Francesco Arena

Francesco Arena - Square Meter with Holden, Fruits and Person

Technique: polished bronze

Artist Biography: Francesco Arena is a contemporary artist born in Torre Santa Susanna, Italy, in 1978. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera, Milan, and currently lives and works in Cassano delle Murge, Italy.His artistic work focuses on history and the political and social events that have marked the recent past. Through synthetic and metaphorical forms in his sculptures, Arena seeks to give new life to often hidden or silenced episodes. One of the most important aspects of his projects is the factual relationship with himself, using anthropometric data such as his weight, body mass, height and the distance from the ground to his eyes as a testimony of a quantifiable history. In this sense, the relationship of the individual with history becomes one of the crucial aspects of his work.In addition to his sculptures, Arena also works with installations and performances, exploring the limits of spaces and how they can be transformed by the intervention of art. He has exhibited in major museums and galleries around the world, including the MAXXI in Rome, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA). In 2017, he received the Contemporary Art Award from the VAF Foundation in Venedig, Italy.

 

A highly-polished yellow bronze slab featuring four phrases from J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye engraved along its upper edge. The main character, Holden, utters these phrases at intervals throughout the tale: "People always think something's all true", "People never notice anything", "People are always ruining things for you", "People never give your message to anybody". Two fruits are placed on the bronze plate: as time goes by, their mute presence needs to be replaced. Viewers who read over the highly-polished surface mirror themselves in it and become part of the work. The sculpture is a collage of relationships associated with different time periods: the eternal time of bronze and the engraved writing, the immobile but limited time of the slab with the fruits on it, and the transitory time of people passing by and being reflected.