Sofferto riposo (Suffering Rest)

Life is made of action and rest. Every sculpture is action — or rather, the subtraction of matter from matter. Max Solinas’ work is also rest, through the meaning entrusted to the stone. 

Is it the imagined rest of matter before it welcomes any transformation? Or the rest of imagination before the creative idea strikes the artist and guides his will? “Matter receives from our dreams an entire future of work,” writes Gaston Bachelard in Earth and the Reveries of Will. In any case, as the perfect moment preceding every fragile action, rest is an invisible red thread linking past and future, gestation and creation, non-being and becoming. 

Intimacy, silence, listening, participation, protection: the interpretative keys multiply and never exhaust themselves, testifying to the richness of an open work, waiting without prejudice for ever-new eyes. 

The figure represented — a female body lying in a fetal position — conveys both tenderness and vitality. The pose is balanced by the strength of the incised lines, carved into the stone as if they were construction marks of a drawing. 

The Verzegnis Red marble lends the figure the dramatic intensity of suffering. Placed upon a pedestal of Piasentina and Aurisina stone, which elevates it with elegant interplay of lines and colours, the work gains further meaning: the one who rests does not receive only the support of the earth, but also the protection of the sky. 

It is to that space between the two elements — earth and air — that the artist entrusts his silent message of compassion.

— Francesca De Filippo

Max Solinas was born in Venice. His curiosity led him toward sculpture, the art of living, and nature in all its intimate facets. He first attended the atelier of a renowned sculptor and later enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts. 

Author of two books, In Silence Among the Trees and The Order of the She-Wolf, he lives and works in his atelier in Cison di Valmarino (Treviso), at the foothills of the Dolomites. 

His sculpture is “powerful,” in constant dialogue with the attentive visitor, because, as he says, “art must communicate and make us communicate.”