After the success at the Mart in Rovereto, “The Cry and the Song” arrives at the Museo Le Carceri in Asiago, but here, in the city birthplace of Paganini, it finds a different resonance.
For Giovanni Paganin (Asiago, 1913 - Milan, 1997) the body is the territory of a solitary war: every figure emerges from the material like a petrified cry, which concedes nothing to the decorative but everything to the necessary. The flesh becomes a simulacrum: not representation, but presence. A plunge into the pain of living that the rigorous nudity places outside any historical time.
Ilario Fioravanti (Cesena, 1922 - Savignano sul Rubicone, 2012) chooses the opposite path: the body as the stage of history, theater of the small and great human contradictions. His figures wear masks that do not hide, but reveal: irony becomes a tool of knowledge, never of escape.
Both artists believe that sculpting still means giving shape to the body. But which body? The absolute body of Paganin or the historicized one of Fioravanti? The body that escapes time or the one that traverses it? There is no unequivocal answer, only the urgency to continue seeking.
