The MAC Lula museum of contemporary art is hosting the anthological exhibition of Chessa after Milan

PRESS RELEASE

Andrea Chessa. Lo spazio della materia. Curated by Alberto Barranco di Valdivieso

“Lo Spazio della Materia”, a survey exhibition devoted to Andrea Chessa (b. 1972), the sculptor and visual artist from Tempio Pausania, curated by the Milanese art historian and critic Alberto Barranco di Valdivieso, is being presented once again in the spaces of MAC Lula following the important exhibition staged at Milan’s historic Spazio Arte Scoglio di Quarto — a centre dedicated to contemporary art and culture in the heart of the city, directed by Gabriella Brembati — an event that met with significant public and critical acclaim. The museum in Lula, situated in the heart of a revived Barbagia of extraordinary evocative power, represents one of the most remarkable cultural realities in contemporary Sardinia. Founded in 2018, MAC Lula has established itself as an authoritative private museum hub, conserving and enhancing a significant collection devoted to historic Sardinian art of the post-war period, while at the same time fostering dialogue with the most current forms of artistic research. On this occasion, a new suspended installation in iron and wool, “sos-Enattos”, created site-specifically by the Artist and the Curator, is being presented: a work that receives and preserves the memory of the wind, of sounds, and in particular the “silence” of the place. Chessa is a Sardinian visual artist whose work reaches beyond the confines of the island, pursuing a cosmopolitan plastic-sculptural language while never forgetting his origins in a land — Sardinia — which, within the language of the contemporary, has produced in art (painting and sculpture) the research of masters capable of combining modernity with autochthonous roots. The island’s geographical isolation has not produced closure, but rather a profound relationship between human beings, matter and landscape; Sardinian artists have progressively managed to abandon all forms of folklorism in order to arrive at original and experimental enquiries, as the curator explains in his critical essay for the catalogue: from Costantino Nivola to Maria Lai and on to subsequent generations, Sardinian sculpture has progressively transformed the vernacular imaginary into a contemporary plastic language, moving beyond ethnography towards a symbolic and universal dimension in which tradition is not cited, but transformed into a creative device, into conceptual and poetic matter. “Sculpture thus becomes – writes Alberto Barranco di Valdivieso – space, relationship, installation, sign, while nevertheless retaining a strong material imprint and an anthropological tension that remains one of the most recognisable characteristics of the island’s artistic research. More recent generations, as in the case of Chessa, having grown up within an art system that is now international, inherit this cultural substratum but move even further beyond its more explicit narrative and identitarian aspects, using materials, memory and landscape as points of departure for an open and non-didactic visual enquiry. In this context, Sardinian-ness is no longer a theme, but the deep structure of the gaze: not an ethnographic narrative, but the silent grammar of form.” It is within this cultural and poetic terrain that the work of new generations of Sardinian sculptors such as Andrea Chessa is situated: his research enters into this continuity, transforming it into an autonomous contemporary language, spare and essential yet elegant in its exact compositional calibration, in the linguistic synthesis articulated between solids and voids, between air and matter, between planar signal and volumetric articulation. In Chessa’s sculpture, matter becomes an instrument that “digests” memory in order to observe the present. His research revolves around two constant nuclei: memory and the symbolic value of materials, addressed through cycles of work that return to precise material signatures — iron, copper, wool, reeds, imprints on plaster — constructing a poetics which, while starting from an Arte Povera–conceptual horizon, opens onto an original language that is receptive to the space of experience. As Barranco writes, “for Chessa, Sardinian-ness thus becomes true plastic matter, not a narrative theme but formal substance, the internal energy of the work.” In works such as “Col-lana” (2023), wool compressed within orthogonal iron structures generates a contrast between organic matter and geometric discipline: the work is not exhausted in the object itself, but extends into the space it activates, becoming a perceptual experience. In “Lingua di fuoco” (2019), twisted iron preserves the memory of the flame that brought it into being, while in “Ri-emergere” (2019), the imprints of the isportas are transformed into archaeological signs suspended between memory and form. Works such as “Germogli” (2018) and “Ri-volgere” (2017), by contrast, bring nature, human labour and material memory into relation, in an equilibrium between industrial archaeology and poetic form. As the Curator further writes, “this exhibition speaks of the transfiguration of memory: matter becomes the place in which origin and present meet, tracing the path towards a narrative of dream, of the freest imagination of a possible future, beyond traditions, beyond memory itself — an action freed from the shackles of history, embracing the echoes of a universal poetry dedicated to the world.” Chessa’s work thus remains suspended between artefact and form, between memory and perception. “For, in the end, origin is not what lies behind us, but what continues to drive us forward: not the memory of the path, but the promise of the footprints that our time calls upon us to leave.”