F A D I N G
S p h e r a 9 . 0 _ S p h e r a 7 . 0

__ installation _ Gaeta _ 2022

By accessing the hangar where the mass of Simone Lingua’s work, Sfera 9.0, is in progress, I find myself for the first time in front of the materialization of an installation studied on drawings and renderings, as well as imagined for a long time through the words of the artist. A sphere of 90 cm in diameter, made up of 26 steel sheets, floats in front of my eyes, suspended between mimesis of the real and the illusory gradual cancellation of its own entity.

The Sphera 9.0 and 7.0 originate from this assumption, works created for the city of Gaeta and more particularly for the fountains located near the promenade that runs along the beach of Serapo. Gaeta is a place that belongs to Lingua’s recent biography: the artist was born in Cuneo in 1981 and from the late nineties he chose Tuscany as his residence. However, he does not like to stay in the same place for a long time, perhaps aware that his creative vision is strongly nourished by dynamism. An unstoppable journey, mental as well as physical, which finds translation on a creative level in infinite variations of shapes and volumes.
The Riviera of Ulysses is a land embraced by water and permeated by a magical, dusty and vibrant light: a reality that has fascinated Lingua over the years. And it is precisely inherent to nature and its declinations, the presupposition from which this creation moves. Nature understood as a generating and propulsive force, capable of animating these sculptural installations: site-specific, aniconic and abstract-geometric, kinetic and optical works, designed and created to establish an open dialogue with the environment, assumed, at the same of the concerning, an intimate and constitutive component of the work. A dynamic in which the installation intervention transforms the inhabited space into a perceptive key and the latter, together with its actors, penetrates the artistic dimension, generating a flow of cross fades between the sphere of life and that of art.

The fulcrum of the installation is a sphere constructed through the geometric intersection of planes: a creation which, if ascribed to the artist’s corpus, constitutes the soul of his most important kinetic idea, the Cube (2016), and at the same time represents an already extrapolated in the field of jewelry design (Klinve, The Soul, 2019). The two steel spheres, respectively 90 and 70 cm in diameter, follow an arrangement as the crow flies which – as SL points out to me – draws an ideal connection between two points placed on parallel lines. The same volumes rise on domes that are not immediately visible as they are hidden by the water; the latter flows from a gap between the two concavities, to pour into the underlying circular tanks, whose internal surface is wrapped in a dark gray paint. A detail that is anything but marginal, but pertains to the search for an enhanced rendering of reflection and illusory projection of the work. With this work, for the first time, SL translates the concept that most marked his research, that is the fading of matter and forms in space, modulating it on a material characteristic of his production, but new for this application: the SuperMirror steel. This special alloy represents very well the union between aesthetics and ethics: shiny, precious, refined and at the same time resistant, durable, incorruptible. For the aforementioned reasons, the creative in the past has often chosen SuperMirror steel, which in this circumstance finds a new conjugation, binding to a principle that has until now been experienced only on plexiglass.

Also written in the same technical name of the material is a reference to a key object to understand the visions carried out by the artist in recent years: the mirror. Intended as a place of refraction of the world and, in parallel, of overcoming concrete and tangible reality – be it represented by a monument (Contemporary Illusions, 2018-2020) or by a dome inhabited by a blown glass icosahedron (Sotiria, 2021) – the mirror thus ends up going through continuous mutations, coming to cancel itself out and merge with the context.
Beyond the mirror, the water. An element often included in Lingua’s scenic machines – now as a permeable carpet (Ninfea, Bagno Vignoni, 2018), now as a formal and empathic continuum (The Bridge, 2018), now as a double specular and fluid (The Hole, 2019) – the water, for its intrinsic peculiarities, as well as for the symbolism, comes to represent an ideal harmonic complement, first through mental images and then on paper.

However, in this research, made up of analysis and technique, between studies, experiments, materials and mechanical and industrial tools, it is always the human factor beginning and end of the creative process: it is the observer who moves everything, from what concerns the genesis and evolution of the work up to its fruition. Not only does the viewer give life to the works through his own movement, but it is the awareness and analysis on an optical, perceptual and emotional level of the potential audience that triggers, determines and defines the conception and construction of the work.
In truth the artist does not limit himself to showing the relativity of the boundaries between reality and illusion, but suggests, exhorts and invites, in this time more than in the past, not to stop at what is shown to us, at what we see, but to observe the life in which we are immersed through filters that allow its objective interpretation, by overcoming pre-established and introjected superstructures in the course of existence.

Tiziana Tommei

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Simone Lingua, Sfera 9.0, 2022, SuperMirror Steel, diam. 90 cm

Simone Lingua, Sfera 7.0, 2022, SuperMirror Steel, diam. 70 cm

Permanent installation for the city of Gaeta.