Alberico Verzoletto’s interest in sculpture began even before painting: not even of age – in the first half of the 1950s – the artist approached the technique of wood carving, his first artistic test. His figures have the fragile hieratic nature of the Etruscan Lares, but a double personal register soon manifested itself: on the one hand, an intimate existentialism with heartfelt tones, embodied by men and women suspended in an atmosphere of restless uncertainty. On the other, the artist’s vivid imagination ignited in a gallery of surreal and magical characters, demon-men similar to snakes or imaginary and bizarre animal creatures. Verzoletto returned to wood carving even in his mature years, alternating it with works in terracotta: one can perceive the tactile taste for formal smoothness and a plastic research that is expressed through soft, wide and sinuous lines. Even the subjects became more ethereal, almost an expression of universal ideas. Neither an exercise nor a simple divertissement, these works help us understand the vastness and depth of the author’s artistic inspiration, unequivocally defining the depth of an authentic protagonist of the second half of the Italian twentieth century.

Gian Piero Rabuffi