Gioielli

For years Daniela Rancati's complex and aloof sculptures have revolved around an important concept: the recreation, using modem techniques and materials, of the alienated sacredness of the stele and its evident symbolism.
The stele (according to anthropology; the double par excellence, the first projection of the human body; the fundamental coscience of the individual) becomes an image and anthropomorphic column, or immerses itself in a horizon of poetic intuitions that simultaneously contemplates its own formal and structural nature.
The latter is the path taken by Rancati. Primarily using metals (especially copper) that present a minor historical/artistic tradition, and working in parallel with the concepts of an important school of Italian research (from Malotti to Nagasawa), exorcising its weight and opacity in favor of more subtle shapes, the artist creates structures whose shining shell opens toith a gesture that cleaves the surfaces and explicitly transfer physical energies.
Rancati feels and examines her own body and, acting with great strenght, she reproduces the flow of her intuitions in the exploration of the entire organic unity of the individual, meaning the non-analytic anatomy of her own body: as a result, it is the double that emerges once again, but this is a double that arises from the profound and obscure intuition of organic unity.
Of course, in that sense Rancati reveals an initial attraction for the Post-informal (the sculptural part) that, starting with Giacometti, gave rise to Richier and Armitage and to one of the most renowned schools of the '50s and '60s. However, at the same time the artist has sensed that the informative level of the sculpture, still vibrant and necessary; had to make way for a more abstract and self-critical concept, totally aiming at questioning the precise reason that gave life to the sculpture and allowed it to exist.
Therefore, these stele have a neurotic and irritated appearance and present anxious, inharmonious, crude shapes. Rancati has taken a position that is neither banal or marginal on the horizon of standing sculptures today.

Flaminio Gualdoni

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