MINDFULNESS – 2015 (WERNER)

Now I try to offer a proof, telling the genesis of some bronzes by Cristiano Alviti, which intends to give a trace of the ways that art, the serious one, usually goes through to arrive at a finished product truly worthy of to be remembered. Some time ago the father of Cristiano and Patrizio, collapsed and was urgently hospitalized. All the family members gathered in the usual sad waiting room of the hospital, received the news that the situation was not definable. The next forty-eight hours would have made it possible to understand if there was hope or it was over. Everyone took the way home to fill a timeless time, suspended in nothingness, in which any thought could only derail, shatter and become dust before the prospect of the end of a father, husband, grandfather. Cristiano went almost without thinking, as drunk, in his study of the Roman hills, and in solitude he transferred this agitation of his to the matter, which became a feverish plan. Five works were born, which I think are among his best “things”. I saw them as if by chance, a case that Cristiano’s subconscious in my opinion created with his deep awareness that he does not belong to the intelligent self, daily but to the soul. We went to a warehouse from which, according to him, he had to take certain mosaic tiles. The works on the ground, placed between bags of raw material. The environment was in dim light, but their silent cry, their anguish sent it all to me.
Those works for the first time can be seen by the public. I often asked the artist to show them and to tell, or to tell them, how they were born, but he still needed to keep them apart, to hide them as much as possible out of sight. To see them was to remember, to relive an abyss, a Maelstrom still too powerful and struggling to be remembered even though his father’s situation had taken a positive turn, a little at a time.

ARCHEOVERTIGO 2009 (DAVERIO)

One hundred years ago the disruptive path of futurism began. It was not at all a school of figurative or poetic aesthetics; it took tangible form only in its future becoming. At the beginning it was a powerful gesture of rupture in a world that had become definitively static, which rejected any hypothesis of evolution beyond the apparently stable certainties of the liberal bourgeoisie of Europe. It was the cry of liberation from the bonds of respectability and in this sense the first moment of self-awareness of all the successive avant-gardes. Going “against” was his primal belief. It stood in an era of comfortable taste and obsessive and haunting tranquility. He defended the growing generations who were denied the right to their own expression, to their independence. He wanted to break the respectability, the balance, the security of the established powers.
And today we are basically at the point and at the head!
(…) Art research always takes place behind the scenes of the vast commercial show.
He does not care about immediate results or blatant consensus, he lives thanks to the careful understanding of those few who understand what is happening beyond what appears.
And then the great upheavals that history presents as proof of one’s vitality take place.
This is what happens today. The world is taking another direction.
He will inexorably find himself abandoning the hypothesis of a single, spoken or visual language that he is, in which to recognize himself.
The pathetic question of tolerated niches is overcome, since the authentic languages ​​of the various identities are being formed, those that will make up the kaleidoscope of the world of tomorrow.
Tomorrow will be full of fierce contradictions, of cruel confrontations, between Americans with an intellectual cap, gothic Germans and French jewelers, between conceptual Japanese and twisted Chinese, between barbaric depleted of the painted walls, iconoclasts of the East and nomadic freaks of hyper-decorated African freaks gifted and Arabs dedicated to the most sophisticated calligraphy. The geopolitical platitudes of a grand hotel will be thrown into the dustbin of history.
And the Italians will return to have their say, not only at the Sunday market or on the TV show on Friday night, but in the cosmopolitan joy of the perennial confrontation of ideas and aesthetics.
They will return ciaccolanti as in the Venezie families of Carpaccio, Canaletto, Boldini and Tancredi, they will return as serious as in the grays and in the rusts of Leonardo, del Piccio, Fontana and Armani, they will return formal, sometimes recalling the design of the Florentines and the passion for a light that unites Botticelli and Fattori, they will return to the Baroque style, with pure oil as in Genoa, cream as in Naples, tomato sauce as in Rome.
The Alviti, perhaps even unknowingly, have for years been following a path that leads in this direction. They are Roman and for this specific reason they are naturally baroque.
Being very far from any minimalist hypothesis has never generated modesty or complex in them. They are shamed in the metrical exaltation of their powerful roots, because the vigorous alternatives in art are without shame.
They slip into work as a method of living and allow themselves to be transported towards the convinced exaltation of the Roman language, that language which is from Rome when the Roman world exists, on the walls of encaustic in the houses of the patricians, on soft floors and fresh from the imperial mosaics, in the infinite mysteries of the papal court, in the taverns. That which is of painting but above all, exaggeratedly, passionately, of sculpture, of great plastic, of the human figure, of the form taken beyond the meaning of rhetoric. The one that inseminated the West.
And with the parameters of the story they play them. They are witnesses of a breakup that becomes a parameter of a new expressiveness, where the archaeological gods lose the romantic sweetness dear to women travelers in buggies to reveal instead the terrible mysteries of parallel kingdoms. Ancient voices behind the tragedy masks that immediately call the astrophysics of the future for the abolition of the obsolete rationality still promoted only by philosophy students in the northern provinces.
The weight of the iron plates, weight that for the eye becomes vigor, the glow of molten bronze in the forms of earth, earth that then crumbles to remain between the folds of the cooled metal, the victory of the muscle on the mind, the cosmos which is generated, are the cheerful and rude response to today’s respectability. They are the sonorous force that will participate in the dissonances of tomorrow to cancel the mellifluous music of the priests of nothingness, and its inevitable numbness.

BALTICO-MEDITERRANEO:SCONFINAMENTI 2008 (ROSSI S.)

To explain the sculptures of Cristiano Alviti the names of Rodin and Marino Marini have been made, and others could be added, Manzù, Fazzini, in short, the best of the figurative tradition of the last two centuries, a certainly useful but not exhaustive reference, because this young man an artist who nourished by the references mentioned above, he was able to present himself as an innovative voice in our current artistic panorama, thanks to his constant anxiety to experiment, to use also heretical materials such as the cement he knows how to use with the lightness of plaster, not to be satisfied never of the results achieved. Its giants and its chrysalises (from the infinitely large to the infinitely small) live their condition of material imprisonment with the awareness of an imminent redemption, gathered in a fetal position but ready to rise up in a heroic liberation effort. The Alviti sculpture is in fact pervaded by a continuous vitalistic movement and its technical expertise is never an end in itself but is always brought back into a profound ethical and aesthetic motivation that it has in constantly relating to the great Italian sculptural tradition, as we said , his fixed point. But it is a past intended not as an inert or cerebral nostalgic evocation as rather as a springboard towards more daring formal resolutions. In fact, nothing is further from the Alviti than the cold revival of Neomanierism or Anachronism. His is an art made of and with movement and passion, the tension of a naked condition as naked is the body, instrument of this contrition and at the same time of this redemption anxiety.

BALTICO MEDITERRANEO 2007 (WERNER)

Roman artist who works in continuous dialogue with his brother. An outstanding feature of its production is its excellent craftsmanship. Years of mess-tin with a brush in his hand and a remarkable curiosity have led him to select two techniques with which he feels most comfortable; watercolor and bronze. With the latter he is obtaining valuable results. Critiano Alviti takes the raw object out of the fusion and refines it and partially polishes it. These bodies are suffering. What tears them apart is not external to them but their own thinking. They are empty shells. Chrysalises that have devoured the butterfly. Houses of the uninhabited soul. The bodies seem to have become ruins. Having left the object partially rough helps to imagine this inferior dimension. The body as an expressive possibility, a desire to live and do that does not accept the limit of the five senses to receive and the word and the hands to give? The meticulous decay of suffering works and is in progress. The tension is expressed by the tendons of the neck and by the muscles of the chest that transmit the idea of ​​a power all tense in resisting metaphorical flames. The limbs are not present. The body is summarized, simplified in the trunk and in the head. The place of the heart and of the viscera added to the place of thought. Here is the man standing in thought that consumes him like a flame. Only twisting is allowed.

DI LUCI E D’OMBRE 2006 (ROSSI S.)

In the field of art history, the case of two painter brothers is not particularly rare, but the case of two brothers who work in perfect symbiosis and harmony, without one personality prevailing over the other and indeed in such a way that the final result of his work is absolutely balanced: the case, in fact, of Cristiano and Patrizio Alviti.

Since its birth, the figurative art has had to come to terms with its dual nature, always poised between intellectuality and manual skill, and its protagonists have now seen themselves assimilating to simple artisans now elevating to the rank of intellectuals. In summary, it was the perennial conflict between form and matter, between idea and practice, which has characterized the history of painting, sculpture and architecture since the classical era.

ARBOREA 2003 (SCARPA)

Two young lovers of the woods. Of their poetry, their beauty, their charm. In their views, nature represents at the same time something real and unreal. Two painters and two passionate naturalists, who have taken to heart the problem of ecology and respect for the environment.
These trees without a horizon, sometimes rendered at times almost abstract, are studied with imagination in the different seasons and hours of the day and have the charm of a time now lost, immersed as they are in the silence of a nature that still seems uncontaminated man.

The drama with which the artists raise the problem of pollution and the lack of respect for nature in no uncertain terms, testifies to the sincerity with which they faced all the work, with a genuine affection for the theme.

ARCO PICIOCCO 2003 (MAGNI P.)

A mosaic is like a person: seen from afar it looks like a compact, homogeneous surface. If you look around on the street strangers seem a bit all the same, only knowing them you notice the differences, the peculiarities, the facets of the personality.

Thus the mosaic.

From a distance it almost looks like a painting with slightly angular shapes, then, as you approach it, you notice the nuances, the shadows, the lights but above all you see the true texture of the surface.

Not one, but thousands of surfaces make up the mosaic, and it is precisely this interaction of bodies that defines its nature, just as in a person there are so many aspects that define its personality.
In a mosaic, each tile has its own ancient history, which is written in the stratification of colors, in the veins, in the brightness of the tile, which is in turn reshaped to become part of a whole.

If a life is composed of so many events, in turn it is a day and in turn all the minutes that make up the hours, even if turning back, from afar you risk seeing a flat surface. Some tiles in these mosaics are brighter than others, as some memories light up in the mind or some moments bring a glow to our eyes.

Why look far ahead if we can find a lot of poetry in the most common everyday events?
 

DI LUCI E D’OMBRE 2006 (WERNER)

These bodies are thought. You can ask yourself who the model is, but you don’t have a picture of her. You won’t see it easily. You have the thought of an artist who starts from the real body for you unknown. You have the vision that started from the eyes has been exhausted by something that is a feeling that you know you have too, but you do not bring it beyond a moment of lucidity of thought. The artist collects that moment.

A body, a person. Understanding is the highest form of possession.
Leave the other free. It does not necessarily go through the body. The path that passes from his flesh is not necessarily the one that leads to the heart.

The watercolor stains, the rough paper.
You take refuge in the matter. Thought is not usual in everyday life. Life is in a hurry.

The body is sinuous, the line widens to the shoulders. It expresses a more subtle force, more mental than what Patrizio would put in a self-portrait. Not that in water polo there is only strength, but certainly elegance has less chance of showing itself.

The faces parade. They look at me. They don’t judge. I let them do it.

There is also a self-portrait. They attract me. I like to see how a person sees themselves. How does she feel.

There is too much beauty in the world. Those eyes know it. Beauty that becomes cruel, an end in itself. When does adolescence end? When you understood it. When you know how great those things are, those people, those words, those gestures, which are worthy of being remembered.

BALTICO MEDITERRANEO 2007 (TAGLIAVIA)

Creation out of itself, for a continuous deployment. Yet still dialectical and imprisonment. Then, the gathering of legs and back on oneself, in an attempt to learn (to feel the physical effort of the articulation of the limbs elastically and hardly almost in compression) and in the immediate succession the hard composure and the hard turning of a head painfully into tries to withdraw from this merciless determination of being. Brutal. Essentiality of a naked condition: and the body is the instrumental instrument of this contrition so pure in the tortuous act of trying to mirror itself externally, in the afterlife of things, of the Other, of the more immediate circumscriptions and metaphysical places, for the attempt even only least to see their own conception. Each plastic – and anciently metallic – scapula tremor is mechanically reflected within the space structure, yielding to it as it tries to tear itself away from the hard concept in its still insane, unconscious offer.
But the mystical and loving contrition that for purity and stubbornness is close to Rodin, and that for primitive split is Marinian, constitutes the work of art situated on the dense and always excessive border between sign and possibility.

GIGANTI 2012 (CIMILLO M.)

We have already replied on other occasions as Cristiano Alviti is an artist absolutely out of the game of trends and poetics, a clear and authentic outsider who consumes all his physical, mental and manual resources towards a continuous, passionate, intense representation of the “world that is “As opposed to” what should be “.

And his first sculpture project is dedicated to the subject who most expresses the disconnect between the ethical and moral responsibility to follow his natural inclinations and the imposed need to deny them in the name of survival.

The exhibition is titled “The Giants”.

The subject is the individual, or rather the idea of ​​a humanity that is forced to neglect its potential in search of the subsistence that justifies the existence and the denial of inner balance.

And the sculptor uses bronze to manipulate his plastic imagination and create prisons with a cosmological flavor suspended in the myth of immortality in which the image of the transcendent is imprinted.

Poetically and lyrically inspired, over the years he has developed a very particular, extraordinary nucleus of plastic and narrative sensitivity that feeds on rare, precious suggestions, drawn from the peasant roots of his childhood, from the relationship with humanity that shines from every face that meets and that seems to have lost familiarity with nature, with the pains and joys of a life now almost forgotten.

His work resembles him, giving the impression, almost physical, of a great strength combined with a deep desperation: of a robust energy, at times brutal, combined with a subtle and nervous delicacy.

The fervor that sustains him and that has always driven him, from the earliest proofs of the most naive and basic figurative imprint to the ripped and concluded forms of today, is full of lyricism and pietas for the human being.

It is almost instinct, spring and gushing, like his works deployed on the subject almost without sedimentation or translation, distilled from a state of mind, from the warmth of memory, from the intensity of feeling.

And so The Giants return in an original and strong way the sense of sculpture as a form but even more monumental the perceptive and emotional sense of the idea. The idea of ​​the exhibition is to bring the viewer into the intimate and obscure torment of those tragic and human works to which the human conscience will reproach for being captured by the aesthetic and emotional beauty of the bronzes.

Seeing the whole route of the exhibition in a single space makes man save the infinite spiritual preparation of the sculptor as well as his painful youth was infinite. His works bleed and at the same time express a desperate desire to win.

The exhibition is a tremendous struggle between the present and the future, between the dark today of roars and the mystery-filled tomorrow.