Ignazio Fresu explains himself

These works have been created using waste products such as pieces of old metal, polystyrene and packaging collected from bins, dumps and scrap metal yards. What has been thrown away is a testimony of our loss of steadfastness, scraps from our ephemeral desires and consumer waste, transformed into semblance or mimesis whose transitoriness is shown by their suspension between appearing and disappearing.

These objects represent the process through which beauty is revealed, the world of appearance and impermanency. A world in which reality is shown daily, suspended between birth and death, thereby constituting a space for a possible experience of being. Through its fragility, precariousness and perishability, in my work I seek the intrinsic beauty which permeates transitoriness, thereby recognising its aesthetic value.

By using openly vulnerable materials and through the medium of oxidisation, rusting, opaqueness, fading, cracking, staining, buckling, shrinking, withering, splitting, moulding, scratching, splintering, denting, cutting, chipping, peeling and other forms of deterioration through which objects are tired and worn out, dehydrated and about to crumble, I am returning to authentic values, in open contrast with the varnished or plastic-coated world around us which is unable even to hypothesise that all things are temporary or that the tendency towards nothingness is relentless and universal.

We do not know if this is a process of evolution or of regression from or towards nothingness. Nor do we know if nothingness is an empty space or a place of infinite possibility. This is probably not important. The important thing is to be there to capture the beauty of the dynamic event which is able to convert one’s state of awareness into pure poetry.