From September 19 to October 19, 2018, the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro in Milano is holding the solo exhibition of Roberto Pugliese (Naples, 1982), entitled Concerto per Architettura (Concert for Architecture). This exhibition is the Foundation’s second appointment with the new Project Room cycle, which gives young curators and artists the chance to make use of the Foundation’s spaces and know-how to bring the latest contemporary trends in sculpture to the public eye.

The Project Room 2018 has been entrusted to Flavio Arensi, who has created Proust’s Room, a project in three acts which provides an opportunity to watch society’s and human events through sounds, absences and presences, of the past like the future. The three phases that follow each other in this room make up a single reflection on the role of sculpture in this historical moment. As Arensi states, “with the work of the three artists involved in the Project Room 2018 we are trying to regain the idea of an enlarged conscience which no longer uses the most traditional sculptural techniques but rather seeks out the deepest concepts through technology and space”.

After Donato Piccolo’s solo show, the second act of the Proust's Room features the Neapolitan artist Roberto Pugliese, who has conceived Concerto per Architettura, an audio composition created especially for the Project Room spaces, whose architectural plans have been used to reprocess some numerical values which were afterwards assigned to a series of genetic algorithms and complex functions.

These processes, thanks to an acoustic-mathematical relationship, were used to generate the sound material later reworked by Pugliese.

The result is a sound sculpture which, spreading through the Foundation’s spaces, makes the most of the architectural resonances in such a way to give the space back its own “voice”.

For the curator, “this sort of musical interlude between the first and last act, also marks the furthest point of a research that transforms sculpture into a new linguistic system, in which space and sound become the work’s intrinsic value. The theme of sculpture, therefore, goes beyond the simple light-space-material scheme to enter in a new semiotic method where the object is joined to sound. If with Piccolo the observer was called to deal with the sculpture-machines, learning to control themselves through dealings with human beings, with Pugliese we come to tackle the vibrational/frequential nature of matter”.

“With a minimal and rigorous organisation – continues Flavio Arensi – Roberto Pugliese’s work requires the visitors to participate together to the space and the musical system; after all even the great Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache couldn’t separate the listening to the musical composition from the human and experiential dynamics of the theatrical audience”.

Robert Pugliese’s Concerto per Architettura will be performed as a concert on the opening night (18 September, at 6 pm), then recorded and replayed for the entire duration of the exhibition through an installation specially designed by the artist, flanked by two other of Pugliese’s typical sound sculptures, Score (2016) and Risonanti pressioni materiche (2014), where the sound composed by Pugliese is emitted by a series of small “trumpets” placed next to each other.