Thirty Years of Sculpture

While writing about the first thirty years of Enrico Sala's sculpture, I realised that I was not even born when he began. In truth, I met Enrico in his atelier in Salorino for the first time, when I was not even twenty. Bohémienne and without rule: at that age, this is how I imagined that Art was. I was wrong. It was he, Enrico, who thought me that the Art, in order to be realised, requires years of study and work, and obviously, also, some rules. I asked him thousands of times to tell me the story of his study, of his work and to impart to me, the "good rules".

‘Where do you want me to start?’ He asked ‘Maybe, I had better start from the Academy in Brera. I came to sculpture after two years of painting. Truthfully, I was not enthusiastic about painting, I had the feeling that it was too insignificant, too -how do you say?- "flat". After Brera, I left sculpture aside for teaching Art. I heard the "call of the material", so too speak, only a few years later. While I was standing in front of a few blocks of marble from Peccia, I felt an incredible emotion, making me realise that life could be not in teaching but rather in shaping the stone. At the beginning I just used the freedom that school gave me during the summer holidays for sculpting the stone from the quarry in Salorino - the exact one where my father and my grandfather worked previously: Can you imagine?! In those first years I was learning the material and the working techniques.’

'After having terminated the study of "Arts Plastiques" at the University in Paris, I abandoned the abstract shapes to dedicate my attention to more focused themes, with the idea of giving some significance to my work. The human shape was only developed at the beginning of the nineties. It was never abandoned since, and I concentrated myself mostly on the human female figure.'

‘Firstly, only the woman, thereafter with her partner, followed by a family context, to come to the female-parent, mother, symbol of life. The figures are sculpted in marble and stone; colourful figures, depending on the origin of the material: from the light blue sky from Argentina, the yellow of Thailand, green from the Burmese fluorite; to finally come closer to us with the white marble from Carrara, the red marble from Arzo and the black marble from Salorino.’

After thirty years of sculpting, Enrico Sala defines himself as a labouring man and tireless worker, even if working the stone requires an incredible physical labour and constant intellectual awareness. In fact, it is the stone that determines the rules, and that imposes one sculpture rather than another, one working technique rather than another.

He does not surrender. In the meantime, we can enjoy his first thirty years of sculpturing. For the following ones, there is still time.

Cristiana Spinedi

Impressions

I met Enrico Sala for the first time in his atelier in Salorino on a late September afternoon. The air is sweet and the sunset invokes the reflection and beauty which welcomes me as soon as I cross the entrance of his ‘laboratory of the marbles’. This beauty comes from far away, from the rhythm of variegated and brittle blocks, which were shaped by the water, the sun and the wind. The artist guessing their deepest meaning extracts and shapes their souls while moulding sinuous, harmonic and pacifying figures, whose roundness recalls in my mind the eternal feminine.

Colourful striations, glittering like fluorite, warm like the yellow from Siena, slightly blue veiled, milky or pied, more precious than the hollow shell but resistant, reveal in the hard hands, callous by passion but gentle in the touch, the light trapped in remote ages. The full forms are portrayed in acts of affection, or are solitary and thoughtful or again captured while resting. All have an equilibrium that fixes them to the ground and at the same time have a kind of vertical concentration. The same idea, which is developed in many different ways and from many different points of view, gives continuity to the sculptured figures. They live in the space and the space lives in them with a symmetric growth. I leave this place full of images, I would like to isolate one of them and penetrate its mystery; on the other hand, it may be better to leave, to the artificer of such revelation, the privilege of knowing the modus and times of extracting the love for the matter, with the help of experience and physical and moral strength. It's not little!

Graziella Monti