The exhibition “Scultura lingua morta” at Ca’ Pesaro initiates a silent dialogue between the twenty-year work of the Venetian artist, a spokesperson for contemporary art, and the history of the Lagoon.
“Dignified, sacramental, symbolic language: sculpture is a dead language that has no living heir. Mankind will never spontaneously speak it.” Thus Arturo Martini, one of the best-known twentieth-century Italian sculptor, commences his treatise Scultura lingua morta (lit. ‘dead language sculpture’), published in Venice in 1945 in a mere 50 copies. His spirit broken and impotent before the horror of a mutilated Europe, Martini laid down his arms, surrendering, and proclaims the death of an art suffocated under the weight of history and matter, unable to answer the instances of modernity. Almost a century later, by the time moss and ivy should have grown on sculpture’s tomb, Martini’s epitaph shakes the art world and becomes the founding question of an exhibition that mirrors the soul of Ca’ Pesaro, a hotbed of modernity which today houses Scultura lingua morta, an exhibition of sculpture by Giorgio Andreotta Calò that speaks, silently, with Martini’s. The life of sculpture is not over, after all, as long as it accepts to transform and abandon the rigid boundaries of shape to grow into process, relation, and memory.
