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To truly look at the countless modulations of Roberto Tagliazucchi’s sculpture — and preserve them in our visual memory — means first of all understanding the intellectual tension that governs them, his culture of the human, and the most demanding yet carefully balanced constructive decisions that shape his strong and significant plastic daring. Stefano Lanzardo is right when, in the title of his photographic investigation, he describes the journey into Tagliazucchi’s work as a search for the traces of an emotion.

These emotions are inseparable from his unquestionable sculptural mastery, which allows us to participate directly and tangibly in the values he has identified in forms chosen with patience and passion. We may also speak of a dynamic emotion: the artist does not stop before any difficulty presented by matter when it becomes the object of an idea and then a precious presence within space.

When Tagliazucchi felt the need to reconcile himself “with the outside world”, he placed at the centre of his creative impulse the concept of “Harmony”, as conceived by Dionysius of Halicarnassus: a mental synthesis, coordinated at every moment, I would add, with an exacting yet conscious technical criterion. To seek harmony, for Tagliazucchi, means to recover a poetics of proportion on his own scale, according to his sensitivity and his personal perception of beauty — the beauty closest to him and, inevitably, the most difficult to make enduring.

The first principle of this harmony can already be read in the rapid drawing — preparatory, yet immediately autonomous from any later sculptural result — when it remains strongly faithful to intuition. It becomes even clearer in the course of his sculpting, when he enters the dominant sphere of a dialogue between softness and deliberately sought angularities.

His is a labour — it could not be otherwise — stubbornly desired and practised, inevitable in him and therefore exciting, almost a preface to the work to be realised. Tagliazucchi never intends to attack or wound the material chosen for his messages. One can easily perceive, in my view, the love with which he sculpts, precisely because he makes visible and understandable his programme of formal conquests, at once noble, robust and lyrical.

When he speaks of a “new romanticism”, we must understand his renewed, tenacious and permanent desire to arrest and exalt rhythmic forms through a deeply rooted and unavoidable “feeling for space”. When he enters the secret room, the privacy of the sculptural medium, Tagliazucchi knows in advance that he will bring back — and offer us with legitimate artistic pride — unprecedented, historical and human moments, free from codes, dogmatic habits and restrictive rules because they are born from that feeling for space.

Take his “Christ of Alleray” (1987). Standing before it, one inevitably experiences something new, because an image glorified in so many different ways by thousands of sculptors and painters throughout history is reborn here from an intensely personal humanism and, I would say, from a rich and courageous secular religiosity. Tagliazucchi does not need to lose himself in description: he prefers the narrow passage — which in his hands becomes open country — of essentiality. By avoiding detailed circumstances, he captures instead the deepest drama of an event as exceptional as the Crucifixion, between stifled cries and impenetrable exaltations.

If we look closely at other works — “Dance”, for example — we can recognise Tagliazucchi’s ability to innovate within the vast and difficult field of sculptural balance. No longer only flat horizontality or absolute verticality, but also “laterality”: a poetry of thrust, at once vehement and elegant, born of vigorous and responsible impulses.

Tagliazucchi is a true sculptor. With that rare, and increasingly necessary, ethic of responsibility, he has acquired the ability to explore matter and the sculptural medium where unpredictable yet essential moments of harmonisation are hidden: between hollows and light, planes and rhythms, measure and spontaneity — as in works such as “Sognando”, “Nathalie”, “Canapé” and “David” — with the blessing of “Madame Poetry” and “Mademoiselle Imagination”. Au revoir, and thank you, Maestro Tagliazucchi, sculptor of distinction and creator of new sculptural figurations.

Ferruccio Battolini — February 2001

There are two different, yet equally important, ways of approaching an artist’s work. The historical-biographical approach places the artist within a cultural, social and environmental path and, more broadly, investigates the artist’s relationship with the artistic currents of the time. The other concentrates on the art object itself, on that particular art which, through a series of formal inventions, brings us to question the universal meaning of art.

Contamination between the two approaches is difficult to avoid, and it often becomes customary to reduce the work to the artist’s psychological traits. Attention is then diverted from the work, which instead exists in its own right, transcending the history and life of its author. In giving form to a mysterious nucleus — dream, archetype, illusion of power — the artist has done all that was possible and, as an instrument of the work, has exhausted the final trace of narcissism.

If a point of contact exists between the two approaches, it must be sought in the universal meaning that the object possesses when it becomes art. It establishes that rare communicative necessity, that passage of meaning which makes it recognisable and enjoyable to others and to the cultural models of the historical moment in which the artist lives. Meaning and significance, however, are never crystallised and never definitive.

In his rare statements on aesthetics, sculptor Roberto Tagliazucchi may cite Cubism and Futurism, decomposition and simultaneity; he may elect Brancusi as a totem of contemporary sculpture and admire the thematic essentiality of Moore. Yet, fortunately, he will never be able fully to justify his complete lack of conformity with trends, models, authors or academic rules.

His special “science” allows him to make space dynamic, to absorb and return light, to enter and leave the object freely. The work therefore has no single privileged viewpoint, but offers a multitude of aspects, each of which is the “right” one at the precise moment in which it is observed.

The artist may still tell his poetry through the metaphors, myths and passions that move him. He is a man of a fragile time, struggling with matter at the end of a restless century, attempting, amid real ruins, to make visible to himself what escapes him and undertaking the visionary journey from the real to the possible.

His “humanism” becomes figure: a form that retains something of the multiplicity of what, by convention, we call history, reality and environment. This is difficult for one who is already metamorphosis. The need for narration and “literature” that we ask of art will never allow us fully to possess the lost or rediscovered paradise of “Sognando”, the vitality of “Nathalie”, the ancestral resonance of the “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 leads toward a predominantly Mediterranean spirit, the “archetype of earth” and the “archetype of sky” are inevitable interpreters: one with sensuality, physicality, dismemberment and fragmentation; the other with the sidereal, the absolute and the need for infinity. Between them stands Eros; between them stands the art and wisdom of Roberto Tagliazucchi, who has made possible the beauty of contradiction.

Giovanna Riu — Art Critic, January 1998

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, and beyond the archetype in which 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”, the perfect form, 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 the external space, is a successful synthesis of humanity’s metaphysical tension.

Giovanna Riu — La Varenne, 5 March 2005

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 — Director of the magazine “Mondo Mediterraneo”

Tagliazucchi’s work cannot be circumscribed. It cannot be defined. At most, one may attempt to approach it through a set of contrasts and the recurrence of forces that almost seem to oppose one another.

Rejecting an art of absurdity and nonsense, one might even say that Tagliazucchi approaches a certain classicism. Yet he escapes the desire to disseminate a merely “aesthetic” concept of art and seeks instead to reach a less immediate expressive level.

In any case, Tagliazucchi’s art cannot be defined from a purely intellectual point of view; to be discovered in all its richness, it requires a total investment, both cerebral and sensitive.

Bernadette Boustany — Conservator of the Musée de Saint-Maur

Three artists, then, different from one another yet united in a single person; three accomplished artists, and one hardly knows which to prefer. Tagliazucchi’s sculpture, with only a few exceptions, is carved from the mass of Carrara marble: pure, smooth, translucent and luminous, with rounded edges, tender and soft, sensual after long, patient and subtle polishing. In its extreme simplicity it suggests far more than it imposes.

Had he not given two of his works the titles “Jeu d’enfants” and “Danseuse”, in the first we might have seen 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 Paris: moving, sublime, admirable in the simplicity and nakedness of its lines. At last, a great modern sacred art which, one hopes, will find its rightful place in Notre-Dame de l’Arche d’Alliance in the new Alleray district.

Unfortunately there is not enough space to speak as it deserves of his painting: colours of frescoes, colours of stained glass when daylight fades, the acid greens of the countryside, yellows burned by the sun, triumphant reds; gesture painting, mystical painting close to his “Christ d’Alleray”.

“Are you a believer?” — “Yes, I believe deeply.” Are Tagliazucchi’s sculpture and painting truly unrelated? Beyond construction, form and expressive force, there is in the whole of his work a spiritual presence that gives it a unity one would never suspect at first sight.

Pierre Brisset — Art Critic, “L’Œil”

In his paintings as in his sculptures, it is not unusual for a disturbing element to break the natural elegance that this “signore” knows how to translate through line and volume. Do not therefore be surprised by those blows of the chisel that seem to irritate the voluptuous fall of white marble caressed by light: Roberto does not wish to “tickle the senses” or give too much room to “aesthetics”.

One must understand that Roberto does not work with a colour chart on his knees and an art-history manual in his hand. His decisions, while certainly not irrational, continually deepen the confrontation with the white surface without providing it with prior certainties.

The painter draws a line, then begins to fill an area. The rest of the blank canvas in turn calls for colour. Which one? Roberto asks the painter, who does not answer and leaves him in difficulty. Then he spreads green, reinforces an orange line with a flow of blue, and it is the clash among the elements of the painted universe that forces him to begin again, sometimes exhausting the painter until the next calm.

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

For him, painting does not mean simply applying paint, nor drawing with colour. We know his dexterity and ability to seize the vitality of a line, the beauty of a body or the rhythm of an object. No: painting is the immediate enjoyment of colour, because every brushstroke creates new relationships between one colour and another, and between the whole and the person organising it.

More than ever, for this man who does not wish to lose anything, 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 refuses concessions to what has already been seen and already been known.

Thierry Chabanne — Critic and Professor of Aesthetics, Paris

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 — Art Critic, Île-de-France newspaper “Villages”

Tagliazucchi’s work cannot be neatly circumscribed or defined. At best, one may attempt to approach his sculpture through a set of contrasts and by considering forces and techniques that appear to oppose one another. 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 both in the stripped-down forms he employs and in the extreme care he devotes to marble, his preferred material, often chosen white and subjected to extensive polishing until it becomes perfectly smooth and translucent under the effect of light.

Smooth to the touch, neutral in colour and compact in form, this sculpture is nevertheless neither mute nor insignificant. There is no monotony and no silence of matter. Remaining discreet and restrained, Tagliazucchi knows how to make stone speak and set it in motion, never limiting the work to itself but always integrating it into its environment.

Do not “Jeu d’enfants” and “Le Ménestrel” acquire their full meaning in the space in which they unfold? The linear harmony of his works is always revitalised, animated and made dynamic by a break forming an angle — as in “La Maternité” — by a notch or by a blow of the chisel — as in “Le Signe grec” and “Le Joueur de rugby” — disrupting the silence of otherwise highly uniform conceptions.

In Tagliazucchi, suppleness never leads to 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 how to create strongly sexual sculpture that, while gentle and calm, is animated by a deep and marked 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. Rejecting an art of absurdity and nonsense, one might even say that Tagliazucchi belongs to a certain classical lineage.

Yet he escapes any desire to disseminate a merely “aesthetic” conception of art and seeks a less immediate level of meaning. He himself says that imposing a precise message or demonstrating his own truths matters little to him, provided that he provokes his public and leads it to question established values.

In short, Tagliazucchi’s art cannot be defined from a purely intellectual point of view. To be perceived in all its richness, it demands a total investment, both cerebral and sensitive.

Bernadette Boustany — Conservator, Musée de Saint-Maur

The work of this artist is rather disconcerting. For a curriculum vitae he limits himself to: “surname: Tagliazucchi; first name: Roberto; profession: sculptor; studies: fine arts; born... still alive” — and yet, very much alive indeed, he paints as much as he sculpts and draws as much as he paints.

Although he was born in Carrara, the great centre of white-marble quarries from which builders and sculptors have drawn material since Antiquity, Tagliazucchi, attracted to drawing and painting from childhood, only became interested in sculpture less than a decade ago.

It is certainly a disconcerting body of work because, while both his painting and his sculpture are wholly abstract, they appear to have no kinship with one another, any more than they do with his highly figurative drawings executed in a very classical manner. Three artists, then, very different from one another, united in a single person — and three accomplished artists, among whom one hardly knows which to prefer.

The sculptor first. His still-young work may of course recall certain great predecessors such as Brancusi or Gilioli, but to the devil with this habit of always comparing the art of today with that of the past. Tagliazucchi’s sculpture, with a few rare exceptions, is carved directly from Carrara marble: pure, smooth, translucent and luminous, with rounded angles, tender and gentle, sensual after long, patient and subtle polishing.

In its extreme austerity it suggests far more than it imposes. Had he not titled two of his works “Jeu d’enfants” and “Danseuse”, in the first we might have seen only 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, a great modern sacred art which, one hopes, will find its rightful place in Notre-Dame de l’Arche d’Alliance in the Alleray development.

There is unfortunately too little space to speak as it deserves of his painting: colours of frescoes, colours of stained glass at the hour when daylight fades, or countryside colours of acid greens, sun-burned yellows and triumphant reds; gesture painting, mystical painting close to his “Christ d’Alleray”.

“Are you a believer?” — “Yes, I believe deeply.” No kinship between Tagliazucchi’s sculpture and painting? Beyond construction, form and expressive force, there is in this deeply spiritual artist a presence that gives the whole of his work a unity we would never have suspected at first sight.

Pierre Brisset — Art Critic, “L’Œil”, 1988

Standing apart from fashion yet always curious about the achievements of our time, Roberto Tagliazucchi claims for art great ambitions combining expression and communication. “I try to avoid prettiness.” Roberto often uses this word to emphasise its pejorative association with the inessential and the superficial.

In his paintings as in his sculptures, it is not unusual for a disturbing element to dislocate the natural elegance that this “signore” knows how to translate through line or volume. Do not be surprised by those blows of the chisel that seem to irritate the voluptuous fall of white marble caressed by light: Roberto does not wish to “tickle the senses” or give too much room to “aesthetics”.

Direct carving — the act of removing in order to reveal — gives the sculptor the possibility of discovering with his hands what his eye had already encountered, “as if, in one block or another, I found one of my sculptures before I had worked it”. The eye is the privileged instrument of this encounter: “some blocks tell me nothing, while others attract me irresistibly”. Roberto then speaks of communion with a material that had fascinated him since childhood in Carrara. “What I know is that you must love the material, otherwise it betrays you.”

Art therefore consists in taming the raw mass all the way to the final polishing without taking away the presence of living material. Paraphrasing a famous painter, Roberto once exclaimed: “In painting I search; in sculpture I find.” It is a curious and paradoxical phrase, since one often claims that it is more difficult to achieve a convincing result in sculpture than in painting.

Painting, however, demands an unceasing effort, especially if one rejects the seductions of prettiness and refuses to make pleasing the viewer’s eye an obligatory goal. Roberto does not work with a colour chart on his knees and a history-of-art manual in his hand. His decisions, though obviously not irrational, do nothing but intensify the confrontation with the white surface without offering it certainties in advance.

Let us enter discreetly into the studio where very curious stories unfold. The painter draws a line and begins to fill an area. The remaining blank canvas in turn calls for colour. Which colour? Roberto asks the painter, who does not answer and leaves him in difficulty. He then lays down green, thickens the orange line with a stream of blue, and the clash between the elements of the already-painted universe forces him to begin again, irritating the painter until the next calm.

There: the space is open, always upward. If the lines begin somewhere, they have no ground; they are neither trees nor branches. Perhaps what the painter seeks is precisely this open but anchored space, these effects of depth that are continually brought back to the surface by deposits of matter.

Facing a vertically placed canvas, it is not easy to avoid flights into space while at the same time suggesting an opening of space itself, a field whose boundaries are present but whose effects remain uncertain and constantly escaping. “I seek neither anecdote nor directly suggestive form,” says the painter. Do not look for something already seen. If you see sky in that blue or fire in that orange, you are free to do so, but such associations may well be accidental.

For him, painting is neither simply applying paint nor drawing with colour. We nevertheless know his dexterity and his ability to seize the vitality of a line, the beauty of a body or the rhythm of an object. Painting is enjoying colour in the instant, because each new brushstroke immediately establishes new relationships from one colour to another and between that whole and the person who organises 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. Such is the difficulty to be overcome when one refuses concessions to what has already been seen and already been known.

Thierry Chabanne — Professor of Art History, École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris