A SCULPTURE AT THE MANN

The exhibition "Argine" is inaugurated at the MANN - National Archaeological Museum of Naples from 5 May to 8 August 2022.
The idea behind this exhibition project is to present a single sculpture to the public. It is a contemporary work, which however was made with the ancient technique of lost wax casting. Beyond the compositional and aesthetic effects it allows, this technique has the characteristic of being the result of teamwork. A work produced with this type of fusion, in fact, goes through several construction steps that compete with different professionals, each of which affects the final outcome. It allows you to transform an artist's original idea into a collective project involving several people. The resulting work comes from a very specific cultural and productive context of which it is itself an expression. Presenting a single sculpture made with this technique therefore means not only narrating the research of an artist, but also giving voice to a cultural reality from which the artist comes or with which he entered into dialogue. There is a very long work behind the production of a sculpture like Argine, which requires several months of preparation, modeling and actual realization of the work. Everything comes from an idea of one person and eventually becomes a product of the work of many. A single sculpture, generated by such a long and "profound" process, is able to represent an entire artistic-productive context.

WHY AL MANN

Paola Margherita was artistically formed in Naples ; even before graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts of the city, he attended the National Archaeological Museum for a long time and the sculptures in the collection of this institution were a constant reference: he observed them, studied them, drew them; he has thus assimilated the plastic language of classical statuary. This language has become for her the "base" on which to build another, daring and modern, which is affected by the artificial perspectives of optics for photographic and cinematographic use, but which nevertheless remains in surprising continuity with the classic one. For Paola Margherita, presenting her own sculpture at the MANN thus has the sense of a restitution: to give back to the classical plastic language its contemporaneity, showing, to the museum public, that the language on whose physical expression every Western individual is trained, it continued to evolve and develop exactly like verbal language. Argine intends to give classical language a current "voice". This "voice" will be that of Paola Margherita, the style that the artist has developed in relation with the technicians and artisans of the foundry, also from Naples, and who, like the artist, have perfected their skills and their own know how on the classical statuary of this city. Argine will therefore appear as a sculpture of the city; not an ancient sculpture, found and exhibited in the city, but a work that shows how the presence of such an important ancient collection in Naples, increased over time by important archaeological finds, has never ceased to influence the local artistic context, which today it expresses itself, through the research of Paola Margherita, with a renewed and current plastic language, but which rests its foundations on the past.