IN PIAZZA - WALTER MORODER
"IN PIAZZA"
Walter Moroder
a concept by Mariano Pichler
Galleria Doris Ghetta in Milano
Vernissage, Tuesday 19th September 2018
September 19th - November 10th, 2018
Press release
comunicato stampa
Pressetext
As children, we’re frightened by our reflection in the mirror: as adults we’re frightened when we realize what we look like.’ (Walter Moroder, 2008)
According to Lacan, during childhood recognition of our image in a mirror constituted by the Other prevents us from living an authentic existence in the world, separating important ambits of our lives from feelings and sensory perceptions. The pursuit of reality and identity through sight and perception and the image of what is different from us is a leitmotiv of the work of Walter Moroder. Thanks to a mounting redolent of a public meeting place, this exhibition endorses the artist’s intention by making the exchange between works and viewer possible.
Walter Moroder carves mostly life-size female figures out of wood and dresses them in long, shaped clothes. The statues, often bare-chested, stand up straight and vertical, their hands hanging by their sides. Their bearing is restrained and calm and they appear to the world with great naturalness and inner strength, their heads held high and their expressions introverted. Echoing the Aura concept – namely the unapproachability and unique unrepeatable existence of a work of art – set out by Walter Benjamin in 1935, the works seem to communicate with their bodies. But according to Moroder, it is our individual relationship with the works that is informed by variety of energies. In other words, it is the relationship between viewer and work of art that transmits the work itself.
For Walter Moroder, art is a place where what count are fundamental questions about our humanity, about our relations with others and ourselves, and about our profound connection with nature and the cosmos, irrespective of social and political issues, fashion and individual interests. In these sculptures, he reveals nostalgia for authenticity, originality and truth, but also a return to his roots.
The son of a sculptor, Walter Moroder has been acquainted with the art of woodcarving from the cradle. Carving human figures in a classical, traditional style has never been his principal artistic goal but rather a technique characteristic of the sculptural tradition of his family in particular and of the Val Gardena in general. Moroder’s debut works were more rooted in abstraction. (Sabine Gamper)