Eidos – Dialogues between form and matter

This exhibition by the Pistoia-based artist Marzio Cialdi at Naturart Village is tantamount to a retrospective and marks a key milestone in his artistic career. Over 20 sculptures, some of monumental scale, trace his artistic journey through an ongoing dialogue between form and material: a body of work that best represents his recent years of creative activity. For some twenty years, the sculptor has been engaged in a process of exploration that has led him not only to experiment with different materials, but also to develop his own style and artistic vision. Cialdi has always been fascinated by the human figure. His thinking has centred on exploring the role of humankind in the ever-changing contemporary world, trapped within a web of constantly interconnected information that creates a sense of disorientation and unease. It is no coincidence that some of his recent works in wood – a material he has used for the first time – evoke, by contrast, the oldest known humanoid sculptures, incredibly created by the’Homo erectus (70,000 years ago). A decidedly new “primitivism” for Cialdi, but one that represents his continued search for forms, his curiosity for all that belongs to man and his history.   

Progressively, his path gradually moved away from figuration into more abstract, less figural territory. However, he never entirely gave up on finding references to the concrete reality of the world in his works; he created sculptures completely devoid of references to the world of figuration. The use of Corten steel was decisive in this shift, a material that develops a material expressiveness connected to rust, to the passage of time. While also used for human figures, for his aniconic compositions, it takes on mysterious, enigmatic connotations. The bent strips of this material constitute a key moment in his work, the compression of the materials imbues the works with an extraordinary energy that remains potential, silent. 

Also very important is the cycle called “Global Warming,” which was exhibited in Pavia in 2022 in various city spaces, with several works from this exhibition on display here. Among his recent works is also a series of ceramics in which shapes and figures seem to coexist at the limit of perception. These are mysterious works that open up Cialdi's research to the indefinite, with his ceramic works accompanying and punctuating his entire aesthetic quest. His is the pursuit of’Eidos, of that form or figure which Plato placed at the base of sensible knowledge, of that immutability which gave rise to all the images of the universe. We would call it Idea, a deep connection between form and matter.