Francesco Zavattari begins exploring new horizons in his latest project entitled (Mind)blowing, a series of sculptures that are a conceptual continuation of the road that the artist has been travelling along for several years. With the installation Poliedro (Polyhedron), the artist first theorized and then showed the geometric figure as the fulcrum of three-dimensional interaction that unravels into space: countless threads tie the artist to his piece of art, the piece to its setting, and the setting to the public that interacts with the piece.

Through numerous declinations of size and materials, (Mind)blowing proposes both an intellectual and a tangible advancement of the above: the artist investigates and then exhibits the physical representation of his creative force, producing a (controlled) explosive web of lines and segments. The piece, therefore, comes vibrantly to life and, like a fire, lights up when the artist first “blows” on it and continues to “flame” as its viewing public “blows” on it as well. The incisiveness of the composition is even more meaningful thanks to Zavattari’s use of strong colours. These have been developed thanks to the incessant technical research of the projects Invelight and Colour State of Mind. Everything then is bound together by the mathematics amply dealt with in the series Isomorphic Conjectures of 2017.

In Poliedro (Polyhedron), Francesco favours creating a strong impact within the space by taking inspiration from the construction of a spider’s web working his way down from the top. In the Figures of (Mind)blowing, he concentrates, instead, on the rapport with land. He begins by developing the bottom of each piece as if to duplicate the natural growth of a tree, mirroring a shared exterior nature and projecting the more personal synaptic processes.

Each Figure is designed for large public places, company or privately-owned, squares, gardens, roundabouts, or reception halls. The piece then takes on the most appropriate conceptual and physical appearance in function of its location. In so doing, the inner solitary process of composition is offered to a vast group of people from all walks of life to the fullest of its communicative power; a magnified fragment shown in “slow-motion”, never static, able to give off “a light 'brighter than a thousand suns' and boost the strength of this light each day. An encounter between the forces of darkness and light, and above all, the display of the consequences arising from this encounter”, as the artist himself states in the manifesto specially prepared for this series.

The impetus of expression is crystallized through lines and colours tempered by the material used, be it wood, steel, or aluminium, in the attempt to make the inner chaos, which the artist must dominate in the creative phase, appear intelligible to the public. At first, the design may seem to be a straight-forward, yet considerable, intervention for large, open and closed areas, but a closer inspection reveals a shape moving frenetically, only in part confined by the material lines perceived by the human eye.

The Portuguese museologist, Cláudia Almeida, who curates Francesco Zavattari’s artistic activity, has observed: “(Mind)blowing is the artist's plastic synthesis of intuition and intellect, two brain processes that give rise to creation. Without intuition, the intellect does not perceive the vision, does not infer the visual and emotive act, and does not question it. Without the intellect however, intuition is only a warning, unbridled emotion, chaotic, irregular. Capturing the precise processes of the creative act, materializing them in colour, assigning them a form and communicating them to the viewer is the genesis of this last work of art by the artist. The viewer sees the final step, but through the chain of forms and colour sequence Francesco guides him to the first blow”.

Text by Silvia Cosentino
Translation by Eleanor Pieruccini