Il Primo Giorno Della Creazione (The First Day Of Creation)
Francesco Arena The First Day of Creation Studio Trisorio, Naples The exhibition brings together four works—three in bronze and one in stone—created over the past year. These are independent works, created at different times but united by the same exploration of matter, form and the written word. The four sculptures confront the founding structures of human culture: the search for the divine, the inevitability of time, dreams and man, creation. The exhibition is conceived as a landscape, and the space in Via Carlo Poerio — with its frontal view — accentuates this characteristic. The title of the exhibition is taken from one of the works on display, L'alba (Dawn), installed on the back wall like a stone sun rising from the horizon and illuminating the other works, all in bronze: three sculptures that take the form of immediately recognisable objects — a club, an excrement, a stool — resting on the floor, like objects created, desired and finally abandoned by a man.
Une âme,
2025
Bronze;
cm 44x23x25
Une âme is a bronze cast of a small wooden stool made by my father in the mid-1990s. The bronze casting preserves the traces of use imprinted on the original artefact, fixing them in time in a resistant material.
The stool has been part of my life since I was a boy: it first followed my family of origin through several moves and later continued to be part of my daily life and that of my wife and daughter. The original stool is still in our home, holding up a stack of books, and will continue to slowly transform over time, while its bronze copy will remain crystallised at the age of thirty.
On one side of the work is what, in the original, is a piece of paper held in place by two drawing pins; above it is engraved the phrase Le présent n'exist pas, referring to the fate of the work, which exists outside of time, and to the way in which the present is so fleeting that one moment it is the future and the next it is the past. It is a time that is impossible to stop, in a continuous planning of what will be and rethinking of what has been.
Objects retain traces of what has been, of the moods of those who handled them, of the desire of those who wanted them and the rejection of those who abandoned them.
The title of the work comes from a sentence in Louis-Ferdinand Céline's London that describes this very well:
'Elle est dure la peine qui monte des objets quand personne ne veut plus d'eux. On n'a ni défense, ni rigueur pour l'ameublement. La mort d'un ornement c'est la mort d'une âme. Un peu de grimace et de honte et c'est fini.'
(The pain of objects is hard when no one wants them anymore. We have neither defence nor firmness when it comes to furniture. The death of a piece of furniture is the death of a soul. A quick grimace of shame and it's over.)
L'Alba, 2025
Metal, stones, book; 41x14x62 cm
Two flat stones with holes in them, hung on the wall by an iron support, hold a book between them. Only the bottom part of the cover is visible, on which the phrase “Il Primo Giorno Della Creazione” (The First Day Of Creation) can be read.
The phrase, taken from Elsa Morante's L'Isola di Arturo, is used in an old Einaudi edition as a summary of the book written at the bottom of the cover.
The Club, 2025
Bronze; 65x13x12 cm (closed)
A caveman's club, like those children usually play with at carnival time, harmless because it is made of plastic, has been made in bronze and divided lengthwise into two parts of equal size. The two inner surfaces thus obtained are engraved with the letters G and D spaced apart so that another letter could be placed in the centre, and on the other with the letter O positioned so that once the two parts of the club are joined together inside, the word GOD is created.
Play, invention, violence, faith, idolatry, all things that come together in the Club.
The Dream, 2025
Patinated bronze; 17x10x10 cm
‘We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep,’ says Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest. The phrase is engraved on a shape reminiscent of human excrement curled up on itself.