Monte Amiata, the project by Patrick Tuttofuoco and Andrea Sala for Massimo De Carlo VSpace, was born from a necessity for criticism and observation: how two artists, whose research is mostly related to materials, techniques, forms and the physical relationship between body and space, can approach an intangible environment that is everything but physical? How can you create a feeling of reality in a digital, impalpable context?
A crystal clear answer to this question came up when the two artists visited an iconic building in Milan, a place that tells of a city just about to cross the threshold of post-modernism in the 1970s: the Monte Amiata al Gallaratese housing complex, the result of the collaboration of two renown architects Carlo Aymonino and Aldo Rossi.
The artists, in a sunny afternoon in June, let themselves be guided by the game of layers, primary forms and most of all colours. The prevailing grey and white of the concrete function as the background where red and yellow hallways are inserted, defining, as if in a video game, the paths that intersect the entire structure. Colours play with light through the complex system of openings, balconies and overlapping planes, generating continuous chiaroscuro effects.
The combination of the experience of such a powerfully abstract space with the possibilities given by virtual technology has allowed Tuttofuoco and Sala to explore the relation between works of art, space and viewers in a new challenging way. Therefore the architectural study of the Monte Amiata site is not a simple scenographic device but the driver for a new experience made possible by the new technologies.
On the red walls the drawings on paper by Andrea Sala, the Balconies, are the representation of a time, of a moment, the expression of the necessity for a new point of view, an invitation to observe: what Sala discerns, even in this case, is not the real world but suggestions, imagined images, vaguely anthropomorphic and erotic.
Emerging from the yellow side, Patrick Tuttofuoco's marble and steel sculptures are shaped in forms borrowed from classical statuary: their intensity and expressive power are combined with the highly contemporary technological performance required to create them. Tuttofuoco's arms and hands arise from the same assumption that guided the virtual project of Monte Amiata: the desire to intercept a new language, acquire its rules in order to thoroughly investigate the evolutions of the most traditional human aspirations and the dynamics in relation to the rapid changes imposed by new technologies.