Italy - FEDERICO SEPPI

Federico Seppi, or about nature

Everything is admissible in contemporary art. Much of it seems to have been seen before, experiments that have been tried before. It is useless to struggle in the waters of contemporaneity: you will be carried along by the current, often far from shore.

This cannot be said, however, of those artists who do not give up the umbilical cord that ties them to their homeland, to the primordial light-heartedness of creating. One of these is Federico Seppi who, without ever falling back into trailing positions, works with the materials of nature, getting his hands dirty and coming away with a clear soul. For him it is not an aesthetic affectation to model resin or listen to the ice melt, or to hollow out a tree trunk; instead it is a matter of urgency. His intimate relationship with nature is not a macrobiotic fashion: he was born near the woods, he played as a child on sharp fragrant pine needles. So it is the need to start from what he knows, in an almost uterine manner. There is no literary sophistry involved. Even this text is disarmingly inadequate in comparison with the combination of simplicity and purity (of message and forms) expressed in his works. The stalactites that form the installation presented here are not elements of a dance choreography: they are the intrusion of a natural element into an urban context, that is not achieved through the visit to a theme park, but through the coherence of an artist who sees nature as an integral part of his own disposition.

Text by Gabriele Lorenzoni