Antonio Panzuto
- Art Department
An atypical figure in the Italian theatre outline, Antonio Panzuto is a gentle demiurge, a scene artist escaping from labels with a smiling discretion.
His theatrical machines are inhabited by objects and characters moved by an entanglement of wires. By mixing wood and metal, ropes and cloth, the artist gives birth to visions that follow the secret dictates of a pictorial dramaturgy that proceeds by affinities and correspondences rather than by logical or narrative connections. Antonio Panzuto is a painter, set designer and sculptor.
He is the author of very original theatrical performances using objects, cars and sculptures he creates from waste materials rejected from the nomenclature of beauty that thus recover dignity by inhabiting emotional and abstract places, fields of very strong passion, defined by a particular use of colour. In his scenes, a painting transforms the stage into a place of light and movement. The two dimensions open in depth and plasticity.
Antonio Panzuto thinks of theatre and set design as a collective work of art, in which each element of the stage contributes to the theatrical draft, thus forcing the director to give equal weight to all the different languages and offering the spectator a richness of interpretative levels where to see is also to feel.
His research has been very much influenced, on the one hand, by the kinetic arts dealing with the subject of movement as being one of the deepest artistic problems in the last fifty years, and, on the other hand, by some American artistic currents of the Sixties, particularly Pop Art, where working with everyday objects achieves a strong symbolic value.
In Antonio Panzuto's work, the rigid laws of mechanics are turned upside down, enabling the artist to enter with lightness into new mental orders in which "the machine" withdraws from its functional logic and retrains as an object and as a sign upturning its shape and function. They are sculptures, assemblage paintings and "combine paintings", made of engines or waste objects, soldered pieces of iron glued together, apparently drawn near by chance, nailed to old planksand painted with wide and variable strokes.