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A kind of brutal bricolage, disquieting and exhaustive, might be a provisional definition of the work process of Angelo Venosa. In its origins there is certainly the in viability of design, the concept of shape and project. The result here maliciously contradicts the final idea itself the reflexive torsions, the patent lines of heavy long drawn out activity, end up strongly close to the skeleton and mimicry. And thus they remain, hypertrophied, saturated beginnings, as if interrupted by the physical and psychic exhaustion of the artist in his search for and elaboration of the current Form, that which comes to exist in a modern extenuated now, worn out by more than a century of revolutionary manoeuvres, disenchanted by almost a century of overbearing institutionalization.

What makes all this still attractive and cogent, is the absurd certainty with which the sculptor pursues the form, seeks a structure, aesthetic, hypothetical and whimsical as it may be, which is in the midst of a formless ambience, formless because it is so poorly uniform. Art would therefore fulfill the perverse promise held out since Baudelaire: to discover, to reveal and explore the flaws and lapses, the illusions of the Real and the fallacies of Reason. And to reply with an imponderable but authentic and true poem. In fact the operation lies in the symmetrical inversion of the dominant formal logic ‑ the Form obtained by means of what is formless and deformed. From the start there is an ethical decision: the rejection of the sum total of vague approximations, the electronics of indifference, which by force of routine and the law of inertia end up creating a succession of objects and, consequently, a real world, too real, although inconsistent. Against this anodyne logic, this pasteurized life, the work embarks upon a fierce debate of Yeses and Nos selections and choices, unpredictable, problematic and instable, but in the end selections and choices. With all its precariousness and indetermination, these are strong and resolute pieces: resolutely ambiguous, strongly undefined. Whoever struggles arduously to achieve and identity, a fluid and even morbid identity, is not likely to want to give it up in favor of any current symbol, image or allegory. On the contrary, faced with a neutral and lukewarm situation and which, for this very reason, demands that things should have an easily recognizable outline and character, the work does not offer any other reply except its very own experimental existence; no belief or moral except to carry forward its casual, singular and transitory, though intense, proposal.

And the pathos would be, as / see it, without any affectation, post‑nuclear. Beginning with the complete lack of distinction between nature and industry in the choice and use of materials. A body of imagination cremated as it were to ensures the paradoxical congruence between disparate and fractured elements, which serve as the object of an almost orthopedic reconstitution. They already appear, therefore, after the destruction. As if every appearance, at this point, were tardy and irretrievable. Art would thus reside precisely in the act of positively determining and authenticating the moment of this second appearance. Or as André Breton says about the decrepit figure of Artaud, to make youth recognize itself forever in these "cremated banners'

Rio de Janeiro, setembro de 1987