Gilberto Zorio

The Pedro Cera Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by the artist Gilberto Zorio.

Gilberto Zorio is one of the artists whose work is regularly associated with the Arte Povera movement, which was thus named by the art critic Germano Celant in the second half of the nineteen sixties. Zorio’s first solo exhibition dates back to 1963, when he was twenty-one years old, and he soon found an artistic vocabulary of his own and which has accompanied him regularly and consistently until today.

Zorio’s territory is that of transformation par excellence: of chemical and alchemical processes, of the transference of energy and of the dangers of the process, of a cosmic perception of the world that makes up the elements of the journey, of movement and of animal nature.

Stars, spears, acids, canoes and animal hides. These are the most recurrent physical elements in his work, to which Zorio often adds matches and intermittent light. The consequence of this action almost always results in na experience that is simultaneously emotional and sensorial, between what is invisible before the process of energy transfer and the instant and fleeting visibility of the phenomenon that comes afterwards.

In a recent interview he stated “(…) Before being a symbol and representation, the global star is a universal image and source of energy. It has different meanings according to the cultures: the star of Christianity, the star of Islam, that of the soviet republics… It is a universal image because it responds to a desire that humanity has, that men have: when men understand they cannot touch a star with their hands, they invent its representation, drawing it. We see man’s own image in the way that each man thinks of it and draws it. It is the idea of exodus, of a journey, and at the same time it is energy. So I always come back to the star (…) ”

In 1976 Gilberto Zorio created his first Torre Stella in a public garden in the city of Brescia. Since then he has been remaking his Torre Stella, always starting from the initial idea, but presenting it in different places and in new versions, in a permanent dialogue of transformation and physical tension with the architecture he encounters in each place.

For this present exhibition he has once again remade his Torre Stella, accompanying it with other recent works and with a Marrano che Gira, from 1998.