In the silent light of dawn, the image of a huge woman took shape. There was a moment of astonishment among the group of assistants. It was immediately clear that the cooler would not be able to contain her, and that she would have to be taken away immediately, somewhere else.
They carried her to the street next to the furnace and laid her on the pavement. It was just a moment, long enough to capture her in her temporary, fleeting existence. Then she disappeared. The large, solemn footprint of this creature of a few moments remained on the stones.
The group of men looked in amazement at the Master who, from the frenetic activity of a few moments earlier, had moved on to quietly observing the shadow on the stones, the bystanders, his own hands, with great and serene detachment. Almost like a parable.
Vistosi had always known this, ever since his teenage years when, in the furnace, a few hours before dawn, the fires were extinguished and the incandescent magma appeared in the wide-open kilns: perfect virtuality that had everything within it for every possible project and also the nothingness of its own negation.
Only an infinitesimal particle of time separates being from non-being, the apex of form as the beginning of life from its eternal extinction in the inertia of matter, enclosed in its own unbroken silence. It was a question of grasping that secret and elusive timing which, in taking the form of life, gave rise to a continuous and uninterrupted process that coincided perfectly with the actual times of execution.
The methods and techniques that Vistosi follows in his work have been described on other occasions: the use of drawing as an initial note, the use of models in different materials as a possible further approximation; but all this constitutes only an ante quem, at best ideological, which does little to aid the understanding of the finished work.
The actual process coincides with the orchestration of the timing of the intervention on the incandescent material, the decisions and gestures, which are verbal and factual acts of the Maestro and the group, in unison.
Brancusi, Arp and Viani are the three possible references for the basic linguistic choices that Vistosi made in the 1960s, but the quality of the material he works on determines him to find quick and highly personal solutions, with synoptic developments and sudden and unexpected results, always tending towards the definition of the plastic object as a luminous metaphor for other corresponding objects, which can be placed either before or after in the order of existence.
The colour of the material – the midnight black of the last season, the aqua green and sky blue of the previous ones; the light that skims and penetrates the surfaces; the interplay, calibrated through diamond-shaped interventions, of the interpenetration between the external and internal space of the work, are the hallmarks of an elegant complexity, of a unified multiplicity that makes each of these images a moment of tormented existential experience, relived each time in definitive terms.
Landscape and human body, primary object and animal coexist and define themselves from time to time by the prevalence of a connotation, like a sign that, in the turning of a mound, insistently indicates the presence of a human face high in the sky.
Few other sculptures of our historical season encapsulate such a complex destiny as those of Vistosi, expressed in terms of equal simplicity and immediacy.
Glass is simply the artist’s choice: nothing more and nothing different, influential in terms of the means, irrelevant in terms of the results. It could be another material and the underlying message would remain the same. Just as it has not changed due to the fact that Vistosi is left-handed and had to build all his tools ad hoc, and therefore also a suitable technique, to work glass with his left hand.
Giuseppe Mazzariol
Venice, August 1982