Pier Paolo Calzolari On the Quiet Alchemy of Time

A melancholy awareness of time passing, a longing for something unnamed and unnamable and an acceptance of the necessary flux of all things within the unrestrainable entropic evolution of matter and energy animate the work of Italian master Pier Paolo Calzolari. Emerging from a sustained dialogue with living, vibrating matter, his works often take the form of simple traces left by processes of transformation, bearing witness to the transient nature of all forms and entities as they remain subject to constant change, from gestation and formation to decay and dissolution.

Calzolari’s practice is rooted in an expanded, sensorial understanding not only of sculpture and installation but also of their inescapable condition of constant, interdependent relation with other bodies and forces in an environment. Operating as both alchemist and medium, he selects materials less for formal stability than for their capacity to change, decay or react, embracing the ephemeral and unstable nature of the four primordial elements and their cyclical transformations, embodied in substances such as salt, ice, lead, sulfur, moss, tobacco leaves, flame and neon.

Long associated with the poetics of Arte Povera, Calzolari fully embraced the movement’s call to use “poor materials,” turning his art-making practice into a profound exercise of reattunement and collaboration with the natural cycles of matter. Yet his position has always remained distinct and, in many ways, pushed further into this poverismo. His materials are “poor” not as a gesture of anti-capitalist rhetoric but as a means of exposing the most fundamental structure of physical reality itself, embracing vulnerability, entropy and impermanence as the only possible conditions for an artwork to exist.

There was conflict within the movement regarding the notion of “poor,” the Italian master acknowledged, when Observer had the rare opportunity to enter into what became a deeply philosophical dialogue with him on the occasion of his latest exhibition, “Saudades,” at Marianne Boesky in New York. One reading was more ideological, tied to resistance against capitalist hyperproduction and consumption, he explained. “My position was different. I started from a Franciscan conception: the idea of losing the centrality of man in relation to things, of moving toward a same-level relation between man and matter, things, animals, everything that exists—a horizontal reading of the world.”

Calzolari describes Arte Povera as a “magnificent comet” that announced an alternative way of seeing the world but whose participants eventually divided into distinct lines of research, like “meteorites.” For him, “poor” always carried a deeper meaning: one of humility, grounded in the human being’s implicit position and in the acceptance of limits as part of a vital entanglement rather than the illusion of omnipotence over other elements: “Brother water, brother wolf, brother fire. For me, it was about understanding everything as part of a broader whole, trying to merge with it, to understand it, to follow it in some way—or to be followed, in another way. There is a kind of familiarity with things. It’s all about understanding that everything that exists—from the flight of a hummingbird to the fall of a stone—is matter, color and essentially living matter. Therefore, it can no longer be denied or merely looked at.”

From this enigmatic and poetic reflection, it’s clear that Calzolari’s approach to art and to nature gestures toward an ancient, pre-Aristotelian and pre-modern understanding of matter, closer to the Greek concept of hýlē but also to the animist beliefs of many Indigenous communities, in which matter is not inert but living, collaborative and endowed with its own agency.

Here he offered a luminous allegory, a poetic image that felt at once prophetic and so ancient it seems to originate at the dawn of humankind. “Let’s think about a temple—Jewish, Arab, Christian, it doesn’t matter. A temple is a meeting point for many people, each with their own curiosity, fear, sadness and hope,” he said in his calm, cadenced voice, inviting us into another mythological dimension. “Inside this temple, people leave traces, even physical ones. Columns that are touched bear marks of collision; on the ground, footsteps wear down stones and mosaics.” At the same time, he noted, it is not only physical presence that accumulates but also meanings, symbols and forces. “When you enter a temple, you can feel the concentration—not only the desires and immediate requests of others, but also the previous ones enclosed within it. These forces move, circulate and listen. We breathe them in and absorb them.”

The temple becomes a site of collective performance, where rituals across cultures and religions emerge to listen, reattune and facilitate this circulation of forces and energies, embracing what Calzolari describes as the chorality of all things: “Then there is a moment when a person stops, kneels on a mat or positions themselves on a marker. They are surrounded by these presences, these lines of force, these inquiries that circulate. Yet they manage to concentrate, almost conically, upward, within that small area. And in that moment, sculpture is formed. Art is formed. That moment of coagulation is a point of force—let’s call it coagulation.”

What Calzolari described is the miraculous moment when forces and dimensions of reality converge, colliding into a heightened awareness that everything belongs to a wider cosmic order. Art becomes a moment of gestation and revelation, capable of bringing us closer to a glimpse of that cosmic awareness.

Calzolari’s latest body of work in New York reads as both a sedimentation of these reflections—a late-life, quietly melancholic meditation on the nature of all things—and an acceptance of them that locates in the playfulness of artistic creation a claim for regenerative forces beyond and after dissolution and decay. Across the surfaces of identically scaled casein-tempera paintings, traces of past events emerge: marks of physical passage and vestiges of past lives, evoked through the fragmentary presence of found objects that create subtle textures and focal points for contemplation while anchoring these diaphanous presences back to an earthbound, time-bound realm of human existence.

Hovering at the edge of existence as silent poetic assertions, his works appear less as subjects of performance than as presences, evocations of past events deliberately suspended between irresolution and potential evolution. Their fleeting, transitory nature gestures toward the inevitability of change and disappearance while still allowing for the possibility of transformation into new forms.

Sharing the same untranslatability as the Portuguese and Galician word saudade that gives the exhibition its title, the works unfold as delicate, fragile notes on time and existence, marked by a rhythmic oscillation between breath and hesitation, assertion and near-silence, reminiscent of a piano composition such as Debussy’s Clair de lune, and carrying a quiet awareness and acceptance of transience and continuous permutation.

“That is my world, and so I tried to let it emerge, to let it speak,” Calzolari said, responding to questions about the reflections from which these new works emerged. “I have to answer with another common phrase that I’ve used many times, or else I don’t know.” Here, he gestured toward the unfathomable and ineffable nature of the artistic process and the mystery of its deepest motivations. “This question has been asked so many times that I always answer in the same way: first, who made the instrument; second, who plays it; third, my function is simply to keep the instrument active,” Calzolari added succinctly, acknowledging that he is unsure whether muses or poets even exist and that he does not particularly care.

He has clearly embraced, in his practice, the role of the artist as a channel, one through which higher forms of awareness of the fundamental principles of the cosmos may find manifestation, or we might at least receive fleeting glimpses that bring us closer to deeper truths. “Artists are strongly egoistic, they are egotists—you shouldn’t trust what I say—but I repeat that if artists were channels, those are certainly the ones that interest me the most,” he responds when asked about this directly.

“I think there’s more of a calling from the demons—intended in the Greek sense of daimon,” Calzolari allowed. Yet it is the slow gestation of those messages, he added, that ultimately enables the work to take shape. “I’m always positioned between bad encounters and bad messages I’ve endured. At my age, I feel more attentive to other things—not only spiritual things, but things that sometimes are spiritual—things that hover over the world of reality.”

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