If we are able to look at the countless facets of Roberto Tagliazucchi's sculpture, as if hungry to store them in our visual memories, then perhaps we will begin to understand the intellectual keenness they vibrate, the culture of the human, the most daring yet balanced constructive determination which rules this sculptor's highly individual daring with his materials. Stefano Lanzardo hits the nail on the head in the introduction to his photographic exploration of Tagliazucchi's works, in which he likens his journey into the sculptor's world as a quest along a trail of emotions. True, they are emotions whose nature is undoubtedly earthly, springing from a handcraft whose sculptor involves us directly and tangibly in the values which he has instilled into his shapes with patience and love. Yet we can also define them dynamic emotions, in that the artist does not surrender to the difficulties of a material which becomes the object of his creativity and subsequently the precious dweller of the space it inhabits. When the time came for Tagliazucchi to reconcile his art "with the world outside", he chose to use his creative drive to crown the concept of Harmony as defined by Dionysius of Halicarnassus as a mental synthesis. To this definition I would personally add "coordinated constantly with painful yet conscious choices of technique". The search for harmony in Tagliazucchi's case means reshaping the poetry of proportions "his" way, in other words with the yard-stick of his awareness, his personal perception of "beauty"-that which is closest and hence the most difficult to render eternal. Tagliazucchi's first rule of harmony can easily be seen in his initial sketch, which although preparatory is already a work unto itself, independently of the three-dimensional work it may precede. The harmony present in the sketch's strongly instinctive tones is even more obvious as he frees the sculpture from its stone to enter into the dominant sphere of the marriage between gentle curves and careful geometries. This "labour" of his - how could it be otherwise? - is as single-mindedly desired as it is pursued. It is part of him, exciting with the promise of what will be the tangible outcome. But despite his energy Tagliazucchi is not aggressive with the materials he selects for his messages: if anything I would say it is obvious how much love goes into his sculpting precisely because it is this love which shows us how he has planned the path to his stylistically noble and strongly lyrical conquests. It is here that we must also take what he calls his "aesthetic help" when he talks of "nuoveau romantisme", to understand his newly-found, unswerving desire to capture and exalt rhythmic shapes through a deep irresistible "sentiment of space". When he decides to shut out the world and enter the privacy of his plastic medium, Tagliazucchi knows what he will bring out of it and present before us with fully justified artistic pride: glimpses of the untouched, the historical, the human. And precisely because they are children of his "sentiment of space", they are unfettered by codes, dogmas, habits or restrictive regulations. His Christ de Alleray (1987) is a perfect example: standing in front of it one cannot help feeling in the presence of something completely new. The same subject which has been intensely glorified in countless ways by thousands of sculptors and artists of all centuries is suddenly reborn from a uniquely personal, exquisitely intense humanism coupled - I believe - with a layman's courageous sense of religiousness. Tagliazucchi does not feel the need to waste time with descriptions; he prefers the narrow path (which he then enlarges into endless plains) of bare essence. By leaving a unique subject such as the Crucifixion free of detailed "circumstances", he enriches it with its full potential of stark drama, among suffocated cries and imperceptible exaltation. If we then look closely at other works of Tagliazucchi's, such as Dance, we can appreciate his capacity for innovation in the never-ending field of plastic equilibrium with all its pitfalls. No longer is there only the flat horizontal and the absolute verticals, but now we also have the "laterals" - sides whose poetry is in their impetus, a vehement yet elegant impulse born of mature, responsible energy. Here is a real sculptor, one with the all-too-uncommon gift of responsibility, with the ability to explore within his material, the plastic medium, where lurk unpredictable substantial moments of harmonization, such as those between hollows and luminousness, between planes and rhythms, between measure and spontaneous ness (Take works like Sognando, Nathalie, Canapé, David), all with the authoritative blessing of "Madame Poesie" and "Mademoiselle Imagination". Au revoir, et merci; beaucoup, maitre Tagliazucchi – master sculptor and forger of new frontiers in plasticity. .
Ferruccio Battolini Febbraio 2001