He immaginary extension of the work  Giuseppe Biasutti

The work by Antonio Saporito is architecture, space dedicated to contemporary sculpture. Steel. Color. Shapes.

He tries to create in the interaction between diverse reflexive shapes, a sort of reciprocal tension and confrontation. Evidently apparent, the function of a real and just conceptual inventive, experimental laboratory addressed to constructing the public with a profound and global involvement. Sculptures of steel, shapes and color that are space, unique in their almost ecclesialistic dimension. They find a new identity according to where they are placed and how light and the reflection of who mirrors it changes. Precise cuts, lucid surfaces, a “container-contained” fact of expressive languages, emptiness and fullness, a theatre. All is research as a way of reacting and thinking, as a strong visionary instance accompanied with a realizing capacity: A project that will sign the future.

Every work is born in the lap of art, from an artistic journey that takes foot from the figurative; these are Saporito’s roots, for arriving to a language that is harmonious, a complex system, where elements of the highest precision derive from a demonstrated tension never abandoned and revealed fidelity to painting and design.

What could induce Saporito to trace on canvas just features in great details? Where does he find, if not in secret exercise a detailed fidelity to reality? Figurative perfection. His research in the value of light, of space and of volume is a profound necessity of his being, an attempt at tying aesthetics to the rhythm of technology. The artesianal expertise must assume a dignity and a coldness that cancels every recognizable individuality. The definition of a style can not coincide with instinct, it must participate to the technology and sensibility of objects as pure evolution.

A print. An strict poem made of perfect linear characters. In this way it is autobiographical of Antonio Saporito. A surface of steel and not just the design.

Geometry that becomes sentiment and myth. This dissolves in a visionary incarnation, a destructurasation and exhausting of painting.”Strutture geometriche” (Geometric structures), lines that flake and create space like a “flower” lacking in decorative elements, but capable of capturing light in physical imagery. But the subject of the work is always geometry made of order and regularity and also the place of small precisions and imperfections that are the sign of sentiment.

Sharp and shaky erect lines.The imaginativeness of Antonio Saporito is inhabited from a multishaped and plural universe. Mutable combinations that temporarily weld and then unravel to weld again more energetically. Lines, intertwining destinies: essentiality and cleanliness of languages put to work. There is no placing of one on top of the other, mixing between the numerous languages that employ a separation, an alignment, a union by affinity, respecting each autonomy appropriately.Stainless steel becomes progressively the exclusive element of language, the referring protagonist of the body. The gesture is one of existential action, a concentration of energy.

How many gestures in art history: Arman when he breaks a musical instrument; then with Nam June Paik with his he is dedication to the same operation, and arriving then to the cuts by Fontana.

The being an artist of Antonio Saporito means transforming any kind of object into something magical, so all can become contaminated by a concrete poem, from picto-sculptural alliterations and anagrams.

Reasoning ordered from abstract shape Paolo Levi

As cubism has taught us, the painting is an object; and as such, immersed in undefined space. This consideration is pertinent in front of a composition from 2003 by Antonio Saporito. A geometric and aseptic work in steel, La Squadretta n.1, that with its serenity fascinates me. In this composite occasion, he avoids the easy use of a fixed module with variables. In this constructive and emblematic moment, he opts for a severe abstract rigor of a unique puzzle, from atonal geometric interruptions, in basic colors. Here, like in his other work, we are offered an image of a constructive and quiet painter, that creates aseptic fairy tales, like Nave Spaziale (Spaceship) from 2004, carried out with enamels and collages on aluminium. It seems therefore that in this work, which I prefer to define constructive ethics, he gave himself the task of eliminating the anguish and tragedy of life. Working in straight lines, semi-curves, signs and signals well inserted in the space of composition, the meaning is to appeal not to the stricken background of unconsciousness but to the beauty of the construction of reason. Saporito’s research exercises the economy of the very few elements that structurize the harmony of chromatic and aprospective cuts. Avoiding the snares and the errors of the increasing planes, he prefers to operate by subtraction, offering the essentiality of pure color. His creative journey is full of research and of recognition in the area of abstract geometry, where at times he inserts symbolic elements. And even so, in this variety of formal experience(where everything must be in order and in proper position) there is never a contradiction, since the artist, from time to time adds or lightens, according to each situation in its necessity tied to the controlled creative vehemence and renewing each time the invention of the constructed. His paintings do not push towards irrationality of sentiment, but towards the meditation of abstract geometry that finds expression in an unedited poetic artifice. In his collages of absolute elegance, we notice an assumption of a subjective responsibility towards painting as a message of possible and realizable utopia, that however in the experimentation as results in itself or as the concrete realization of a project that each time responds to a call of exposed clarity, or maybe still as a declaration to the world that nothing exists beyond the intricate coherence to the geometry of microsomes.

With Speciale geometrico, a steel and collage of 2004, elegant composition where the study of a slight light marries a tonal pureness of the semi-square shapes, it is presented to the eyes as a work that demonstrates how Saporito is tied more to tradition than one might believe. Indirectly, he demonstrates in fact that painting, in what emblematic and magnificence of signs and colors, cannot overpass the dominion of the visual and therefore its way of composing visible geometric formulas, pay homage to light, reaching the objective of fixing the value of perception as the unique and indisputable truth. Spirale in rame, an oil and aluminium work from 2004, is a visual experiment that opens and closes like a chorus of many voices. Here is a pictorial surface with collage that does not allude to a decodifiable phenomenonology. But if we can speak about phenomenons, in this as in Antonio Saporito’s other creative occasions, his construction must be accepted and even endured as an expression of a unique and definite narration. This is also the case of La Grande Piramide, geometric compostion of 2001: space is realized not just from a black star-filled background, but a conglomerate of geometric shapes arranged in ordinate diversity that do not wish to persuade but only demonstrate with their sole presence that beauty can be transmitted in the silent severity of rational reflections.

Inspired by the architecture of a clean world and completely purified from the psychological crevices tied to the anguished historical moment in which we are living in, he proposes an optimistic solution in a cosmic vision where nothing decomposes but only transmutes to shape a new order of re-found values on the balance of shapes and colors. Therefore, for him, painting is never the recital on the stage of ambiguously expressive artistic moments, but on the contrary, an action of depth of a continuous development towards a visual order to oppose the disorder of existential chaos. Antonio Saporito has a geometrical composite scheme of imaginative abstraction that does not seek to exalt metaphysical ecstatic beauty but only what and how much he can harmoniously receive on a surface plane. Asymmetry often has a poetic license that takes nothing away from optical balance. This is the case with Composizione geometrica, a stainless steel and acrylic work on aluminium from 2004: a game from the part of chromatic level where red-orange dominates in contraposition to black stained with marks of white light. Tending to a game of shadows and luminous flashes, where everything emerges and moves away, in this work the distribution of zones vary, the colors vary but also the planes, even if with barely visible modalities. I question whether a music critic would see the work of Antonio Saporito as a modern and atonal symphony, but in compositions of this nature, a particular harmony vibrates and a detachment to any kind of allusiveness to reality becomes the principle of recognition. The disposition of each shape is the result of a kind of wanted color composition where everything develops through lines, bodies, backgrounds of different solid colors that answer a precise rule of imagination. These are inventive canvases such as La Clessidra n.2, in steel and collage from 2003. Rational and asymmetrical that even seem to welcome the visual idea in a mechanism where everything is programmed in an optical game of opposing and converging direction or work of rhythmic slants as in Progetto Comunicativo of 2005, in steel without disorganized effusions or dissonant additions; the assonance is in fact the constant that multiplies in various solutions without ever repeating itself.

Antonio Saporito did not stop himself from the acquisitions of the first period of his activity. Anxious to know what items time proposes, he directed himself along a difficult journey of symbolic geometrical images without violating nature and discovering in each work new paths, new detours. For this artist, the likes of Paul Klee were spoken about, as were those of Bauhaus that are to my advice, the sole possible terms of confrontation for his research and obscure references to the fidelity of shape not only as free expression but also as the only salvation and possibility of autonomy in art. If the first remains like a reference point and model of figural abstract research where the ludicous marries fairy tale, the second part stabilizes the uncontrovertible fact that envisions the utopia of order as the only salvation against the violence and disorder of the modern world. Above all in his most recent work, a wanted estetic precision is apparent. I would almost say metaphysical of his formal prospectives. The geometrical plans, well circumstanced, have an almost frozen aspect, while visual structures are well-defined, not transitory, not ephemeral. Solitary artist, Antonio Saporito is of singular creativity, outstretched between painting of sign and color and the interrogation of our contemporariness. Because of his total freedom from every narrow and pre-ordinate formal scheme, he develops his action of an artist in search of the utopic and constructive, in the area of not easily decodifiable in abstraction. His images present a virtue tied to the severity it brings, like obeying an interior necessity, composing each chromatic wedge in an always perfect pre-ordinate square, where every shape is placed in the right position without force and with a sort of unconscious naturalness (Scultura metallica, work of metal and engraved glass of 2002).

I would like to conclude my text with the words that Jean Metzinger had dedicated to Picasso: it is useless to paint where it is possible to describe. Because Antonio Saporito cuts, glues and paints only what can be described, however is found beyond thought.

Keeping solid to that conviction, he reveals the sole possible vocation of art, that is the evoking of the unspeakable, capturing and returning to the eyes the order of reason through the instantaneousness of imagination, refusing every anecdotal intention that in fact pertains only to words.

Sign and shape Angelo Mistrangelo

More than forty years of activity characterize the aspects of Antonio Saporito’s experience, the moments of research that always tend more towards formal simplicity, the internal motives are tied to his vision of reality translated in “representations swinging from figure to non-figure”, as Rolando Bellini wrote.

In particular, we notice in this artist’s work, a continuous and non-exhausting meditated capacity of delining a refiguration in which the geometry of composition, the ascension of chromatic data and iron flow of the line concur to define a contradistinctive painting from a severe “repertoire of signs and colors…” (Giuseppe Biasutti)

A journey, his, marked by a progressive commitment in the area of elaboration that in time reached an affinity in personal “space”. Self-taught, Antonio Saporito has successfully followed the courses held by Enzo Colucci, Romano Campagnoli, Giogio Ramella and Giacomo Soffiantino. A formation therefore that has contributed in a determinate way to the development of a discussion never discounted but articulated from an extremely sharp expressive measure, evident in the “Sculture geometriche” (Geometric sculptures) in wrought stainless steel.

In these works, an alternating of emptiness and fullness on clear surfaces is recognizable, where raremade, irradescent, precious colors(in the gamma of greens and reds), underline the pureness of tri-dimensional structure until achieving a personal abstractness. In every work done by Saporito, even in those closest to an essential and synthetic figuration, it is a conception of the shapes that depart from the interior knowledge of transmitting the daily sensations in a sort of re-visitation of exact human dimensions and existence.

The use of stainless steel permits him to elaborate a limpid rational dictation of fixing emotions and suggestions of recuperating the value of a sign that becomes a sequence of squares, circles and rectangles while space seems to dilate at contact with atmospheric light.

The profile of urban architecture, the dynamics of certain images, the curvature of composite lines sanction the character of Saporito’s work that has received positive answers on occasions of the presence at “Artissima”, at “La Meridiana” gallery of Piacenza, at “Agoar” of Ivrea and at the precedent exhibition prepared by Luciano Petruso in the halls of “Arteincornice”. In these same locations he now returns with new work and the unchanged rhythm of a very pure language. A language born from a very precise projection, from an incisive and penetrating “scripture” and from an expression held within a boundary determinating mental rationality.

Images and abstracts, signs and surfaces, colors and silence, for an artistic season in secure evolution.