From 2 December 2022 to 5 February 2023, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Villa Croce in Genoa is dedicating a solo exhibition to Piergiorgio Colombara. The title of the exhibition, Neroro , is linked to the cycle of unpublished paintings, acrylic on canvas, all in large format, created by the artist between 2017 and 2021; there are also other paintings on display (including the splendid Cantoria , acrylic, brass and tempera on canvas, 1988) which by Colombara, known above all as a sculptor, show an aspect of his research, which began at the end of the seventies.

Emblematic of the reciprocal transition between painting and sculpture are two works from 2017, a painting and a sculpture, which bear the same title: Inpunta . Moreover, in the anthological exhibition of Villa Croce, there are some of the sculptures that have marked the affirmation of the artist on a national and international level: among others, Suononous , brass and copper, 1985; Mulino , iron, copper and brass, 1992; Tears of glass , brass and blown glass, 1997 (collection of the Museum of Villa Croce); The audacious carena , bronze, 2007; Cradle , bronze, 2014; numerous works documenting the inexhaustible exploration of Colombara in the use of various materials, including terracotta and iron.

Colombara's works immerse us in a visual and sensory experience that we could define as the limit, the frontier, the ambiguous threshold between worlds and situations usually considered alternative. His works are characterized by an atmosphere that cannot be ascribed either to some direct reminiscence of reality, or to artistic outcomes of the past – even if we could mention Fausto Melotti, and his desire to dematerialise sculpture and dissolve its volumes, and some results of Alberto Giacometti, Louise Bourgeois, Germaine Richier. In Colombara's work, one breathes a sense of lightness, of suspension, of fragility and transparency, of tension to grasp and give shape to the void and the uncertain boundary between sound and silence, something that makes us think of the dear levity to Italo Calvino, who quoted Paul Valéry: “we need to be light like a bird in flight and not like a feather ”.

His works escape attribution to a defined time in the course of human civilization and the evolution of artistic expression: splinters of something that we have already acquired flow before us, even if these fragments are often combined with each other, in the operation of actual editing performed by the artist, in a way that is not directly consequent to a linear logic that has introjected the laws of the possible evolution of an object. It is as if, in Colombara's creative process, the drive to graft one thing onto another, to join and hybridize what is usually separate, is perpetually lurking: the laws of transmissibility of genes and of mutation can be subverted, when are invested by the shivers of creative freedom and by the impulses of the imagination. In his creative workshop, the artist resorts to the combined use of various materials (brass, copper, lead, aluminium, blown glass, wax, iron, bronze, ceramic, mirror fragments, ropes, papier-mâché, photographic transfers) and of fragments of ancient artifacts, fragments of objects which, belonging to the history of human experience, have then been shipwrecked or have come down to us without being completely overwhelmed or disfigured.