Valeria Vaccaro, a refined sculptor from Turin known for works that challenge human perception, is the protagonist of the highly awaited exhibition in November at Punto Sull’Arte. The opening reception of Fuoco cammina con me will be held on Saturday, November 30, 2024, from 11 am to 1 pm at the main Gallery at Viale Sant’Antonio 59/61, Varese (Casbeno). The artist will be present.

Valeria Vaccaro has developed a distinctive and recognizable sculptural language, through which she has managed to combine the enduring monumentality of marble, her preferred material, with themes such as fragility, metamorphosis, and the transience of all things. The exhibition will feature works from various series, including Marmiferi, Aver cuore, Urban platform, Handle with care, Tree of life, and Non brucio, as well as the new and previously unexhibited series titled Controsenso, which opens Valeria Vaccaro's artistic investigation to new expressive possibilities.

All her works share a fascination with fire. In fact, the fiery symbolism alluded to in the title of the exhibition, borrowed from a famous feature film by David Lynch, permeates her recent production, taking on different meanings each time and organizing itself around pairs of antithetical concepts—such as destruction and rebirth, permanence and impermanence, solidity and fragility—that allow us to reflect on the (necessarily) contradictory nature of existence.

In the series Marmiferi, Vaccaro carves oversized matches that highlight the contrast between the solidity of Carrara marble and the ephemeral function of the object. In the Urban Platform and Handle With Care cycles, she monumentalizes pallets and packing crates, removing these tools intended for industrial logistics from their natural oblivion while simultaneously bringing the vexata quaestio of the role of mundane objects in contemporary art out of the speculative domain of Duchamp's epigones. One of the greatest qualities of Valeria Vaccaro's work is, in fact, her technical expertise, a category often underestimated in contemporary art, which allows her to combine the great legacy of classical sculpture with the conceptual urgencies of the present.

In contrast, the Aver cuore and Non brucio series are more lyrical, where the skillful effects of burning and combustion envelop blocks of typographic characters arranged to form idiomatic phrases and statements that resonate like elegiac fragments of Visual poetry.

Finally, while the Tree of life series explores the contrast between the opposing polarities of fullness and emptiness, evoking the idea of fire as both a creative and destructive natural force, the new series titled Controsenso opens up a new territory of formal investigation that temporarily abandons object representation to focus on the expressive potentials of the material itself. The new sculptures are simple, curvilinear slabs of marble on which the artist reiterates, with her usual verisimilitude, the charred effect of wood. They are forms that, when paired, create new balances held together by joints placed at the point of tangency of two diverging curves. Alternatively, they are single concave surfaces, slabs that draw imaginative parabolas, yet are rigorously marked by fire.

Valeria Vaccaro was born in Turin in 1988. After attending the Artistic High School, she studied sculpture at the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts in Turin. Since 2005, she has regularly exhibited in solo and group shows in Italy, France, Germany, England, and Montenegro, and has participated in contemporary art fairs. Between 2013 and 2015, she participated in the European itinerant biennial JCE Jeune Création Européenne. In 2015, she exhibited at Exhibit in Turin and at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Castle of Rivara. In 2017, on the occasion of the CBM Art Prize, she received a special mention from the city of Turin. In the same year, she was among the winners of the 2017 ArTeam Cup. In 2021, she was selected to exhibit some of her sculptures as part of the Bocconi Art Gallery at BAG in Milan. In 2022, she won the Second Prize of the VAF Foundation IX Edition, recognized by the prestigious German Foundation with the aim of promoting innovative positions in contemporary Italian art and communicating them in Germany.

On this occasion, the renowned Foundation has acquired two large sculptures by the artist for its valuable permanent collection. At Punto Sull'Arte, she was the protagonist of the solo exhibition Carta, forbice, sasso (2019), as well as the group shows Lollipop (2019) and Fun 4 kids (2022), in addition to being a highly appreciated presence in the gallery's historic exhibitions 20 15x15/20x20 (2019, 2020, 2021, 2024). She lives and works in Turin.