Francesco Arena

Prats Nogueras Blanchard is delighted to present L’Âge d’airain [The Age of Bronze] by Francesco Arena (1978, Torre Santa Susanna, Italy), the artist’s fourth exhibition at the gallery.

Originally used to make weapons and tools, bronze has been a symbol of human resilience for over 5,000 years. It would soon become the material for creating statues: objects designed to contain and preserve human identity, but which often took on a life of their own, detached from their original subjects. L’Âge d’airain references the iconic work by Rodin while reflecting on the role of statues and sculpture as mediums of representation and memory, of time and transformation.

At the heart of Francesco Arena’s practice lies his approach to the notion of temporality, an opening up of the concept of History, by revealing irruptions in the course of events he questions a linear development marked by causes and effects. The historical and the personal constantly intersect in the artist's work, as he chooses to address and represent historical events from a factual relationship with himself.
Arena’s recurrent use of anthropometric data—such as his weight, body mass, height, the distance he reaches on tiptoe or the distance from the ground to his eyes- emphasizes a number of crucial aspects in his work: the relationship of history to the individual; the relationship between the human body and its environment; the use of data as irrefutable evidence of existence.

In L’Âge d’airain, Arena brings together a series of works that question the essence of the statue and function as a kind of self-portrait—Statua (... as head), Statua (... as heart), and Statua (... as balls)—consisting of three bronze pedestals of different heights— corresponding to the artist’s head, heart and gonads—upon which visitors can place an object of their choice. The title of the piece changes each time the object is replaced by another, thus serving as a flexible pedestal, offering a new perspective on the use of the object and its symbolic and material significance. The pedestals, cast in bronze and painted white, appear to be made of wood, symbolizing permanence despite their fragile appearance.

The use of units of measurement as testimony to a quantifiable history allows the artist to address and revisit facts of the past, historical references that “grasp a truth that, starting from the fact in question, becomes a tool for looking at everything else.” The convergence in the present of two situations or objects distant in time and space can be found in the work Marcel, which consists of six bronze commemorative plaques that replicate those marking Marcel Proust’s residences in Paris, Illiers-Combray, and Orleans. These elements narrate Proust's biography in stages, reflecting the chronology and places in which he lived. When assembled in the gallery, they lose their original context and become displaced objects, changing in meaning, exploring ideas of memory, authenticity, and place, presenting Proust’s life as a unified narrative within a single space.