Tempus Edax Rerum

 

The title of this work is taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses and means "time that devours everything", an expression coined by the poet and referring to the inexorable flow of time that transforms everything, regardless of human will and events.

Inexorable like the continuous becoming and transformation of nature, always able to repossess the anthropized spaces and among the central themes of the artist's poetics.

The work comes to life in quarry no. 7 of Botticino, part of a limestone deposit which for two thousand years has supplied the precious marble with which thousands of sculptural and architectural works have been created. The quarry itself is a site in constant evolution and metamorphosis.

I thought deeply about these concepts, passionately studying the theme of their bio-reversibility, coming to synthesize in this cultured title the meaning and message of a work that makes the need for a new approach to the natural environment an urgent priority of our time.

Gandhi, a universal symbol of change and non-violence, supported the equal right to life of all living beings on the planet, demonstrating an astonishing awareness for his time and testifying to his desire for a more balanced relationship between man and nature. In his hands, he holds out a red thread that connects him to the other figures that animate the work and to a mature quarryman, a metaphor for work and experience who, sitting on a large block of marble, seems lost in thoughts of him. To the right of the large block on which the quarryman is sitting, as a further element of connection and continuity between the figures, the ends of the roots of the large fantastic tree that grows on the left wall emerge. The roots seem about to envelop the block of marble on which the worker sits, taking up the theme of time and the reconquest of space by nature. On the left wall, fully visible only from a lateral point of view with respect to the work, the most surreal and visionary element of the project materializes: the enormous tree inspired by the Ficus Religiosus, a singular plant from whose roots faces and animals seem to take shape.