Fernando Izzi - The iron

Fernando Izzi was born in Torella del Sannio in 1957.

From when he was a child he manifested a visible attitude to a manual ability, which is expressed in the fabrication of objects and primary rudimental utensils. A turbulent and passionate temperament, after brief experiences settles him onto his authentic passion: the working of wrought iron.

Fernando Izzi succeeds with apparent skill to mediate the working need with an artistic expression; even his routine work often reveals a hidden tension towards more agile fantasies.

In his workshop he constructs the crib in corrugated iron, admirable example of "poor" art; which is a mystical representation of medieaval inspiration which is exhibited, after its inauguration in Torella, in the Fortresses from Basso to Florence to the International exhibition of handycraft.

After a month or so the line of sculptured objects comes to light in which the artist shows in metaphores the relationship between fire and substance: and between fire and substance, dubious and painfull there is man, caught in the act of protecting the flame, to accompany it, to coax it and limit its destructive power.

The sculptures express a sort of "suffering of doing," it is archaic simply because it is profoundly natural nostalgic and dialectical to a time and a glance of the past. In this way Fernando Izzi finds itself as in a spiral where present and future compenetrate to the antique and noble art of forging where the fantasy of man, along history has always attributed dark simbolic fascinations.

It comes spontaneous therefore to associate the sculptures to the stone figure of the handymen of the gothic cathedrals so much loved by Proust: "small inoffensive rescuscitated figures against any hope, from the death which seems more total than any other, which is the disappearance into the infinite of number": taken away from oblio only because of art.

The tradition and the work which transform art through enthusiasm and memory, the everyday and the dreams, are the essence of a civilization. It is in this sense that volume is a monitor to not forget and an example to follow to give back to our Molise the dignity of its origins, which risks falling to pieces forever.

Angela Piscitelli