Dear Friends,

I turned 30 last month and marked it with a trip to Venice with my mom, for the Biennale.

One exhibit I was genuinely excited for was Call Me The Breeze Alma Allen's presentation for the American pavilion, large scale carved stone and cast bronze sculptures, intuitive and playful organic forms deeply connected to ideas of deep time. The Biennale was ripe with controversy this year, and the American pavilion had its own share of drama. New Trump administration restrictions on the selection process led to resignations and other artists passing on the commission before it reached Allen, (reportedly the fourth or fifth choice) who then lost gallery representation just for taking part.

Once the show opened the reviews were brutal too, one calling it a pavilion that "says nothing, does nothing, means nothing, and goes nowhere," which I think says more about our need for obvious, loud statements that mimic our polarized society than about the work itself. I found the sculptures to be much like the artist, quiet and thought provoking, outside the canon, with a sense of humor but also a primordial perspective that looks beyond the chaos of this current moment. There's an interesting interview with Alma Allen on the Time Sensitive podcast that I recommend tuning into. His story, running away from a religious family in Utah, surviving homelessness, becoming an artist, is captivating and very distinctly American in a Jack Kerouac way.

The main Biennale exhibition, In Minor Keys, curated by the late Koyo Kouoh, was also a highlight for me, along with the incredible bronze sculpture in the Nordic pavilion, from Klara Kristalova, Benjamin Orlow and Tori Wrånes, and the French pavilion, where Yto Barrada's Comme Saturne created a world of its own, layered with emotion and intellectual meaning.

All of these wonderful exhibitions reminded me of something Arthur Jafa talks about, to present not represent. To present something is to show as is, while to represent involves layers of translation and interpretation. I've been thinking about that a lot lately, especially in terms of the role of beauty in art and in our daily lives and built environment. Growing up in Rome and living across Europe, I got used to beauty just being in front of me everywhere, ruins, painted colors, small hand crafted details of thoughtfulness tucked into nooks and crannies.

Now that I live primarily in New York, I don’t experience that same kind of casual slow beauty, beauty that isn't carefully curated or trying to sell you anything, just quietly existing on the street. That kind of publicly accessible beauty largely left our built environments once mass production replaced handcrafted detail, and modernist design chose strict utility, form follows function, over ornament. I think the art I saw and resonated deeply with at the Biennale presented crafted research and narrative through beauty and material prowess, this is something I'm learning how to focus on in my practice using Deep Time as my anchoring thread.

Above are images of a sculpture I recently installed in a client's home, based on the mountains I watch out the airplane window flying between Rome and New York. I love that perspective, being above the mountains, just the tips poking through the clouds, rendered so small and hard to conceive. Playing with scale is something I keep coming back to, and Deep Time is the ultimate scale, beyond human comprehension, something you can only really approach by imagining it.

A sculpture starts in my mind the moment I look at a block of marble that took a hundred million years to form, far beyond the scale of human experience, a sentiment I love to think about and transfer into the work but that's hard to nail down. What I'm trying to do is pair raw, uncarved stone against carved organic forms, shapes that read like shells and mountain tops, the biggest and smallest things the earth makes with the same slow intention but reimagined through my hands.

Doing this work and then living in fast, action packed New York has been great and funny contrast to experience. I'm back in my studio now, with five blocks of marble shipped over from Carrara. All of this has been simmering while the studio is coming together and to celebrate I'm hosting a studio warming party next Saturday, the 25th. If you're in NYC, please join us!

I'm very excited that I have a number of new sculptures nearing completion some available for purchase that I will be sharing with you soon.

More on that to come

Best,

Isotta