In a fragile balance between earth and sky, between memory and loss, lies the sculptural world of Stefano De Santis, an artist active since 1982.
De Santis' figurative sculptures represent figures reaching upwards, their faces turned towards the sky. They are silent presences, symbols of inner tension, of unanswered questions, of listening to the invisible.
Entering Stefano De Santis' sculptural world means entering a state of suspension. A suspension between form and idea, between earth and air, between what remains and what escapes.
For over forty years, De Santis has been working with matter as one works with an ancient thought: with patience, listening, and an inner silence that settles in every curve, every void, every plastic tension.
The human figures, belonging to a language that an artist friend of De Santis's has defined as “Figurative Fantastic,” each figure is constructed with essential but powerful lines, where the body is not so much a representation as a metaphor: the human being becomes a structure, a bridge, an echo of the visible and the invisible.
Their gaze, constantly raised, is an act of poetic resistance, a desire for contact with something else, something greater.
Alongside the human figures, the enigmatic forms of the Pachiderma senza memoria (Pachyderms without memory) emerge: terracotta and bronze animals with massive and undefined shapes.
themselves and their path.
These fantastic animals seem to drag themselves through time like fragments of a lost or yet-to-be-born world. A reflection on biological beings without consciousness, on matter that moves without meaning, in contrast to the spiritual tension of human figures.
A dialogue between worlds
The exhibition Lo sguardo e la materia (The gaze and matter) brings these two souls together: momentum and stasis, search and forgetfulness, the form that opens up and the one that closes in on itself.
Yet both the figures and the animals inhabit the same universe: that of matter transformed into symbol, into question, into plastic poetry.
In both, however, the same care for the material, the same attention to form, and the same respect for what emerges from the sculptural process vibrate.
In a fast-paced and distracting age, Stefano De Santis' work invites us to slow down, to look—and perhaps, above all, to feel.
Because in these forms that seem immobile, there is movement.
And in this silence, there is voice.
Through bronze, terracotta, wood, and natural materials, De Santis constructs a symbolic and personal plastic language, in which the material becomes the voice of the soul.
An exhibition that speaks of time, silence, identity, and transformation
Participants are solely responsible for managing their own content and for obtaining the necessary permissions for the publication of any materials.
If you are the owner of this profile and do not wish to appear on Rome Art Directory, please contact info@romeartdirectory.com to request its removal.
