A highly cultured collector of objects, visual and literary pieces, Maurizio Vetrugno composes each of his works by endowing the pure material of which it is composed with a precise creative and – absurd as it may sound – mystical will. Everything he collects he transforms from time to time; this means that in Vetrugno’s work, we must not stop within the boundaries of the Western art interpretation of the ready-made or the object trouvé, but that the moment we see a Balenciaga wedding dress juxtaposed with a Qing cup or a Noguchi lamp, we must necessarily ask ourselves what reflections of a spiritual nature have conditioned those precise choices and that interplay of apparently distant materials and cultural sediments.
Observing Vetrugno’s new works made up of a triptych, two diptychs and three single works presented for his first solo exhibition at Galleria Martina Simeti, we have the sensation of seeing the bodies appear as if from another dimension: remote, oneiric, from an autre-monde, but above all it is the clothes they wear: it is something that still intensely concerns that aspect of clothing that survives death and history, with time and with the wait for the image to manifest itself, the phantasmal permanence of its aura. [Excerpt from the text by Riccardo Conti]
