Starting July 19, 2025, at 6:00 PM, we are pleased to present ANTONIO BARBIERI’s solo exhibition “ALL’ORIGINE DELLA FORMA” curated by Davide Sarchioni.
The exhibition can be viewed by appointment by calling +39 338 4520080 or during regular Gallery hours.
“Antonio Barbieri (Rho, 1985) returns to exhibit at Galleria La Linea in Montalcino with a wide and diverse selection of works, created predominantly over the past five years, marking the milestones of a complex creative journey that, since its inception, has revolved around a rigorous investigation into the origin of sculptural form.
By questioning the processes through which a form comes to life in space and relates to it, the artist has long studied the evolutionary phenomena of natural forms in relation to their ability to adapt to a given environment, opening up a vast territory of plastic experimentation conducted through the aid of the most advanced digital technologies – from 3D graphics to rapid prototyping, from three-dimensional scanning to dataset collection, and on to complex elaborations carried out using cutting-edge software and programs – alongside skilled manual technique and the use of heterogeneous materials such as iron, steel, and PLA.
Aimed at exploring the frontiers between art, technology, and nature, the exhibition begins with a dialogue with several Coralli – painted and hand-modeled iron sculptures made in 2019 – and develops in particular by delving into an aspect of his research still nourished today by fractal theory and the principles of self-similarity, whereby forms repeat and transform on different scales. This inquiry reflects on the morphological evolution of natural structures – both animal and plant – and brings to light a complex, poetic harmony, often imperceptible to the ordinary gaze, yet capable of generating unprecedented, fascinating, and mysterious forms, emblems of a worldview in constant metamorphosis.
The large painted iron installation Tassia fogliare (2021–2025), which unfolds along the walls like a climbing organism, suggests a principle of formal organization born from close observation of natural processes and translated into a sculptural lexicon that is both analytical and poetic, precisely following the rhythm of a geometric and modular structure, as rigorous as it is flexible. Like a vegetal vein expanding into space, the work reveals a balance between spontaneous growth and constructive order.
Another core group of works – including the wall-mounted sculpture Policheto (2021) and the monumental, luxuriant vertical structure Chrysolina (2022) – originates from the elaboration of three-dimensional scans and photogrammetries of vegetal and animal elements. These data, gathered with almost scientific care, are subsequently reworked by the artist into composite, harmonious, and coherent forms, returning a hypnotic interplay of symmetries and variations, poised between recognizability and metamorphosis. In particular, Chrysolina presents itself as a biomorphic sculpture in which the tension between the microscopic and the macroscopic, between nature and abstraction, becomes explicit. The work evokes the idea of an ornamental, modular, and shimmering column, whose structure recalls the smooth and iridescent shell of the insect from which it takes its name. Its geometries, precise yet at the same time complex and organic, draw on morphogenetic structures observed in the natural world, suggesting dynamics of growth, expansion, and transformation.
Different in conception and approach, yet coherent in its dialogue with the sculptures made via 3D printing and subsequent hand-painting, is Acherontia Atropos, part of a cycle of works from 2019. The work evokes in its form an ancient ritual mask, but its genesis lies in a visual and conceptual reflection on the phenomenon of insect mimicry in nature, as a metaphor for exploring behaviors, adaptations, and disguises that also characterize human dynamics. The artist begins with detailed scans of moths, transforming them into an unexpected and disorienting object that thus becomes the emblem of a broader investigation into the concept of identity and the tension between appearance and truth, between what is revealed and what is concealed.
Barbieri draws from the vast formal heritage of the biological world to translate it into an unprecedented sculptural grammar, where natural data become generative matrices, poetic and structural sources of a process in which form is never static but always in becoming, as evidenced by the extensive series of works on paper – refined formal elaborations of various elements, inspired by fractal theory – executed by a drawing machine, emphasizing the dialectic between natural and artificial.
Along this path, Venenum and Venenum #2 (2025) are objects that, resembling alien plants, open a profound reflection on the relationship between nature and artifice, between what grows spontaneously and what is manipulated, between the organic and the synthetic. Venenum is not just poison, but the threshold between science and science fiction, where life becomes contaminated by technology, where healing blurs with toxicity, where sculpture becomes a hybrid body – as much biological as mental – a transformative substance that acts on the gaze and on perception, modifying both form and consciousness, revealing the dark side of beauty and the restless allure of metamorphosis.
Tessuto (2025), instead, is a sculpture in PLA that reworks fractal forms in an abstract key, generating an object that is at once archaic and futuristic, between archaeological relic and prototype. Resembling a spaceship or a science-fiction artifact, the surface of the work, finely treated, is a true visual and tactile “fabric”, where matter becomes the memory of imaginary evolutionary theories, suspended between past and future.
Closing the exhibition is Tegumento (2023), a triptych of photographic prints on aluminum, digitally elaborated from environmental data collected in the garden of a private residence. The tegument, like a skin, is a sensitive narrative of what lives beneath the surface – amidst internal tensions, invisible structures, and evolutionary potential – suggesting an imaginary biology that leads the gaze to the origin of form, suspended between art and science.
Through his work, Antonio Barbieri aims to redefine the canons of contemporary sculptural language, underpinned by the idea of form as a fluid and dynamic process, mutable and in constant transformation.”
Davide Sarchioni
