By Pier Giorgio Balocchi
A Tuscan, in fact a Florentine, in fact from Mugello. This is the international sculptor who has set the seal of achievement on the last forty years. Giuliano Vangi in the mature splendor of his creativity is all this, and of course much more. A true touchstone for anyone who has ever dreamed of becoming a sculptor in the last two generations, the gruff master, his face straight out of a fresco by Ghirlandaio, seems to truly represent all that a "great Florentine artist" is in the dream of anyone who cares for sculpture.
In fact his success goes beyond any passing fashion, as is well documented by his astonishing wealth of works and his brilliant and unconventional use of every kind of sculptural language. Vangi appropriates every word in the sculptor's vocabulary, using it in his narratives, whether lyrical or tragic. Forged in that Parnassus (a veritable minor Athens) that is the Art Institute in Florence, where an amazing array of artists has sat in those lecture halls (and which still teaches the valid craft of the academic sculptor), Vangi seems to encompass everything that is sculpture with rapacious speed. Avid of new materials, a sublime technician in classical marble or bronze, a restless experimenter and tireless draughtsman, this wonderfully tough old Tuscan seems to overwhelm us by his greatness, urging us to work from morning to night, the way he once did with his pupils and the way he himself worked as a boy.
I have always thought that Donatello, Mino da Fiesole or Brunelleschi were like this: hard-eyed, sparing of words, yet witty and always ready for some rough practical joke.
Vangi is reaping accolades with this exhibition and for representing what he does.
By Massimo Bertozzi
FOR A NEW HUMANISM. Giuliano Vangi at Forte Dei Marmi
It is the merit of Giuliano Vangi if the figurative tradition of Italian sculpture has passed into the new century and the new millennium, not as a historical experience, now defined and completed, but still as a field open for experimentation with a view to the future, no doubt uncertain and difficult but far from a foregone conclusion, at least as long as man with his ability to feel and understand remains the arbiter of his own fate as well as the protagonist, the "measure" of the universe.
Man measures the world with his body.
This is literally true. The earliest units of measurement, the inch and the foot, the span and the fathom, were based on the body and things that are nearby are just "a few steps away" and those very close are "to hand," and our first assessments are always "at a glance."
But above all because it is the body that enables us to feel with others, to know what it means to experience hunger or cold, for example, and to understand how sorrow delves deep within, undermining the soul, but also the ravaging the body and not just the spirit.
Never in the whole of history has the human body been subjected to such afflictions as in the last century: in wartime, torn apart by bombs, asphyxiated with gas, burned in ovens, and broken by torture, lost in common graves, or even, in times of peace and progress, violated by aggressive medical treatment and unnatural genetic experiments. At some point artists must have felt that the simple representation of the body was insufficient to do justice to all the violence and horror, as if to feel with and like our fellow men and women it were no longer enough to feel compassion, to suffer with them as well as for them.
But there are also those who, like Vangi, have continued to believe - and profess - that, above all when the construction of the image adopts the modes of narrative, the human body remains an extraordinary and perhaps unique unit of measure in its power to recover and perpetuate memory.
In many quarters it is being said that man's future is uncertain. If this were not profoundly true, we would have to smile. When has mankind's destiny ever been certain? But precisely because we are inured to uncertainty, we can be confident in the powers of endurance that mankind has shown throughout its history, and particularly in difficult times.
As a sculptor Vangi is undoubtedly the synthesis of a remarkable talent.
He sets to work without anxieties, rather like a marble worker, a carpenter or a blacksmith, a cabinet maker, jeweler or engraver.
He is increasingly thought of as a Renaissance artist, not only because of the extraordinary season that made his homeland great but also because of the Renaissance of tomorrow, that which will undoubtedly come.
Because of the way he loves the materials of art and the respect he feels for their qualities and their nature. And because of his faith in techné, the ability to combine imagination with the practice of sculpture.
It is therefore no accident that we can glimpse in his works the expectations of a new Humanism, less mawkish, more confident and with an indestructible faith in the future.
Vangi's man frankly faces the immanence of his nature. And even when faced with the frighteningly great range of the universe, he refuses to allow it to annihilate him.
Because of the strength of his hopes, his few certainties, but above all because of the many questions to which he feels he must find at least the shred of an answer before nightfall. Sometimes simply being content to put on his coat, pull up his collar, and go out to encounter those winters of the spirit that, in spite of himself, he feels coming from many directions.
If we think of the solitary multitude of his figures, their habit of wandering between the many complications of existence, there is no doubt that the ancient idea of man as the only "measure of the world" has finally found, thanks to Giuliano Vangi, not just a new prophet but the poet that it needed.
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