Renzo Tieri - The artist of silence

The ancient stone is the centerpiece of Renzo Tieri's work as a material of the archetypal tradition.
It is in stone and with stone that man confronts the silences of history, discovers his own origins, understands changes, builds the character and spirit of the ages, and measures and interprets the creative process of human evolution.
To Renzo Tieri stone is the consolidated zone of being, the basis and foundation of the social condition, in which are solidified the stratifications of the individual and society. In stone the artist seeks an anthropology of observations where the material part of man shares in the logics of society and history.
Forms are rediscovered and researched. The artist, in the original integrity of form, embeds fragments of pure crystal like diamonds, always integrating ancient stone and the transparent material the fluid element of oil consumed, burned by the industrial progress of the modern machine. A metaphor that runs through the organization of man, of humanity. A symbolism that settles the past anthropologically - stone: matter/form, crystal: thought/transparency - and places the being in comparative analysis with the realities of the present time - burnt oil: progress/science/consciousness/knowledge.
Renzo Tieri's sculptures are strong, heavy, hard, but at the same time they present a balanced, sensory and one might even say divinatory vision.
In them one sees the whole essence of the world in which homo faber, the only true entrepreneur and measurer of himself in direct confrontation with society, becomes artificer and participates in the whole universe. There is no talk of the study of anthropology or volumetric forms: his work goes beyond the thresholds of the codes acquired by the various doctrines, philosophies and methodologies. Man becomes the mirror of man; creative acts are events in the world where the man-artist is the artificer of the total thought of humanity.
Renzo Tieri's research always occurs in the nature of his territory, the sacred place of art. Nature is strong, constantly present in his work, just as the transparency of a healthy conscience becomes a regular eco-interlocutor of the places of art and life. The artist elaborates his sculptures not only in symbolic or conceptual forms but principally emblematizes them in continuous perceptive experimentation, amalgamating them with the vital needs of humanity and universal culture.
The titles of his works, such as Soul, Symbiosis, Vis, Paradise and others, belong to a language whose genesis is made to participate in the present while respecting the future.
The continuous evolution of Tieri's work belongs to the structure of his cultural growth. Stone is an integral part of the constant quest for truth that the artist, a solitary traveler, locates in the reality of nature and humanity, as the only existential source of being.
Renzo Tieri's sculptural projects make fully legible the design of a path that goes beyond the pure representative state and touches on the spirituality of man, the sublimation of the universality of art. Only the power of stone is capable of being the symbol of the material and transcendental construction of a harmonious future for society.
The message is directed at the betterment of a greedy world, consumed, singed, burned by the ephemeral like his oil, which surrounds and seeps into the hard stone. But it is also true that in that dark and magic fluid there still resides the vital energy for the renewal of social culture.
A sculpture-culture like the world, glass as clear as reality, an ancient stone as strong as truth.
In this subtle and arduous work the artist Renzo Tieri seeks to restore to humans through stone the cosmic desire and love of a world in which we can still feel the thrill of le grand feu.

A piece of land called Bolognano
Renzo Tieri has lived as a witness to the great adventures of Joseph Beuys. He has seen the emergence of the synthetic concept of Lucretia's House. He has experienced the passage of artists, history and art.
In this magical place, Tieri, a solitary artist, has succeeded in inserting the trace of his emotional, mental and spiritual continuity and by mingling his experience with his creativity he has become a participant in the history of this piece of land in Abruzzo.
His works are discourses in three parts.
The artist selects old stones as the geographical, structural and essential basis of his synthetic discourse. Old stones, an organic trace of his presence on earth, on his earth.
Renzo Tieri adds a crystal element, of mental purity and openness toward an enlarged vision of being, closer to the lightness of thoughts when they are still more conceptualized and grounded in reality.
The third part of his discourse is addressed to our contemporaneity. It is the burnt machine, used oil that envelops or surrounds, touches or is inserted, or at any rate always seeps inside the stone.
A metaphor that represents the latent threat of a continuity that penetrates into every pure thought.
Regrettably we live in a world where the present is the threat and the past nostalgia of memories, always on the verge of the impossible.
I must say that this summons to integrity of thought is an evocation of a new vision of the presence of being in the world. It is a reality that gives the work of Renzo Tieri the sense of his achievement, of his sculpture which is strong but at the same time human, eternal, balanced. A sculpture that, in its purity, shares with men the acts of faith of its presence in the world.
They are elements without any secrecy, which Renzo Tieri confers on art as a message of integrity. Emblematic elements that are born and live together in this piece of land called Bolognano.
(From L. De Domizio Durini, La natura nella scultura, Renzo Tieri,
Silvana, Milan 2004)
Bio
Renzo Tieri was born and works at Bolognano in the province of Pescara.
In 1971 he began to teach painting at the G. Mistioni art school in Pescara. From 1970 to 1975 he assisted Cristina Mannucci in the running of Galleria 818.
In 1974 he met Joseph Beuys in Pescara. In 1976 he collaborated with the German master on the creation of Biological Plowing at San Silvestro Colli and in 1980 on Plantation Paradise at Bolognano. In 1984 he worked with Joseph Beuys on the creation of the Olivestone project exhibited at the FIAC in Paris, at the Castello di Rivoli Contemporary Art Museum and today on donation at the Kunsthaus Zurich (1993).
From his first encounter with Beuys he took an active role working on the Defense of Nature operation and with Lucrezia De Domizio Durini on the ongoing Cultural Intercommunication project, holding courses on nature conservation and the protection of human values.
Since Beuys's death (1986) he has given cultural and technical support to the continuation of the Plantation Paradise project at Bolognano. He also contributes to RISK-Arte Oggi magazine based in Milan.
Tieri's artistic research is based on secular and religious sacredness. His works are much loved and often described by the critic Pierre Restany, with whom he has undertaken important operations. The materials he favors - old stone, crystal and burnt oil - are metaphors for an anthropological sedimentation of a comparative analysis of the present time.