SCULPTOR | PAINTER | GRAPHIC ARTIST

The environment and the period into which one is born matter, and so does the city — especially if the city is as unique and singular as Venice. This city of water has been, since the early twentieth century, an environment rich in artistic and cultural ferment. The exhibitions of 1908–20 brought together more than three hundred painters and sculptors in the lagoon city, among them Boccioni, Casorati, Gino Rossi and Arturo Martini. In this climate, between the two wars, the figures of Alberto Viani, Emilio Vedova, Santomaso, Virgilio Guidi and many others took shape. These presences, together with the Art Biennale (1895), the Gallery of Modern Art at Ca’ Pesaro (1902) and the first Film Festival (1932), brought to Venice a great renewal and an international openness in the artistic field and beyond.

It then seemed out of place to defend the myths of the past and the authority of a tradition, and with it the right to a detached attitude, while everywhere discontinuity and dynamism were fundamental components of living. The world could no longer be simply an object of contemplation; it had to be grasped in its becoming, in its continual renewal, in ever more dynamic change. Non-figurative art appeared in the 1940s and 1950s as a break with the past and as suited to the new reality. In Venice, the leading figure in post-war sculpture was Alberto Viani (1906–1989), a pupil of Arturo Martini. This reserved and methodical artist from Mantua is the sculptor Giorgio Zennaro’s only Venetian point of reference.

Zennaro — too young to take part in the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti or to join Spazialismo — understood from his very debut at the Bevilacqua La Masa in 1953 that the time for serene catharsis was over, and that the reality expressed by sculpture is tragic and must therefore convey not only polished forms mindful of the classical tradition, as with Viani, but a reality in the making. With “Evento di Forma” (1953–54) Zennaro set out from his own personal reworking of European sculpture. For him, plastic space is not restless, tormented or formless: it is a space skilfully measured with rigour and harmony. His working method is one of design, and drawing is the fundamental instrument of his inventive path — project, construction and invention as the only elements to set against a world that had known the tragedy of the Second World War. In his projects there are no smudges, only essential lines that, with geometric firmness, mark out space. Man has always needed to measure himself against something higher, to aspire to ever loftier goals: this is Zennaro’s path.

His work is dynamic, changing like the watery environment in which it is born. The sequential dynamism that, from the late 1960s, is the most original and characteristic motif of his work is the same one present in the waves, which perpetually break and return with a movement always new and constant; and it is in this space-time dimension that his forms are to be placed. In the 1950s and 1960s his research moved along apparently different planes that nonetheless share a constant: expansion into space. Thus at times the works lose volume in order to circumscribe it with thin metal lines in ordered rhythms like dance steps, and at other times gain volume through more complex, incisive elements carved and hollowed from marble or cast in bronze. If the “Eventi di Forma” and the “Condizioni” of the 1950s still show clear references to schemes that recall organic forms, the “Apertura Eveniente” of 1966–67 and “Forma divenuta” of 1966 (black Belgian marble) are his personal articulation of space, with strong, decisive lines that project dynamically forward.

The great novelty is the birth of the theme of the “Sequenze Plurime” in 1967–68: at first the elements are still tied to a closed structure, with forms that overlap and intersect in ever new and different combinations, but in 1971 and above all in 1972 the “Sequenze Plurime” become plastic modules that display their compositional elements balanced along a horizontal axis. Elements in succession that create the dynamic illusion of motion, and against which, at times, an element almost like a musical counterpoint is set to break and interrupt the rhythmic sequence. The music of Bach and Beethoven constantly accompanied the work of this artist, who in his youth had played the organ and the violin. Marble, steel, bronze, brass, wood and Plexiglas live in the sequential elements projected into space, and seem to breathe in the curves and hollows that alternate rhythmically. The forms seize space with impetus and aggression, expressing man’s dramatic quest for liberation and his constant will to rise above the pettiness, alienation and suffering that life inevitably brings.

A dynamism that is life and action — at times tragic, yet which, in its tragic intensity, makes us aware of our own changes and helps us grow inwardly. Zennaro uses every material and, above all in the 1970s, Plexiglas, which through staggered and superimposed forms restores all the imaginative allure of the lagoon’s water. In the dynamic successions of the Plexiglas sequences, light plays an important role, and the transparency of the material lets the birth of the formal trace be glimpsed. The Plexiglas sequences become plural transparencies, the rhythmic breath of wave motion made material. Zennaro’s dynamism has no purely mechanical connotation: the care and smoothness of the forms reflect not only the perfection and prevalence of technique in the world of the 1970s, but the expression of a moral order to be set against the negativity of the real world. The pure, rhythmic forms are thus an alternative image — ethical and aesthetic — to an irrational reality. The perfection and purity of the plastic forms are an expression of culture and civilisation, just as they were, in their perfect and proportional beauty, in Greek statuary.

For an artist caught up in the drama of the Second World War, beauty and reason are a primary need, the only salvation against the spread of cruelty and barbarism. For an artist there are two alternatives to a tragic reality: to depict it in all its horror, or to dream and imagine forms whose rigorous rational order represents an alternative to disorder and chaos. Zennaro creates his own personal sequential system, harmonious and poetic. The sequences belong not only to the individual works: each sculpture is sequential to another. Four or five works are sequential to one another and form a cycle, and each cycle is in turn consequent upon another. His works thus constitute a system at once simple and complex, in an endless sequence that marks out space according to a temporal rhythm. Zennaro has an unconditional faith in the rationality of form as an expression of human creativity and a vital force against the destructive impulse of 1970s society. The human and moral values handed down to us by ancient culture can no longer be transmitted in the rhythm of a motionless dream, as in Viani’s caryatids, but in forms that assail and mark space — forms of hope, dynamically projected towards the future. It is not a time for an art of metaphors, spells or games, but of forms built with effort that bear witness to a dreamed, intangible beauty: this is the message of an artist who, over fifty years of work, took on a human and civic responsibility through constant design.