On the occasion of the Eighteenth Day of the Contemporary, Saturday, October 8, 2022, organized by AMACI and dedicated to the theme of ecology, connected to that of sustainability: "global urgencies that confront us with the need to rethink the contemporary art system through a renewed awareness and a more widespread sensitivity," the Paolo Scheggi Association, through its social pages (Facebook and Instagram) and dedicated website, proposes a focus on Paolo Scheggi's early works, the Sheet Metal Works (1958-1960).
In fact, perhaps not everyone knows that these works, destined to open up and then translate into the deeply excavated forms of the artist's better-known Reflected Zone Intersuperfici and Curved Intersuperfici, are born from discarded materials that Scheggi, since the late 1950s, retrieves from the streets, workshops and among household objects: sheets of metal marked by time that, instead of being thrown away, are bent, overlapped, welded to form sheets charged with perspective.
"[...] In search of 'his' language, he feels the need to excavate and open the steel sheet: his imagination thus leads him to uncover the space suggested by Fontana's canvas, the lips of the cut open outward and reveal another space, another sheet of metal." This is how Germano Celant tells it when he thinks back on these early works, a few years later, in 1967.
Scheggi himself calls this working technique "saldage"; these are the years of existentialism and Informalism, marked by the readings of Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre, whom the artist personally met in Rome: the French philosopher will also write an essay for the magazine "Il Malinteso," founded by Scheggi with Florentine friends and companions in early 1960.
"[...] In search of 'his' language, he feels the need to excavate and open the steel sheet: his imagination thus leads him to uncover the space suggested by Fontana's canvas, the lips of the cut open outward and reveal another space, another sheet of metal." This is how Germano Celant tells it when he thinks back on these early works, a few years later, in 1967.
Scheggi himself calls this working technique "saldage"; these are the years of existentialism and Informalism, marked by the readings of Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre, whom the artist personally met in Rome: the French philosopher will also write an essay for the magazine "Il Malinteso," founded by Scheggi with Florentine friends and companions in early 1960.
