"Art to make art" a sentence the sculptor Guido Galletti liked very much. This artist stressed that "to make" - a verb evidently suspected of "manuality"- with evident liking, to emphasise the significance and creative importance of the "job", of craft matrix, he very well knew, of very art world. Craft, then, in the most noble meaning and not certainly in that reducing significance the word took with the disappearance of the glorious mediaeval Corporations, when that is to say, that "Artistic dilettantism" started to findroom and lawfulness, usurping the definition, thought remaining its stepbrother. Historically the tear coincides with the period after the French revolution and has significant reflexes on the new vision of artistic universe supported by "pure values" independent of the subject and therefore out from literary, didactic, psychology conditioning.

Its deals now with the need of externalising the interiority of emotional crisis. Negation, then, of the "representation" of the visible world, crossed and often weighted by parameters of a bulky tradition. And research of pure and fulfilling "lyricism". That a conception of this kind has left the field free even from exasperation and misunderstandings and sometime to incorrect interpretations till to push the liberty of speech to the limits of grotesque or of a immotivated subjectivism, is another subject: Each upsetting has its price.

Who, as Paolo Chimeri, has managed to line up to the artistic (and intellectual) clime of our time, in force of a craft process (I always speak about blue blood craft) and as to say without ipercultural conditionaments, demonstrates that artistic (and Human) experience can find poetic reflexes also in not conventional images nor academically. He demonstrates, moreover, how the "job" (and here we return to the usual concept of craft in the art) manage to sublimate an become itself an irrinunciable component of the artistic process when matter transforms itself in aesthetic modulations and in spatial contractions not changed nor suggested from traditional subjects. From this point of view the interventions of Paolo Chimeri on valuable metals (gold, silver) and poor metals (iron, bronze) fin a certain offset -Just for their manuality - with Ceroli's and Burri's experiences. And that such experiences include the "gene" of poetry is demonstrated by courageous overtaking of the platonic suggestion for a conceptal lyrism suggested by form, at its time moulded with the instruments of fantasy and spirituality. Chimeri's sculpture is not easily definable: his evolutive inspiration excludes him, the, from every classification and does not let us see tangents. I should define anyway "virginal", because his innovative currents, reserving to the "new" itinerary of the artist a primitive spontaneity. Out, for this reason, of academic nostalgies and possible futuristic ecstasy. A sculpture, than, that moved her first steps on a path traced and covered through the time by the "fraveghi" (goldsmith) of aristocratic memory. Not be chance the first statue (so it is called) of Chimeri is inspirated to the "motives" of a precious necklace and measures a little more than two centimetres in height. More complex sculptures came after (and, logically, of other dimensions) where the image (evident or evocated) is defined in aerial though rigorous spatial contractions which mark their formal dynamic and the volumetric presence without, anyway, renouncing that atmosphere that seems to be an irrinunciable constant of such sculpture, and that, at its time, shows itself in an ideal succession of plans and in a fascinating game of light. So we arrive to the "great sculpture" and that is to say to the monuments at Voltri (Genoa) and in La Spezia. Just because it deals with monuments a greater indulgence of the artist toward figurative contents, played in a meeting (of Greek memory) between ethics and aesthetics or anyway on a plausible metaphor would not have certainly caused scandal.. But Chimeri once more than ever avoids formal conditionings, suggestions of rhetoric. Nor a disguised symbolism the artist manages anyway to upset can be considerated heretical: the first monument, dedicated to the fallen of all the wars, speaks to us more about life death and does with language synthetic, sharp, of an essential dynamics, stylistically pure. The image, in a metamorphic declination, frees us from nightwares, recovers the existential rhythms of people of Liguria, magmata ferments on this our country, avaricious and generous at the same time.

The second sculpture, placed in a well defined space (a credit Institutions) more than the first was subject to temptations of a physiognomy at least allusive. But once more Chimeri exorcises this risk relying himself on poetry and fantasy. It does not deal with a twisting and but with a upsetting. The results is obtained through the "contrary" of a logic which, though upset, and on the contrary just for this reason, does not renounce an immediate persuasion. Chimeri's creativeness shows itself with a calm restlessness that is difficult, if not impossible, to define. Because it is not possible to take it back to representative archetypes. Nor an ideal of armony, nor the romantic charm, nor the recall to the constructive form or the pure organic form deprived of literary meaning. Nor "giacomettiana" negation of volume. And perhaps the interests caused from this artist's works comes from the ambiguity so rich of implications he only propose in order that other people interpret them. We must not forget that Brancusi himself (I apologise if I am crossing the door of the empyrean without knocking!) limited himself to give exterior and well defined forms to abstract concepts. Can we perhaps astonish if Chimeri does exactly the contrary, relying himself on the latent suggestion of his enigmas?

Remo A. Borzini