di Dafne Crocella

Claudio Sapienza is a visual artist and professor of graphic design, painting, and scenography. Trained at the Art Institute and the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania, with Erasmus experience in Spain and further master’s degrees in visual arts and art history, he develops a language inspired by Land Art and Cosmo Art. His work includes painting, drawing, assemblages, and site-specific projects. Active in solo and group exhibitions, he collaborates with galleries and curators and has received international awards and recognition.

The audience of the XII edition of the COMEL Award particularly appreciated your work Pagine di Esistenza, so much so that you reached the top of the voting and won the Audience Award. Did you expect this recognition? What do you think your work conveys to those who appreciate it most?

When I work intensely and passionately on a project, a piece, or a competition, my main goal is coherence between theme, inspiration, language, and execution. What matters to me is communicating my thought and vision authentically. Afterwards, I wait to see whether that commitment, passion, and search for coherence between thought and action find acceptance, understanding, and why not! appreciation from others. I cannot hide my pride and satisfaction at being at the top of the voting list for this XII edition of the COMEL Award. For me, it was by no means a foregone conclusion.

The work represents a large book in metal. Have you already worked with this subject? What does the book represent for you?

The idea of working on a book in an artistic and unconventional way appeals to me greatly. For some time, I have created works in the form of the artist’s book. The book, as an object and as a representation, can embody the idea of narration, communication, and transformation of even very intimate thought into a universal linguistic code, able to travel through time and space. It already carries within itself a strong evocative power, and these aspects fascinate and interest me deeply.

Nuvole di terra

Literary references often appear in your works. What relationship do you have with the written text, and which authors do you most often refer to?

For personal reasons, but also through my education and studies, I have always engaged with readings, texts, and cultural and literary explorations of various kinds, favoring essays and poetry. These offer me opportunities for research, reflection, and artistic reworking. My first solo exhibition in 2005 was born from the idea of presenting a pictorial reworking of some twentieth-century poetic texts, from Ungaretti to Neruda, from D’Annunzio to Jiménez. Since then, poetry has continued to nourish and stimulate my visual imagination. A literary work that has recently been a strong source of inspiration for me is The Prophet by Gibran. In addition, the writings of Antonio Mercurio, such as Hypothesis on Ulysses or Rules of Night Navigation, are for me an inexhaustible source of artistic and existential stimulation.

The XII edition of the COMEL Award asked artists to work on the theme of strength, understood as the element that allows us to remain whole while enduring the many hardships life sometimes places before us. How do you feel your work responded to this theme? And what value do you give to the concept of strength in your work?

I presented this work dedicating it to Man, who lives and transforms his personal struggles by creating beauty, and to Humanity, which learns to resist the brutality of conflicts, rising again, transforming, and building a new civilization. It is this kind of strength, profoundly regenerative, that I wanted to reference with my work. The aluminium pages of the large book support themselves, as if they had their own strength. From their metallic surface, covered with volcanic ash and marked by lived experience—like the skin of a soul that has faced deep struggles, deaths, and rebirths—emerge traces of new life in the form of leaves, composing an organic constellation full of new energy and beauty. I believe that Life constantly invites Man to be the artist of his own existence in a cosmic dimension of which he is an integral part. Art, in my view, is its most intense and enduring metaphor.

Dalla cenere

In Pagine di Esistenza there are graphic signs that express the idea of handwriting without being translatable into text. What value does handwritten text have for you? And what relationship exists in your work between manual impulse and mental concept?

The work bears traces of asemic writing, obtained through various stratifications and gestures: applications sometimes freer and more impulsive, sometimes more controlled and calibrated; incisions and scratches more rigid and marked, later replaced by abrasions and erasures, and then new applications of signs. All this produces what appears as a mute language but full of symbolic evocation of history, of a memory so layered and indecipherable yet still present and tangible. My mark, in this case, while personal, becomes “writing” and takes on the features of an ancient code of conservation and transmission of existential memories, so that they may continue to live through time.

The work is created on a large aluminium sheet. What relationship do you have with this material? Have you used it in other works? What do you consider its peculiarities that make it artistically interesting? Where does this material come from, and how do recovered materials enter your work and why?

The story behind the material used for Pagine di Esistenza is very special to me. I have used this metal occasionally, both for sculptural works in the past during my studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania, and more recently for some pictorial works. When I read the theme of this XII edition of the COMEL Award, I found it fascinating and stimulating, so I decided to experiment with something that could respond to the proposed content, highlighting the material, luminous, and pictorial qualities of aluminium. In its ductility and plasticity, I believe it truly has an intrinsic strength: adaptability, resistance, durability, while maintaining its light, as if it were an absolute and irreducible value.

Starting from these considerations, I sketched some ideas and then searched for the aluminium support that could best respond to my communicative intention. During my search, I found in a corner of a large company dealing with disposal and recovery of metals a sheet perfectly suited to my project. Surprisingly, this sheet had exactly the same proportions as the sketch I had made. It appeared folded like a large book, its surface marked by traces of a lived existence that had resisted time, external agents—physical, chemical, human, and atmospheric. Moreover, being folded twice, it offered the possibility of developing the idea of rebirth from within its pages.

This “discovery” further confirmed to me how in life encounters or opportunities that arise along our path must not only be seized but are often expressions of a connection that escapes rational decoding, yet can certainly be traced back to a subtle correspondence between phenomena and our deepest decisions in harmony with external events. For this reason, I enjoy using recovered elements, natural or otherwise, in my works. I see in them a natural expressiveness, a poetry difficult to achieve otherwise, from which I draw inspiration for creating works full of evocation.

Profondità del mare

Dal cratere

On the aluminium sheet you carried out mixed-media work using volcanic sands from Mount Etna. What importance does your land have in your expressive research, both materially and conceptually?

I live right at the foot of Mount Etna. This volcano is for me a constant source of inspiration, for its intense energy, the phenomena that characterize it, and the traces it leaves in the surrounding territory, the matter it frequently releases. The ash from its depths, the sand that defines the Etnean landscape, are for me plastic and pictorial matter, just like the blue of the sea surrounding my island or the yellow of the broom flowers that grow spontaneously on Etna’s slopes. Some elements of the nature and volcanic island territory in which I live have a very strong expressive value, which I choose to employ and highlight in my artistic research. Volcanic ash in particular condenses several natural elements: it is earth, but also fire, air, and water. It is a substance that, coming from the bowels of the earth, rises into the sky thousands of meters above ground, then falls back onto the land and sea, nourishing gardens and vineyards, orchards and seabeds, as well as my imagination and creativity.

Observing your works reveals particular attention to both material and conceptual aspects: from intuitions linked to literary texts or musical pieces, to references to Sicilian land, to careful research on materials, their history, origin, and capacity to transform. Who have been your masters? To which names of the past is your creative path connected?

For me, matter and concept have overlapping value. In an unceasing search for synthesis between the two, I carry out a linguistic experimentation that allows me to adopt multiple materials, techniques, and tools to make a thought or vision concrete. Just as a composer orchestrates his symphony by assigning each instrument its specific part, functional to the others, I like to think that in composing my works sounds and voices from various instruments may enter, finding in visual art a new placement, a new principle of meaning, fully consistent with my feeling and vision.

This linguistic heterogeneity corresponds to the diversity of masters and artistic and cultural references to which I am connected. From Leonardo to Klee, from Monet to Kiefer, from Turner to Penone, arriving at Land Art and Cosmo Art, I have always had a particular interest in all artistic expressions that in some way create an evocative atmosphere of the natural world, with its mystery, beauty, and its immanent and transcendent character. I am also strongly influenced by suggestions from the classical and contemporary musical world, as well as by poetry and philosophical thought that investigates the relationship between Man and Nature in its ontological and existential qualities.

Water Leaves

Next spring you will hold a solo exhibition at Spazio COMEL. Do you already have in mind some works you would like to exhibit, or a conceptual path you would like to present?

Yes, I am very grateful for this opportunity to present a personal exhibition project at Spazio COMEL. For this occasion, I already have a vision that is becoming a project, perfectly in line with the research I have been pursuing recently and with the experimentation and development of works in which the element of earth is fundamental, as a means of evoking content and a very profound emotional resonance.

Besides the solo exhibition at Spazio COMEL, do you have any other projects you can share with us?

I have other projects to which I am dedicating commitment and energy, in particular a solo exhibition at a public institution, a representative place of the culture of my city, Catania. In addition to this, there is also a monographic publication of my artistic journey so far, and participation in some international events and projects.