Mattia Bosco

Biography

‘I don't sculpt stone to impose a shape on it. I touch it, I listen to it, and I simply try to bring out what it already carries within itself in silence. My gesture is but a breath in the long life of the material.’

Born in Milan in 1976, he studied philosophy before devoting himself entirely to sculpture. He approaches the material not as a medium to be shaped according to a preconceived idea, but as a living, autonomous entity with which he enters into dialogue. For him, stone is never neutral. It is already inhabited, imbued with history, geological memory and silent energy.

Bosco approaches each block as a world unto itself. He chooses his materials for their singularities: a crack, a hue, a particular density. The stone—Carrara marble, granite, serpentine, porphyry, basalt—carries within it a geological memory, an almost cosmic duration. Contrary to an extractive or decorative vision, he treats the material with an almost sacred respect, as an organism endowed with memory, language, and its own breath.

His practice is based on a deep respect for the material, patiently listening to what it carries within it. Unlike the classical approach to sculpture, which imposes a form on the material, Mattia Bosco adapts to what he discovers, guided by the veins, breaks and irregularities of the raw stone. He likes to say that he does not sculpt stone, but with it.

Mattia Bosco's work begins in marble quarries, where he searches among the fragments left over from extraction for stones to use in his sculptures. This first stage of the work, which is very important, is a real audition: the artist “listens” to the stones and chooses those in which he sees potential, often associated with a fascinating complexity of surface. By selecting them, he changes their destiny and brings them out of anonymity to turn them into unique works of art. Once chosen, he begins the sculptural work by cutting the base of the stones in order to change their position from horizontal to vertical. The stone sculpture, although abstract, is thus substantially anthropomorphised.

Works