A poet, a philosopher of space, has been said. A blacksmith, a craftsman who does his job well, as he liked to qualify himself. Marino di Teana is undoubtedly all that, but above all he is an immense artist, whose theoretical and formal research will have marked the twentieth century.
Five years after his disappearance, his work has lost none of its originality. It continues to amaze us and to move us.
"Me, I want to tear out forms and give them to others," he said, the humility of the man joining the pride of the creator here.
With him, sculpture becomes architecture, steel gives life to space, matter becomes spirit and the work of art a mystical impulse. From smaller to more monumental sculptures, emanates a harmony, the very one that fascinated him so much in Cistercian architecture. Austerity is imperious. The sobriety of the forms, the purity of the lines, are married in a geometrical order, leaving the light to animate the spaces.
"In all creation, nothing must hinder the mystical impulse, I want a total retreat so that God is present."
Steel, the coldest of materials, is humanized to give life to space, to a "living space" according to its terms, which participates in composition and balances the whole. And this is the singularity of the artist, the tri-unit logic according to which space counts as much as the masses that surround it. During his lifetime, Marino di Teana dreamed of uniting sculpture and architecture, which for him are only one and the same set of forms. Removing any utopia, he will realize many models of edifices or imaginary cities.
Some of the artist's comments collected by the art historian Marc Gaillard, included in this catalog, illuminate the spirit of the works presented in this exhibition. About twenty paintings and monumental sculptures that Sisteron is honored to welcome in his Citadel, works in perfect communion with the hieratic and the beauty of the monument.
Édith Robert President of Arts, Theater, Monuments.
Director of the Nuits de la Citadelle & organizer of the Sisteron festival