Italo Rodomonti, the most significant representative
of Space Art in Italy, has built during his long
artistic career a coherent and formally unexceptionable
way around a passion and an adventure: the representation
of the cosmic space and its declination founded
an the artistic culture of contemporaneity. It has
already been said that Space Art moves on a very
dangerous ridge, often uncertain between figuration
and illustration. Keeping on this ridge in a balance
which is not only intellectual whim or, even worse,
cunning contamination has been the constant challenge
with which Rodomonti has always competed reaching
unitary and artistically valid results without giving
up his basic love: the infinite space of the universe.
We know that the problem of the representation of
the space has always been in the centre of the searches
of artists, who have often followed if not anticipated
the speculations of philosophers and the discoveries
of scientists with their intuitions and their figurative
expressions. The homogeneity of the Renaissance
perspective space, the space-time of the cubist
adventure, microcosms and macrocosms of so much
contemporary art. The artist from Teramo has carried
out his research for ages not ignoring this cultural
background, facing in an original way the happy
union of art and science. His relations with astrophysicists
and Italian and foreign astronomic observes could
show it and also what constitutes a real historical
relic not only for Rodomonti but also for Teramo
and for Italy: the letter by Werner von Braun addressed
to the artist with the compliments for his art but
above all his constant work, near obstinacy and
alienation, his stubborn attachment to a topic without
however sinking into repetition and even continuously
sounding the topic with new researches with the
experimentation of new materials. It was natural,
I’d say unavoidable for Rodomonti to come,
as it is recently happened, to sculpture and tridimensionality
to let trajectories, heavenly bodies, cosmological
archaisms hover in the space, with an eye always
turned towards what happens in the world of art
and artistic experimentation. We cannot but wish
to our artist greater and greater adventurous goals
in full syntony with the mysterious and disquieting
but always fascinating explorations of the infinite
universe.
