Furnitures are the guardians of our memories. They host objects that have belonged to us and keep the memory of our body and our daily concerns. Furnitures are watching us, they have a soul and a story.
By a careful and indiscreet operation, Leopoldo Mazzoleni sections and dismembers them. He cuts the doors and drawers, then with hinges and screws he gives a new joint to the fragments. He invents a new syntax of variable angles for them: he opens the closed forms, eliminates the boundaries between inside and outside, makes mobile what is static. About this, let us agree that he fully supports the etymology: these furnitures are truly mobiles.

 

But this transformation does not erase the memory of objects. The furniture still contains his past: it carries it with him, out of it, embedded in the history of its transformations. If we focus on time or space, the work starts from a breach and is emerging as a long journey in search of a form. Destruction and Construction are one and same process. But it is a destruction without violence, meditated, necessary, perhaps even therapeutic. By stripping furniture of any function, the artist-architect exposes them to become, to uncertainty, to failure. Each movement is a dice rolling and requires adjustments, knuckles, counterweight, unexpected deviations, replacements or turnover. These furniture extend - as the act of thinking - in a thousand directions of space: they measure, explore and enjoy the course, but their balance remains precarious. As objects of architecture they remind slums or emergency constructions ( social, economic, environmental, cultural ) in a world far more fragile than we thought.

 

It is however not an irreversible process. As an upside projected film these tormented surfaces can still turn back and recompose the image of the original form. But it is clear that this is illusionism, the closed form is no longer one of many possible configurations, as chaos. An ephemeral image ready to dissolve, a hallucination, an Alacazam. Here is revealed the more playful or even grotesque aspect of these works . There is humor in this lonely Buffet appearing to face us in amazement , so troubled to still be there or not to be there any longer . Or in honest Comodino ( Bedside table ), ready to collapse , or in this ergonomic object, Sedia Da Giardino ( garden chair ), which gives our eyes the spectacle of a stitched body as well as possible after multiple fractures. We tend to project our humanity on these abused objects, as if the breaks had finally made them like us.

It seems like the artist sees furniture as ideal objects to stage his (our ) conditions. But this work is not a performance,  or an organized show for the audience. The artist did not intend to "represent". Rather he wants to question these objects and let wisely be questioned by them.

 

The key to the works of Leopoldo Mazzoleni must be found in the identity between the plastic space and an unreachable and deep interior space. Just look Piede De Armadio n.1 ( Closet foot n.1) , this piece of curved wood, support a missing piece of furniture , which firstly looks like a curious toy. However , this toy makes us uncomfortable . These pieces of grafted trees and coarsely attached by hinges have something sinister , obscure . They are black parentheses , discontinuities , perhaps remains of the furniture missing ? It is curious that so rudimentary mechanics can give us the feeling of something fluid : this is indeed the case . The base of the cabinet became an enigmatic object.

Porte (Door) also shows traces of this anti-matter : the door, which has ceased to be a diaphragm between two physical locations has cowered - creating within itself a multiform space - seems to give us access to a higher dimension of space and time. This door hanging from its hinges between being and non-being , demands a subtle replacement from our point of view. And doubt takes us all these elusive objects and specimens, emancipated and tragic , would not they an anamorphosis , a distorted image that waits patiently to be understood, to be observed by the eye of an angel.

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