Who - Isacco Macalli

Born in February 1975 in the province of Bergamo, Isacco Macalli always shown a propensity for painting and material composition. He has cultivated an interest in creativity and in the world of art during the high school and also during the college years.

Due to the recent economic and financial crisis that affected also the labour market, he decided to cultivate “his nature”. At first he started painting t-shirts, creating his own clothing brand and finally he decided to deal with the artistic creation. He combines different painting techniques with recycled material such as plates, pieces of metal, scraps. This is how come to life these contemporary works that evoke metropolitan and industrial memories, imbued with emotional echoes and a naturalistic touch.

His natural predisposition for manual work and repairs, makes possible the enhancement of scraps. This makes exciting working the metals, mould resin, clean, smooth and finish off the wood, a material that attracts the artist and gives him a feeling of naturalness, simplicity, tranquility and family warmth.

From this starting point both physical and mental, the artist develops the new, not to distort the natural order but to enhance it without forcing; the colour is involved in the experimentation while wood, copper, alluminium, steel, resins are combined and connected to each other thanks to painting, carpentry and mechanical techniques.

The result moves spontaneously to the sculpture, in a sort of "pitto-scultura”, suitable to cover the artistic fields, as well as the other connected fields, such as the decoration, the interior and exterior decor.
In the spaces are installed works of art pleasing to the eye, apart from the interpretation and the meaning of the creations, according with the idea of the artist:
“I love the colour, I love the cleanliness of the style; I love the order, but I love asymmetries able to prevent obviousness and monotony."

"Recovery. The artistic path of Isacco Macalli is based on this principle. The young sculptor from Bergamo concentrated the last years of his research on the rethinking of objects extrapolated from his original environment; through a change of perspective, these elements are re-proposed in different contexts and forms thus giving life to the sculptural works of Macalli.

Macalli's work is already born during the research of materials, which often takes place in abandoned factories, in quarries or in any case where it is possible to find tools abandoned after wear. Elements of industrial waste are thus collected, cleaned up and re-weighted; filtered through the author's gaze, these abandoned and seemingly useless tools become works of art. This is evident in the Metropolis, where cut bases recovered in a quarry are rethought as monolithic pitto-sculptures.

In addition to the principle of recovery, another decisive element emerges in Macalli's works: the dimension of interactivity that the works have with the subject that uses them. The light graft that often characterizes the sculptures allows the viewer to interact with them, constructing his own personal sculpture, modifying its lights and thus developing innumerable and changing forms.

It is precisely this capacity of the work to change at the changing of the eye that look at it that makes the sculpture of Macalli precious and mysterious: not being able to know every form of what is presented to the eye, not being able to have a complete vision and at the same time as each facet of the work, the spectator is invited to look into it and reveal its subjective sense after it forms. "

di Enea Chersicola – curator of the project “Be Art Builder” 2015