The Small Sculpture as Poetic Code

The exhibition presents some of the artist’s most significant plastic inventions in reduced version, such as to offer itself not as a reduction in size but as a matrix, a code of reference. The two principal forms employed are the square panel and the oval, at times combined in the same work. The first type is underlined by a frame of iron wire or of colour, or else traced by a mark in relief. Within it, surfaces of various materials such as terracotta and enamel are incised with holes that call up the remote echo of the agricultural labour of sowing, impressed upon the artist’s memory. The oval form, which refers back to the form of the shield, gains expressive force from the colour and from the broken treatment of the surface. On the shields of large dimensions the sculptor traces marks, furrows, graffiti, colourings, figurative hints: in other words he evokes narrative tracks, echoes of deeds and emblematic figures such as Saint Augustine in the extraordinary installation at the Castello Visconteo of Pavia, or the palaeo-Venetic matron Ostalia Galliena in the gardens of the Roman Arena, in front of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. The small sculptures do not possess narrative echoes but the merit of a synthesis of formal poetics pressed above all by colour. As the curator Virginia Baradel writes: “Nelle piccole sculture modellate con terracotta, carta, ferro, smalto, bitume, tessuto la poetica e il lessico di Ievolella si fanno più espliciti, paradigmatici e allo stesso tempo più preziosi. Si tesaurizzano nella piccola misura compendiaria. Si caricano di valori formali ed espressivi che rimangono al loro interno, non si espandono nello spazio come accade nelle grandi sculture nelle quali il coinvolgimento spaziale diventa fattore a suo modo attivo della composizione e della lettura dell’opera. Certo al monumento spetta la dominante espressiva, il motore che attiva i significati ma l’uno non può prescindere dall’altro, il monumento dallo spazio urbano. Nella piccola scultura invece la grammatica del modellare si concentra nello spazio della sua forma, coincide con l’oggetto e offre alla contemplazione soggettiva quel che toglie al dialogo con lo spazio.”