Press

Tagliazucchi's work eludes definition. It cannot be circumscribed. At best, one can try to approach his sculpture through a series of contrasts and through the use of opposing forces and techniques. What first strikes the eye and arouses interest is the subtle interplay between a commitment to purity and simplicity and a firm desire to break with an overly academic and “harmonious” treatment of matter.

The essential purity of Tagliazucchi's style lies as much in the pared-down forms he employs as in the extreme care he takes in working marble, his preferred material, often selected in white and extensively sanded until it becomes perfectly smooth and translucent in the light. Smooth to the touch, neutral in colour and compact in form, this sculpture is nevertheless neither mute nor insignificant. There is no monotony, no silence of matter.

Remaining discreet and restrained, Tagliazucchi knows how to make stone speak and set it in motion, never confining the work to itself but always integrating it into its surroundings. Do not “Le Jeu d'enfant” and “Le Ménestrel” acquire their full meaning in the space in which they unfold? The linear harmony of his works is always enlivened, animated and made dynamic by an angular break — “La Maternité” — a notch or a blow of the chisel — “Le Signe grec”, “Le Joueur de rugby” — that disrupts the silence of otherwise highly uniform conceptions.

In Tagliazucchi's work, suppleness never becomes formlessness, and the serenity of his sculpture is never a sign of bland complacency. On the contrary, despite the delicacy of his relationship with matter, he knows how to give it intense life and movement. He also knows the secrets of creating a powerfully sexual sculpture which, though gentle and tranquil, is nonetheless animated by a deep and pronounced rhythm — “La Danseuse”.

The contrasts throughout this body of work reflect an inner universe in full ferment and a fierce desire for communication. Without being truly figurative, his sculpture is not purely abstract either. In rejecting an art of absurdity and meaninglessness, it is even impossible to say that Tagliazucchi belongs to a certain classical tradition. Yet he avoids the desire to disseminate a merely “aesthetic” conception of art and seeks to reach a less immediate level of meaning.

He himself says that he cares little about imposing a precise message or demonstrating his own truths, provided that he challenges his audience by prompting them to question established values. In short, Tagliazucchi's art cannot be defined from a merely intellectual standpoint; to be perceived in all its richness, it requires a total commitment, both intellectual and emotional.

Bernadette Boustany Conservator, Musée de Saint-Maur — 1984

Standing apart from fashions yet always curious about the achievements of our age, Roberto Tagliazucchi claims great ambitions for art, combining expression and communication. “I try to avoid the pretty.” Roberto often uses this word to point out its pejorative association with what is inessential and superficial. In his paintings as in his sculptures, a disruptive element will often break apart the natural elegance that this “signore” knows how to convey through line or volume.

Do not be surprised by the blows of the chisel that seem to disturb the voluptuous fall of white marble caressed by light; Roberto does not want to “tickle the senses” or give too large a place to “aesthetics”. Direct carving, the activity of removing material to bring something to light, allows the sculptor to discover with his hands what his gaze had already encountered: “as though I found, in one block or another, a sculpture of mine before I had worked it”. The eye is the privileged instrument of this encounter, which explains why “some blocks say nothing to me, while others attract me irresistibly”.

Roberto then speaks of communion with a material that had captivated him since his childhood in Carrara. “What I know is that you have to love matter, otherwise it betrays you.” Art thus consists in taming the raw mass right up to the final sanding without depriving it of the presence of living material.

Parodying a famous painter, Roberto once exclaimed, “In painting I search; in sculpture I find”, a curious and paradoxical statement, since it is often claimed that obtaining a fine and successful result is more difficult in sculpture than in painting. Painting, it is true, requires unceasing effort, especially when one sets aside the seductions of prettiness and does not make flattering the viewer's eye an obligatory goal.

It should be understood that Roberto does not work with a colour chart on his knees and an art-history manual in his hand. No: his decisions, although certainly not irrational, continually deepen his confrontation with the white surface without providing any prior certainties. Let us enter discreetly the studio, where some very curious stories unfold.

The painter draws a line and then begins to fill a surface. The remaining blank canvas in turn calls for colour. Which one should he choose? Roberto asks the painter, who does not answer and leaves him quite perplexed. So he spreads green, thickens the orange line with a flow of blue, and the collision between the elements of the painted universe makes him begin everything again, unsettling the painter until the next calm.

There it is: space has opened, upwards, always upwards. If the lines start somewhere, they have no ground; they are neither trees nor branches. Perhaps it is precisely this open yet anchored space, these effects of depth continually brought back to the surface by some deposit of matter, that the painter seeks.

Facing a canvas placed vertically, it is not easy to avoid soaring effects while seeking to suggest a kind of opening of space, a field whose boundaries are present but whose effects are unpredictable, always receding. “I seek neither anecdote nor directly suggestive form,” says the painter. Indeed, do not try to recognise something already seen; and if you see sky in that blue or fire in that orange, you are free to do so. Yet these may well be merely chance associations.

For him, painting is not simply applying paint, nor is it drawing with colour. Yet we know his dexterity and his sharp eye for capturing the vitality of a line, the beauty of a body or the rhythm of an object. No: painting means taking pleasure in colour in the instant, because every new brushstroke immediately establishes new relationships between one colour and another, and between that whole and the person organising it.

More than ever, for this man who wants to lose nothing, making one painting also means improving the next. Roberto is a young painter who already knows a great deal. That is the difficulty to overcome when one makes no concessions to what has already been seen or already been learned.

Thierry Chabanne Paris — May 1984

Tagliazucchi’s work attracts, awakens, shocks and renews. Humble and restrained, his art — whether painting or sculpture — is neither monotonous nor impersonal.

The simplicity of its concepts, a certain classicism of line and the purity of execution are the surest guarantees of a genuine and profound communication between the artist and his public.

What visitors saw at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Maur during the exhibition devoted to him illustrates his determination to create a personal and contemporary art, rich in both rigour and independence.

Is it art for everyone? Certainly. But it is not ordinary art. The technical quality of his work, the richness of his inspiration and his profound humanity ensure that Tagliazucchi deserves a leading place among contemporary artists.

Laurent Chemtob Press article — 9 January 1986

This surname — already known even in distant places thanks to the astonishing skill of the father — returns to us today almost as the echo of the success achieved in Paris by the son.

What follows offers vivid testimony from authoritative admirers and critics who were won over by the quality of Tagliazucchi’s work from the moment it appeared.

Here we can present only a limited selection; yet the paintings and sculptures exhibited at the Musée Villa Médicis, not far from the banks of the Seine where the light of so many distinguished artists first began to shine, already allow us to glimpse the future of our fellow citizen.

Let us welcome him like a prodigal son who, we hope, will soon show us not only the acrylics he presents today, but also our own marble which, as Chabanne writes, he “caressed” during the process of creation.

For us, that caress will also carry the gentle melancholy of nostalgia.

Aldo Fetonte Preface to “Frammenti di viaggio” — 1986

The work of this artist is rather disconcerting. For his entire curriculum vitae he confines himself to giving us his “surname: Tagliazucchi; first name: Roberto; profession: sculptor; studies: fine arts; born in 1939... still alive” (sic). Yet he is indeed very much alive: he paints as much as he sculpts and draws as much as he paints. Although born in Carrara, that great centre of white-marble quarries from which builders and sculptors have obtained their materials since the remotest antiquity, Tagliazucchi, attracted to drawing and painting from childhood, curiously became interested in sculpture only a little less than ten years ago.

His work is certainly disconcerting, for although his painting and sculpture are both entirely abstract, they bear no resemblance to one another, any more than they do to his thoroughly figurative drawings, executed in a very classical manner. Three artists, then, quite different from one another, in a single person; and three fine and accomplished artists, among whom it is difficult to know which to prefer.

First, the sculptor. His still very young work might of course recall some of his great predecessors, such as Brancusi or Gilioli, but to the devil with this obsession with always comparing a work of today to those of the past! Tagliazucchi's sculpture, with very few exceptions, carved from solid Carrara marble, free of all impurity, smooth, translucent and luminous, with rounded edges, tender and gentle, sensual after long, patient and subtle sanding, suggests far more than it imposes in its extreme simplicity. Had he not entitled two of his works “Jeu d'enfants” and “Danseuse”, we would have seen in the first nothing more than a tall portico opening onto infinity, and in the second a kind of hieratic totem.

One exception is his Christ on the Cross, a bronze maquette from 1986 for a new church in the Paris region: moving, sublime, admirable in the simplicity and nakedness of its lines. At last, great modern sacred art which, let us hope, will find its rightful place at “Notre-Dame de l'Arche d'Alliance” in the Aleray development zone!

Alas, there is not enough space to discuss his painting as it deserves: colours of frescoes, of stained glass at the hour when daylight fades, or of the countryside, with acidic greens, sun-scorched yellows and triumphant reds; painting of gesture, mystical painting close to his Christ of Aleray... “Are you a believer?” “Yes, I believe deeply.”

“No resemblance between them”, Tagliazucchi's sculpture and painting? For beyond construction, form and expressive power, there is in this fervent Catholic a spiritual presence that lends his entire work a unity we would never have suspected at first sight.

Pierre Brisset L’Œil — 1988

There are two different but equally important ways of approaching an artist's works. The historical and biographical approach traces the artist's cultural, social and environmental path and, more broadly, investigates his relationship with the artistic movements of his time. The other focuses its reflection on the art object itself, on that particular art which, through a series of formal inventions, leads us to discuss the universal meaning of art.

It is difficult to avoid the contamination of one approach by the other, so that it often becomes habitual to reduce the work to the artist's psychological characteristics. Attention is diverted from the work, which instead exists in its own right, transcending the history and life of its maker. By giving form to a mysterious nucleus — dream, archetype, illusion of power — the artist has done all that lies within his power and, as the instrument of his work, has exhausted his ultimate narcissism.

If a point of contact exists between these two approaches, it is to be found in the universal meaning possessed by the object when it is art. It establishes that rare communicative “necessity”, that passage of meaning which makes it recognisable and enjoyable to others, within the cultural models of the historical moment in which the artist lives. Sense and meaning, in any case, are never crystallised, never finally defined.

In his rare statements on aesthetics, the sculptor Roberto Tagliazucchi may cite Cubism and Futurism, decomposition and simultaneity; he may choose Brancusi as a totem of contemporary sculpture and admire Moore's thematic essentiality. Yet, fortunately, he will never fully manage to explain his complete refusal to conform to trends, models, artists or academic rules.

His special “science” enables him to make spaces dynamic, absorb and reflect light, and move freely in and out of the object. Thus the work has no predominant viewpoint: it has many, and each is the “right” one at the moment it is observed.

The artist may also recount his poetry through the metaphors, myths and passions that stir him. He is a man of a fragile age, struggling with matter at the end of an unsettled century, amid real ruins, attempting to make visible to himself what escapes him, attempting the visionary journey from the real to the possible.

His “humanism” becomes a figure whose form retains something of the multiplicity of what we conventionally call history, reality and environment. This is difficult for one who is already metamorphosis. The need for narrative and “literature” that we demand of art will never enable us to possess in its entirety the paradise lost or regained of “SOGNANDO”, the vitalism of “NATHALIE”, the ancestral resonance of “JOUEUR DE FLÛTE”, or the stubborn determination of “DAVID”.

Yet form and idea, the two inseparable souls of art, have found their empathy. In this exhibition, whose passage through the works leads to a predominantly Mediterranean soul, the “archetype of earth” and the “archetype of sky” are the inevitable protagonists: the former with sensuality, physicality, dismemberment and fragmentation; the latter with the sidereal, the absolute and the longing for infinity. Between them stands Eros; between them stand the art and wisdom of Roberto Tagliazucchi, who has made possible the “beauty” of contradiction.

Giovanna Riu January 1998

To truly look at the countless modulations of Roberto Tagliazucchi's sculpture (and preserve them in our visual memory) means first understanding the intellectual restlessness that presides over them, his culture of the human, and the most demanding yet carefully calibrated constructive decisions governing his powerful and significant sculptural daring.

Stefano Lanzardo is right when, in the title of his photographic investigation, he describes the journey through Tagliazucchi's work as a kind of search for the imprints of an emotion. These are, of course, emotions inseparable from his unquestionable sculptural craftsmanship, capable of making us participants, always directly and tangibly, in values he has identified in forms chosen with patience and passion. We may also speak of a dynamic emotion, in the sense that our artist does not stop before any difficulty presented by matter when it becomes the object of an idea and then a distinguished inhabitant of space.

When he felt the need to reconcile himself “with the outside world”, Tagliazucchi enthroned the concept of “Harmony” at the centre of his creative inspiration, as Dionysius of Halicarnassus understood it: a mental synthesis, coordinated, I would add, at every moment with a technical criterion both hard-won and conscious. To seek harmony, for Tagliazucchi, is to recover a poetics of proportion on “his” own scale, according to his sensitivity and his individual perception of “beauty”, the beauty closest to him and obviously the most difficult to make enduring.

The primary reason for harmony in Tagliazucchi is clearly legible in his rapid drawing (preparatory, yet immediately autonomous from any possible subsequent sculptural result), when it presupposes a strong fidelity to intuition. It is even clearer in the process of sculpting, when he enters the dominant sphere of the interplay between softness and deliberately sought angles.

His is a labour — as it could not fail to be — fiercely desired and practised, I would say inevitable for him, and exhilarating, and therefore a preface to the project of realisation. Moreover, Tagliazucchi never intends to attack or wound the matter chosen for his messages: in my view, it is easy to perceive the love with which he sculpts precisely because he makes his programme of formal conquests, nobly and powerfully lyrical, visible and understandable.

Here we must understand one another, with the help of his own “aesthetic guidance”, when he speaks of “nouveau romantisme”: his new, fierce and enduring will to arrest and exalt rhythmic forms through a deeply rooted, inescapable “feeling for space”. When he decides to enter the secret room, the privacy, of the sculptural medium, Tagliazucchi knows beforehand that he will draw from it — and offer us, with the legitimate and entirely justified pride of an artist — unprecedented, historical, human moments, alien to codes, dogmatic habits and restrictive rules precisely because they are born of the feeling for space.

Let us take an example: standing before his “Christ de Alleray” (1987), one inevitably experiences a new emotion, precisely because that image — glorified so intensely and in so many ways by thousands of sculptors and painters throughout the ages — springs from an intensely subjective humanism, indeed from a rich and courageous secular religiosity.

For Tagliazucchi, there is no need to lose oneself in descriptions: better to choose the narrow passage (which in his hands will become a prairie) of essentiality, avoiding detailed “circumstances” and grasping instead, in an event as exceptional as the Crucifixion, its deepest drama, amid stifled cries and inscrutable exaltations.

If we then look closely at other works (“Dance”, for example), we can recognise Tagliazucchi's ability to innovate in the infinite, treacherous field of sculptural balance: no longer merely flat horizontality or absolute verticality, but also “laterality”, which is the poetry of impetus, an impetus both vehement and elegant, born of vigorous and responsible impulses.

A true sculptor, Tagliazucchi has attained, with that rare yet increasingly necessary ethic of responsibility, the ability to explore matter and the sculptural medium where unpredictable but essential moments of harmonisation lie hidden: between hollows and luminosity, planes and rhythms, measure and spontaneity (see works such as “Sognando”, “Nathalie”, “Canapé”, “David”), with the sacred blessing of “Madame Poetry” and “Mademoiselle Imagination”. Au revoir, et merci beaucoup, maître Tagliazucchi, a sculptor of distinction, master of new sculptural figurations.

Ferruccio Battolini February 2001

From the separateness of the Shoah to unity among human beings. A unity that may be rediscovered through a “culture of peace” tending toward recomposition and harmony.

This is the meaning of this maquette for a sculpture that seeks to show how memory — necessary and indispensable — must move beyond mere narration and be sublimated in the courageous attempt to free itself from the selfishness inherent in humankind, striving instead toward tolerance of the other.

Prometheus, in the apotheosis of the one who commits the sacrilegious theft of fire in order to give it to humanity, but also in his titanic chaining to the rock of the Caucasus, is a recurring theme in Roberto Tagliazucchi’s sculpture.

Beyond the semantic and symbolic complex embodied by this mythological figure, human and divine tend reciprocally to recompose and penetrate one another — finitude and infinity, matter and spirit, destruction and reconstruction — within a common destiny of perpetual transformation aimed at achieving harmony.

Sculpture becomes the privileged metaphor through which the myth of Prometheus may be received and made meaningful.

The artist, in his individual myth, is the one who gives “light” and “frees” the forms enclosed — chained — within matter, forms that intuition has already imagined and captured.

Yet all this would remain dream, delirium and poetic fable if artistic quality and mastery did not make such a “revelation” possible.

Roberto Tagliazucchi’s Prometheus, aided by the light that defines and dynamises the form, and by the intersection of planes and spiral lines of flight that help characterise external space, is a successful synthesis of humanity’s metaphysical tension.

Giovanna Riu La Varenne — 5 March 2005