Francesco Moretti

The themes that Francesco Moretti approaches are drawn from nature: the human body, plants, and animals. He doesn’t seek to reinvent their forms. On the contrary, his aim is to rediscover them, to capture their essence.

To do this, he works through filters: the memory first, then the various drawings, sketches and models that he created before the final work starts. Taking distance from the subject is necessary. This maturation time allows him to keep only what is essential, the minimum required to understand the subject. This way, the blunt simplification takes on its full meaning: the subject is gradually relieved by all superfluous elements, alleviated of what isn’t raising the primary meaning of things.
Only then is it time to sculpt.

The relationship that Francesco Moretti maintains with the material used is atypical. When others work the metal by physical confrontation – compression, hammering – or choose to push it to its limits until it loses all its substance – melts- he chooses to accompany it. This understanding of the material results to a form of evidence of the gesture. Folded, bent as would paper, the metal becomes a light and delicate material. This is when the sculptor’s work can fade, leaving its place to the subject.

As soon as the original rectangle is gaining in volume and curves, the subject is born from an abstract metal sheet. And this is what Francesco Moretti is showing us through his sculptures: figures under construction captured at the moment when the subject becomes intelligible and palpable. In this way, the imprisoned void between the metal sheets becomes itself component of the sculpture, just like the lines drawn by the edges of the deformed plate make up an autonomous and dynamic design. But even if the forms can liberate themselves, they however, lose nothing of their meaning.
Against the hand-crafted virtuosity and the decorative indulgence, Francesco Moretti is looking without artifice to render the process of the construction of the Form accessible.