered his training in Paris and London, where he currently resides, works, and exhibits his sculptures.
A work of sculpture has the prerogative of founding and erecting a centre in space and time, an origin.
Gabriele Risso has taken on the task of a difficult and complicated poetic undertaking, making the highest results of modern and contemporary sculpture coexist in his work with the rhetoric of the monument. He meditated and then shaped a stony mass that incorporates and inscribes a seated female figure: a metaphorical portrait, a plastic symbol, an archetype in memory of the writer. He sculpted in marble a figure that refers to the plastic purity of Egyptian statues. He exhibited in his sculpture the posture of someone who reads or writes and for this reason he chose a strictly orthogonal composition where he tilted only the head, the place of thought, while on the lap, female symbolism of generating, a book sits, quietly horizontal. The reference to two extraordinary works hovers here of the 20th century sculptor Arturo Martini, "the dead lover" and the "convalescent", works that Gabriele Risso knows well and certainly loves. In his sculpted figure of Beatrice, who sits contemplative with a book on her lap, the plastic presence of the deceased writer takes on the ancient, solemn and quiet gravity of the boulder and she appears there as if she were absorbed by it, incorporated, she is installed in it. This work by Gabriele Risso tells us both about sculpture as a silent, immobile art, and about literature, which is instead an airy and iridescent, fluctuating art. It tells us in the silence of her presence of dwelling and thinking, of writing and reading words.
Verbo volant scripta manent, the word flies away the written remains, the saying warns.
And, in its time, the oral word from aerial, sonorous and mobile had become visual and immobile, terrestrial, silent and monumental, transforming itself into writing, into an ingenious combinatorial line of alphabetic signs. To read you have to learn to write and to write to read: you have to know how to look. In the enigmatic epochal transition from orality to writing, we must grasp the original poetic link between plastic art and literature that the work of the sculptor Gabriele Risso, in memory of the writer Beatrice Solinas Donghi, was able to offer. In Serra Riccò, for those who live there or are passing through there is now a stop, a refreshment of being in the face of memory. This quality so human, too human.
Massimo Chiappetta for his former student, pupil and now friend, Gabriele.
Genoa 16 September MMXXIII
Translated from italian by Gabriele Risso, Alex Young