From the separateness of the Shoah to unity among human beings. A unity that may be rediscovered through a “culture of peace”, tending toward recomposition and harmony.

This is the meaning of this maquette for a sculpture intended to make visible how memory, necessary and dutiful, must move beyond mere narration, sublimating itself in the courageous attempt to free itself from the forms of selfishness inherent in humankind, in order to strive toward tolerance of the other.

Prometheus, in the apotheosis of the one who commits the sacrilegious theft of fire in order to give it to humankind, but also in his titanic chaining to the rock of the Caucasus, is a recurring theme in the sculpture of Roberto Tagliazucchi.

Yet beyond the semantic and symbolic complex carried by this mythological figure, and beyond the archetype in which the human and the divine tend, reciprocally, to recompose and interpenetrate one another — finitude and infinity, matter and spirit, destruction and reconstruction — within a common destiny, that of eternal transformation in pursuit of “harmony”, the perfect form, sculpture becomes the privileged metaphor through which to receive and “signify” the myth of Prometheus.

The artist, then, within his own individual myth, is the one who gives “light” and “liberates” the forms enclosed, chained, within matter: forms that his intuition had already imagined and captured.

But all this would remain dream, delirium and poetic fable if artistry and mastery did not allow such a “revelation” to take place. Roberto Tagliazucchi’s Prometheus, with the complicity of light that defines and dynamizes the form, and with the intersecting planes and spiral lines of flight that help to characterize the surrounding space, is a successful synthesis of the metaphysical tension of humankind.

Art Critic Giovanna Riu