Giuseppe Pirozzi

The plastic aptitude of Giuseppe Pirozzi, from the very first moment of his long history, reserves special attention to materials: to the plaster and wood of the modeled figurines, to the bronze immediately alternated with iron and molten lead with a very personal technique that allows compactness of forms subtracted from academic prototypes and solicits wall images, to the wax molded to feed the sensitive epidermis of portraits, animals in love, warriors or Icarus, to the steel made container or casing of larvae, relics, debris of a dramatic reality in which the true domain of sculpture takes substance: the representation of the human body in a detached yet moved, sometimes fantastic vision.
Every transition from one material to another, every technical renewal, operates in Pirozzi a rupture, especially in the 1970s-1980s, when the echo of the great statuary of ancient cathedrals yields to the richness of impulses that animate him and, subtracting him from mental schemes, direct him toward articulations of sharp planes that, letting sensual emotion shine through, combine, beyond appearances, the shadow line with a long horizontal breath, that is, a simmering underworld from which emerge, with a few vertical and oblique geometric lines that seem to extend beyond the sculptures themselves, meager profiles in relief, seething rivulets of a definitively contracted magma. The baroque labyrinth of outstretched hands, all light and shadow, has yielded to the container-mirror that endlessly sends back the reflections of matter on the sharp surfaces. The same ideological convictions enter resolutely into the sculpture of the following decades and it is not surprising the amplitude they assume precisely at the moment when sculpture becomes architecture and leaves full freedom to invention, to the ability to enrich with unexpected rhythms a stylistic repertoire not unlike a natural organic growth of what has invaded contemporaneity: industrial and mechanical achievements, daring conquests of technique, skeletons of a gallery of impossible mythomaniacs.
Now it is the turn of clay, in anticipation of firing but not of casting in bronze, where faces, fish, numbers, letters, bolts, screws and nails, which in the 1980s steal from the material every expressive secret useful for feeding the theater of form and with elegant mastery, are inscribed in a characteristic system of signs, gravely underscored by the briefest beat of light and the inner breath that animates them.
Echoes of a precise conception, sometimes even religious, almost as if Pirozzi wanted to extract, from a pile of rubble, sculpted altars, guide the guarded expression of the terracottas, the solid structuring, the compactness of the plastic masses, which give the images an autonomous life in space.      
The love of the material, the openness of interests to archaeological research (back, insistent, the memory of the temples of Selinunte demolished by the earthquake) and a sort of turn in the sense of form, decorative, present especially in the cultivated interest in jewelry, now highlight the way of roughing out the images, sometimes palpable and more realistic, sometimes less explicit, in the square or circular block that houses the remains of a sculpture "a levare."The block has an important function in the structure of the tablets and oscillae. The highly sensitive value of the line, which runs fluidly in the unitary continuity of the two-dimensional work and yet strains toward further spatial enlargement and constant formal simplification, accentuates the extreme consumption of the vertical figures constituted, progressively, into a singular rhythmic plexus of forces, of fantastic interweavings, of free variations in perfect balance, of mental geometries channeled into a dreamlike tale unveiled in siege-like silence.

Giuseppe Appella