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Angelo Venosa's work questions the concept of mimesis. His art does not refuse the imitate nature, like the majority of this century's aesthetic theories, nor does it reduce nature to a system of signs, an image, or a perceptive stimulus, as do the realist and neo‑figurative schools. In Venosa, imitation takes place from the inside out and attacks the world from behind. Simulating organic procedures, it repeats the relationship between skeleton and skin, between bone and cartilage, or between fluid and coagulated materials. Placing itself not ahead of nature but behind it, as if nature were produced by his gesture, the artist literally takes on the role of creator. He is, nonetheless, a creator unable to transmit life. On the contrary, the act of formalizing stills the organic process in a hollow, motionless tension and the sculpture thus resembles its prehistoric matrix: the mummy. The act of reproducing, like the breaking of a taboo, engenders a curse: the natural object dries up, swells, loses function and meaning. In it only the primary impulse remains, frozen in a useless effort: stretched skin and teeth.

In one of the pieces in this exhibition, Venosa makes a circular arrangement of femur joints, faithfully imitated in marble. The dead organism becomes the model for a large sculpture composed of one hundred and forty‑two iron sheets, piled up like altimetrical line on a map. Stripped of func­tion, detailed by a calculation of engineering, the Form of the bone becomes arbitrary and reveals the Fragility of the distinction between organic and a inorganic, between form and Formless. nevertheless, the uncommon weight of the sculpture itself, its excess of mass, the way in which the sheets are overlaid as in Volta's battery ‑ all this restores to the object a halo of vitality, a mesmerizing electricity.

 In the wax sculptures, the contrast between organicity and formalization is even clearer. Parallelepiped polished cylinders, they posses an equally geometrical opening which pierces them from one side to another, shot through with teeth. The teeth transform the hollow interiors of the figures into a throat or a stomach, which, instead of settling them in space, attacks them. The wax, itself in fact organic matter, possessed a respiration which contradicts the mathematical rigidity of the planes. If, in the other sculptures, Venosa congeals the organic material, here he proceeds in the opposite direction: starting from a perfect [and therefore dead] form, he establishes a greedy, passionate relationship with the empty space. He transforms geometry into organism. What is therefore at stake is not the imitation of life's appearances but the imitation of life itself, of the way life appropriates space. The aggressive emotiveness, which exhales from these works lies neither in the receiver nor in the producer - Venosa’s gesture is cold, as is the gaze he demands. It emerges from the work itself like some sort of deaf will, half‑Faded from surviving at the cost of everything that sur­rounds it. From this, and not because of any deformity or macabre detail, does it derive its monstrous quality.

In order that life may he recreated, materials must he capable both of living and of being dead. Because of this. the elemeita to be investigated are those in which the living being is confused with the inanimate thing: the bones and the teeth, the wax, the shells of large insects. Or, on the other hand, the metals, iron and lead, high density masses, in which vital energy may he accumulated before being returned to circulation. It is always imbalance that gives life to this dried out, mummified, inert material. An excess of lightness, as in the works exhibited at the São Paulo Biennal, large insects which appear to have grown beyond the limits of their own mass. An excess if density, as in the latest works. Or even a sudden play, as in the skulls of two oxen joined by the teeth, welded together by cast metal ‑ twin animals caught unawares by death in the act of devouring one another. Because it guaranteed their permanence, death has saved them. And yet the dead form makes sense if it refers to the life which continually destroys itself.