Roberto Almagno 's exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art presents his most recent artistic production through a site-specific installation created for the museum.

In the four works exhibited, two sculptures and two works on the wall, the coordinates of Almagno's artistic research emerge. The wood sculptures are exemplary of the work on this material that the artist has been carrying out for years: collected in the silent paths of natural places to be transformed into signs through different mechanical processes and the action of fire, these woods aspire to remain suspended in the air, detaching itself from the wall or rising from the ground, to reach their peculiar balance that assimilates them to the wind.

Almagno's departure is "poor" , since the original act of recognition of the essential elements that make up his works, and the artist remains faithful to this poverty: he does not mask its nature, and the transfiguration to which he subjects his material does not hides the source. It is precisely to this complicity that binds the material it chooses, stripped of all seduction and tinsel of elegance, to the "blacksmith" work that redeems it, leading it to a form of age-old wisdom, that Almagno owes in the first instance the originality of his work, with a current and at the same time ancient character.

Images of absolute purity emerge, in search of the essential that they want to narrate - a breath of wind, a constant metaphor in the artist's sculpture - leaving an echo of their consistency, of their rapid passing of the space that hangs in the air. they designate, where the sign that crosses it knows how to make itself, from time to time, resonance, projection, momentum beyond its own borders. It is the perfect landing of that dream of a sculpture moved to life only by that breath that Almagno has always sought, perhaps recalling the hope of Arturo Martini: “let me not be an object, but an extension”.