‘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.’
--Mattia Bosco
Mattia Bosco sculpts less than he reveals. 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.
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.
Observing the stone then allows him to choose the lines on the surface in which to inscribe his gesture with rotating blades. The sculptor's intervention here is simple, circumscribed and limited, and aims to bring out and purify the form already present in the stone. He explains: "The sculptor's intervention is a collaboration, it supports the obvious possibilities and opportunities. [...] There is not man on one side and the world on the other, [...] the relationship between me as the sculptor and the material is a close encounter between two parts of the world that collaborate in a play of forces."
