Numero 52 - Città dei Mestieri

Dall’alto:
Armando Marrocco
scolpisce la base dell’altare
della chiesa di S. Antonio al Fulgenzo;
ambone della medesima chiesa,
2001/2002.
More than half a century ago,
in Salento, I began transforming
raw material into ornate works of art:
marble, Lecce stone, wood, mosaic.
In Galatina, the city where I was born,
I learnt the basic skills in the workshop
of a master stone mason. After this
I studied art and at the start of the
1960s, on the advice of Lucio Fontana,
I left formal education and transferred
to Milan where I had the chance to take
an interest in architecture, engineering
and town planning. In 1966 at the
Rizzatto-Whitworth Gallery, I put on
a one-man show entitled “The multiple
spaces of Marrocco”, a work conceived
based on the close relationship
between art and science, executed using
transparent objects and electronic art
and mirrored steel sculptures. After this
came other exhibitions in the same vein,
critical acclaim and awards. I accepted
the position of Art Director in
a company that designed and produced
complementary objects for the home.
We parted company in the 1970s.
After this I became interested in sacred
art, a slow and reflexive encounter with
the spiritual that brought me to create
works I believed belonged only to my
youth, matured by experience. Sacred
art allowed me to confront tradition
without neglecting the innovation
required in our time. The creation
of such works requires skill, experience,
vocation, visual memory, consciousness,
confrontation with ones own personal
history and the environment, awareness
of the transcendent. In my experience
as sculptor, contact with the mysteries
of creation happens on a daily basis.
Everything comes in useful to give
one the courage to live at the level
of one’s own dreams. I have created
bronze doors for cathedrals, altars,
ambones, chapels, stained-glass windows,
fountains and baptisteries;
it is impossible to remain indifferent
to those clients who involve you
in their own personal history, their own
language, their own operation and who
create a continuous alternation
of emotions. With the passage of time
I have learnt that art is always sacred
however it is expressed, because it is
born of and takes the form of me-man.
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