NEW YORK, NY.- In the work called “Caress”, made in 1932, the Swiss Sculptor Alberto Giacometti crafted an abstract organic form out of plaster and traced the shape of his two hands on its surface in bas relief. This work comes to mind because of the way it evokes the forbidden gesture of touching something that has become eternal. Although the drawn hands imply some sort of superficial contact, it is the object itself that shapes the gesture into a secret, permanent meaning. What would be the form of a caress? How would one shape the touched object into a structure that could incarnate its feeling?

Angelo Venosa’s studio in Rio was a short walk from my parents’ home. I remember thinking of this sculpture every time I visited him. In his workplace, densely inhabited by organic forms, one had a chance to experience not the idea or the form of a body, but the “feeling” of it. There, a deeply intuitive form of proprioception animated a wild variety of physical forms. It permeated them, making the inane material semantically porous to Angelo’s life-giving imagination. The hands Angelo Venosa inherited from his parents, a carpenter and a seamstress, gradually became a measuring device by which the gifted artist carefully gauged his presence in the physical universe. His hands shaped these seemingly living forms symbiotically, as if the sculptures themselves were conferring his hands their genuine meaning.

The somatic nature of his large-scale pieces, at first, seemed too extraneous to Angelo’s generally serene and soft-spoken demeanor, but in time, as we gradually adjust to their quiet presence, their scale too becomes abstract. Traditionally, the human body has been the main subject of devotion of sculptors from Phidias to Anthony Gormley. It has been used as an ideal, a marker, as movement in time and perpetuity, constantly challenging the perception of our own physical existence. I have argued that there’s no such thing as a sculpture that is not, at least marginally, about the body, for every tri-dimensional artwork is invariably designed to share space with a physical and conscious presence. We encounter these human creations within this mind-body paradigm and measure our interaction based on how much they challenge the relationship between our bodies and their surrounding context. Angelo’s work seemed to spring from a dream version of anatomy, chimeric, non-Vitruvian, but not entirely fictional as if it were fed by his voracious fascination with natural science and its myriad of structural schemes.

In a more private part of his studio, piles of transparent bins were filled with bones, stones, dry leaves, and twigs mixed with 3-D printed models and cast objects, a formidable cabinet of curiosities that seemed to have sprung right out of Darcy Wentworth Thompson’s “On Growth and Form.” I used to visit him, and we sat among these things. I remember telling him the perhaps fictional, but lovely story about how an assistant of Henry Moore scattered his aged master’s little sculptures in his garden for him to find and think they were beautiful natural stones. Angelo told me that he would love to one day be able to confuse his work with natural things surrounding it. It is a pity he did not have time to do it. Angelo left us after a bout with ALS that did not keep him from creating until the very end of his abbreviated life. At his memorial, I asked Sara, his lifelong love, to visit his workspace once more and told her how much I enjoyed sitting there, immersed in Angelo’s mind and how important I thought it would be for me to be able to share that feeling.

This exhibition was born from that feeling. A feeling very similar to a caress, when one feels the soul touched by someone’s hands. An amazing amount of competent literature has been produced about Angelo Venosa’s work. A deservedly thorough retrospective is touring museums as we speak. Angelo was one of the greatest artists of his generation, although to him being an artist was never more important than making art. The richness of his inner practice sufficed him abundantly and his elegance and integrity kept him from performing a great deal of artworld courtly duties. As a result, much of his art is still to be discovered by a wider international audience. It would scare me to assume a project to showcase Angelo Venosa’s work in the scale and completeness the work deserves, but somehow, it also makes me think that no exhibition, no matter how large or scholarly, could ever translate the sentiment one felt while sitting among his things in the studio. This exhibition is about a different mark a great artist can leave indelibly on people’s consciousness. It is a modest attempt to illustrate the artist’s multiple creative narratives as well as the natural flow of his thinking processes. Ultimately, it celebrates Angelo as the eternal artists’ artist. An inspiring mind, whose hands caressed the matter of the world and the souls who were fortunate enough to feel it. ---Vik Muniz

A sculptor among painters

Angelo Venosa emerged as an artist in the 1980s, having been part of the iconic exhibition Como vai você, Geração 80?, which took place at the Parque Lage School of Visual Arts in Rio de Janeiro and brought together a large number of young artists from across the country. Although there was no manifesto, common theme, or direct links between the poetics, most of the artists’ output consisted of paintings. Since the mid-1960s, and for most of the 1970s, the practice of painting took a back seat in Brazilian art, which was largely marked by conceptualism. However, with the start of the 1980s, painting once again began gaining ground in the country’s art scene (and on an international level as well), now discussed in a contemporary key. Although there were no elements that unified the poetics, there was a strong influence of Neo-Expressionism.

Among the many painters (including some of his very close friends, such as Daniel Senise, Luiz Zerbini, and Beatriz Milhazes), Angelo Venosa concentrated almost entirely on the sculptural practice, taking sculpture in a direction that was still little explored.

Enclosures and skins

At the same time as his research began to explore the volumetric, interiors, and structures of bodies, he also maintained an interest in the wrappings and ‘skins’ that cover these structures. Venosa had already focused on this element from the beginning of his career, but in more recent years, new results emerged.

Among them, the fiberglass sculptures stand out. Sinuous and snaking, they’re made of wooden structures coated with the material, which gives them the appearance of a shell, resembling cocoons or the eggs of strange beings that could burst out at any moment.

‘His art does not refuse to imitate nature, like most of the aesthetics of this century, nor does it reduce nature to a system of signs, an image, or a perceptual stimulus, like the realist and neo-figurative currents. Simulating organic procedures, it repeats the relationship between skeleton and skin, bone and cartilage, and fluid and coagulated materials. Placing himself not in front of but behind nature, as if it were produced by his gesture, the artist assumes the role of creator’. —Lorenzo Mammì

‘If, on the one hand, he presents us with near-dead bodies, which seem to be
being calcined and fossilized, on the other he offers us near-living beings, who are perhaps timidly coming out of a state of coma to take heart, to sprout.’ —Daniela Name

Virtual volumes

The tension between the constructive and the organic, the soft and the hard, the living and the dead, runs throughout Angelo Venosa’s career and can be summed up as a clash between chaos and order, even when the artist talks about structure.

As a sculptor interested in the characteristic attributes of this language, volumetry has always been on his poetic horizon. Ever since he made the sculpture Baleia [Whale], made up of planes that evoke an imaginary volume (since it’s not a body, but a structure that evokes it), he became interested in the idea of planes that define an imaginary solid.

This interest led to developments, especially from the late 1990s onwards. Based on CT scans, in which a human body is digitally represented and ‘sliced’ in such a way as to evoke volumetry, he began to use this “virtual” slicing on glass plates, using both moistened salt and wire to create these drawings.

Later, successive acrylic sheets were also used to create the illusion of volumetry. In the work Turdus (2009), we see the simulation of a bird skull sliced into acrylic planes and suspended in the air. The identification of the figure, of the ‘whole,’ depends on the viewer’s position, varying according to their movement.

This interest in the virtual curves of bodies also led Venosa to explore various other
materials, interspersing, for example, methacrylate with ultraviolet light prints, a procedure widely used in medicine and science for the internal mapping of bodies. Thus, these organic curves are distributed across different supports and materials, sometimes projecting themselves into space as tangible structures, sometimes as phantasmatic impressions.

In this sense, Venosa manages to combine sculptural practice with the most
advanced technological and scientific procedures, breaking the boundary of the real and approaching the digital aspect.

3D prints

Another body of work developed over the last few years of Venosa’s life was his 3D prints. Arranged in groups and reduced in scale, they resemble organic structures such as corals and echinoderms, forming a constellation of inanimate beings so representative of the artist’s poetics and language that they look like seeds of the large-scale works for which Venosa is renowned.