Carlo Zoli – L’infinito volgere del Tempo (The infinite turning of Time)

Spin-off exhibition from HUB/ART, Milan 2024

Luca Nannipieri “Gratitudine” (Gratitude)
Carlo Zoli’s work always inspires a sense of gratitude. When they are in front of you, the first words that come to mind and out of your mouth are ‘thank you’. For example, when admiring Immortali, Titani, or L’altra metà di me the observer feels a genuine sense of acknowledgment. In the complex landscape of modern and contemporary art, which takes decades to develop, solidify in order to glimpse what emerges, it is difficult to predict what standpoint the artist will assume, but regardless of that, whoever writes has to admit that when confronted with some of Zoli’s best work, you are moved, in particular by a singular and unique emotion with an unusual connotation of richness. If a person acquires a richness after seeing a work of art, that work of art has, in part, accomplished its commitments to this world. This is what happened to those who write when observing certain pieces by Zoli.

Carlo Zoli – L’infinito volgere del Tempo (The infinite turning of Time)

Exhibition at Palazzo Guadagni Strozzi Sacrati, Tuscany Region headquarters, Florence, 2024

Greta Zuccali, curator, “L’eterna clessidra dell’esistenza” (The eternal hourglass of existence)
Carlo Zoli’s work is permeated with art and myth since he was consumed by the desire to represent the world and its infinite dances. He moulds humble materials from the earth with his own mastery like a modern day Creator, giving the pieces life “with the image and likeness of ideas” (Timaeus, Plato).
(…) Heavenly and harmonic creatures on one side and visceral, warring subjects on the other, all perfected in minute detail and born to evoke feelings and sensations that characterise the deepest essence of man, who coming from the belly of the Earth will one day return.
These two bursts of Zoli’s creative flame are present throughout the exhibition and are positioned in a larger and fleeting cosmos that is Time itself, explored at last by the artist and centrepiece of this exhibition entitled “L’infinito volgere del tempo” (The infinite turning of Time).

Eugenio Giani, President of Tuscany Region
(…) This contemporary artist is capable of interrogating the past and the future and of harvesting the elements that last and are repeated in the incessant flow of life. He is a demiurge that gives life to materials in order to reach beyond, until he embraces the substance of dreams and myths. He is a man who is ready to question his own place in the universe through reflection on the lessons that arrive from afar such as pre-Socrates philosophers like Heraclitus and Pythagoras, or Friederich Nietzsche with his eternal return. Carlo Zoli is all of this and it is all inside the works in this collection, displayed in an exhibition that confirms a powerful creativity. Again and again it makes us wonder at a moment in time and the meeting of different times, contemplation and prayer, enigma and dreams. As President of the Region of Tuscany I cannot of course but underline a series of works that recall Tuscany and its civilization, from the Etruscan king Lars Porsenna to Pegasus, that for us locals is inextricably tied to the idea and practice of freedom.

Jacopo Celona, Director Florence Biennale
Coming from a family of artists, though visibly representing an iconography that has its roots in the classics, Zoli interprets the profound anxiety of present times. His great ability to mould clay, marrying varnish, precious metals and iridescent resins, gives his sculptures a sense of continual turmoil and transformation. The symbolic and imaginative works make him one of the artists that, while being witness to our epoch, have a neo-humanistic vision, recognising in humanity a creator of our own destiny. We are not simply witnesses to the passing of time, but we are constantly searching for balance in this universe. A balance that is made up of elements in continual revolution and which through interaction generate a state of calm. (…) Zoli is, therefore, a contemporary artist, yet his eye looks to the big themes that have characterised the history of human thought and which are offered up as greater points for reflections on the forever internally conflicted self.

Carlo Zoli – Journey through History

Exhibition at Villa Casati, Muggiò (MB) 2018
Stendhal Turin Editions

Antonio Marucci “Journey into History”
(…) The art of Carlo Zoli crosses the boundaries between sculpture and space, transforming colour and geometry into an intense, perceptive experience.
The complexity of the forms that the artist uses creates a tension between daily and domestic experience and a metaphysical horizon of vision, in which the unusual becomes universal.
In the art of Carlo Zoli, what is visual becomes tactile and vice versa: In fact, not only is colour conceived in a sculptural way by way of form, substance and volume, but the idea of ​​painting is extensive to space, like the articulation of planes that incorporates all objects in its presence.
In this sense the choice of ceramic as a material betrays one conception of sculpture that goes beyond the principle of representation and that aspires to the creation of a place both physical and mental.

Vittorio Amedeo Sacco “Symbols and Values”
(…) With his female sculptures Zoli seeks to underline the role of woman in mythology and contrast it with that of our time.
In the classical age, the public role of women was quite diminished. The female body in the works of Carlo Zoli opens up to the artist’s gaze, telling thousands of stories that he has kept until now and the artist adorns the body with black, red and gold pigments. Zoli gives them a voice, highlighting the graceful gesture, where the lumps of matter and the signs revealed by the gesture on the surface offer a new and more fascinating narrative, possibly withdrawing you into the bodies yourself.

Carlo Zoli – The witches of Levone

53rd Exhibition of Ceramics, Villa Bertot, Levone (To) 2013

Vittorio Amedeo Sacco “The Witches of Levone”
Carlo Zoli sculpts the bodies of the witches with the serene gracefulness as of someone who has contiguity with the creativity of nature, just as one with intimate knowledge of the feminine. It caters to nature with that quivering and at the same time respectful attitude of those who listen, to hear what everyone’s saying, as much as it can understand and therefore reveal, allowing things that expressive freedom- that his will shall have persuasive resonance in the appearance of the intense and saturated colors of his sculpture.

Carlo Zoli – Mythological

Exhibition “A Myth in the Dream”, Palazzo Isimbardi, Muggiò (MB) 2011
Stendhal Turin Editions

Vittorio Amedeo Sacco “A myth in a dream”
Female figures with delicate silhouettes, winged figures and horses of elegant profile stand out within a two-dimensional space, destroying the illusion and revealing the icastic truth of the form which has a life of its own.
A sense of human sacredness runs through the works of Carlo Zoli, as one always interested in investigating the deep and mysterious territories of primitive and archaic. Through the elimination of the superfluous or self-referential elements, the artist eludes the prosaic passage of the mythological fable and excludes the exercise, narcissistic and consolatory, from the divinization of the human and from the narration of the images, maturing a new figurative language, in which synthesis, formal and signic allow him to recover the primary dimension of figuration.

The female body
The female body in the works of Carlo Zoli opens up to the gaze of the artist, telling the thousand stories he has kept till now and the artist dresses the body with gold and red pigments. It’s here then that every color opens seductive narratives, beyond their own apparent physicality, functionality, malleability.
Zoli gives them a voice giving evidence to the graceful gesture, where the lumps of the material and the sign revealed by the gesture on the surface offer a new and more fascinating narrative to the portrayed bodies. And they, so loved, will open the captivating song of sculpture.

The role of women in mythology
With his female sculptures Zoli intends to underline the role of woman in mythology and contrast it with that of our time. In the classical age, the public role of women was diminished. In Homeric times, however, they maintained a certain active and prominent role: indeed many figures appear of important women: Andromache wife of Hector, Clytemnestra wife of Agamemnon, the prophetess Cassandra and above all Penelope faithful wife as well as a queen.

Horses
Horses have been a privileged theme of Carlo Zoli, who wanted to make the animal a symbol of dynamism and life, but also an emblem of the struggle that is always underlying in each aspect of existence, not excluding the ideological and social ones. The horses
of Zoli are characterized by restlessness, vigor, vivid eyes and languor muscles, as if to represent an exaltation of the revolt for the affirmation of the right to live.
Life and struggle are in fact the cornerstones of Carlo Zoli’s visual thought which focuses on three fundamental aspects of existence: the youth, life based on struggle, life-shattering struggle.

Carlo Zoli “Cantor or Poet, Artist or Interpreter, recreates the forgotten mythology”

in “The Art Notebooks”, Year VIII n. 26, April-June 1998, Lalli publisher

Casadio Michele Jr.
A flight on the wings of history that tells the legend of man.
A moor stands out and tears apart the compactness and balance of one sculpture embracing the partnership between knight and steed.
Mythological leaders come back to life, with iridescent and baroque colored armors, rich in effigies and ornaments, embroidery and affectation, which solidify and historicize the character in an ancestral past, where the strength in the battles and the soul of the fighter are reflected in the armor and shields with the faces of animals, expression of an irrepressible inner anger and incomprehension.

Biagio Grillo
It is exciting to acknowledge that it has germinated from Zoli and only from Zoli that feminine creation, modeled with long caresses by the suppleness diluted to the point of implying the ineffable limit that links the sacred to the profane: a dominant figure, delineated by it’s development in the lanceolate arch of a sickle-shaped everted body of moon, which projects the virginal line of love to flare up flamingly in the extreme horn.

Carlo Zoli “The eternal figures of the myth”

in “I quaderni dell’arte”, Year VII n. 21, May-June 1997, Lalli publisher

Benvenuto Guerra
The horse, the rider, the dragon, the hippogriff, the unicorn are the archetypal figures, mythical and symbolical that dominate the universe represented by Carlo Zoli.
They are the archetypes of the eternal conflict between spirit and matter, the reason and instinct, the conscious and the unconscious, including man (whom himself is problematic) tries to achieve in an arduous synthesis or perhaps just maintain a precarious balance.
Zoli questions the myth to find an answer to the concerns of the here I am. His figures preserve and convey, in a time superficial and unpoetic, the original tension and the profound, arcane suggestion of the mythical universe.

Gianna Pagani Paolino
The horse, in this sense, becomes the core of one research, which can to go beyond a purely artistic fact, to become a figure metaphorical of contemporary society, in its ethical social context, looking for something to believe in, to find in the complexity of the structures the regenerative force, to restore that vital rhythm, which is synonymous with social redemption.
(…)
Reconciling the myth with today’s reality is certainly not an easy feat, but the artist’s merit lies precisely in dealing with this theme with originality, creative freshness, irony, sense of “Playfulness”; and the unpredictable.
(…)
We are witnessing a progression of force-forms, which disengage from a formal static, they attack the space in the balance of volumes, with an extraordinary “elan vital” // vital force, such as to promote in the plastic team, that dynamism and completeness of vision, which make these pieces pure spatial structures. In the wake of great sculptors such as Moore, Martini, Marini; Carlo Zoli, lyrical and caustic sculptor; expert colourist, proves he possesses the necessary grit to give a real jolt to the art of the latter glimpse of the century.

Carlo Zoli Sculptures

Arstudio C Editions, 1995

Umberto Pasini “Horses in the arcane of the Apocalypse”
The animal, the horse, is too noble to be united to other beings of the same species of living beings: it is irascible, it’s strong and gentle at the same time, he’s violent but he knows being meek, he lives free and yet accompanies himself as a friend. He was born to live and to win. Literature of all time and every other artistic expression have exploited its elegance and nobility, translating the image into compositions capable of defining the mysterious charm in the elegance of words or figures and daring impulsiveness.

Fabrizia Montanari “The fullness of life”
Here ethereal girls also soar in the skies, to take up the myth of the “Three Graces”, refined symbolism of a perfect and incorruptible femininity. The female figures, which, for some time, the artist forges with skillful delicacy, they are pervaded with enchantment grace and sublime purity, be they sylphs soaring in silent dances, or mute Madonnas gathered together and intent on listening to the discreet movements of the soul.

Carlo Zoli Sculptures

Arstudio C Editions, 1993

Luigi Ortolani, President of the International Museum of Ceramics in Faenza
I have the feeling that our artist, preferring subjects of great symbolic significance, tends to represent the struggle of man, the aspirations of these to rise to the winged planes of the spirit, in the world of ideas, beauty, truth. An aspiration that is almost never satisfied because of the our desires, our passions and our selfishness, sort of boulders that push us down. The representation therefore of a painful and suffered struggle, which carries within itself from the very beginning the germ of defeat, but which ultimately gives meaning to this our life.

Winged paths

Pubblialfa Faenza, 1993

Nevio Bedeschi
From its beginnings until today, Zoli has been committed to the dissemination “Artistic”; of the horse as did, on a historical level, the civilian populations of the Mediterranean area of ​​the millennium BC. This constant inspirational dynamic became the myth-theme of his imagination.
On various registers, it composes anxiety, the strenuous search for essentiality, the will to understand and make the vitality dramatic or lyrical of the object, beyond the obvious appearance of its physical appearance.

The horses of Carlo Zoli

Editarte Milan, 1990

Francesco Butturini “The winged fantasy of Zoli’s horses”
… It is natural to wonder (…) why we can choose a theme which instantly becomes proof of comparison with all those that (and there are many: in the universe of sculptors!) already have dealt with.
I would say that Zoli, on the other hand, did not think about comparisons of any kind: yes he is simply moved by following and chasing a principle of artistic and poetic cheapness. The horse allows him to investigate some spatial and supple forms to seek and find with them and in them the first requirement of “his” sculpture: the requirement of symbolic and mythical-literary metaphors.

Fabrizia Montanari
Impressive creations, covered in the warm shades of terrestrial nature, noble forms that conveys to the imagination encounters between man and animal… This, but not only emerges from sculptures by Carlo Zoli who, enthusiastic and tireless, meticulously elaborates his own art to render, through the plastic, powerful outbursts of vitality and freedom.