Matteo Pugliese

The body has always been an obsession in the history of sculpture, a fixation that Matteo Pugliese cannot avoid. His figures – collected in his famous Extra Moenia – are bodies caught in the moment of resurrection. Or, so it seems: they might be – in bronze – the figures that Luca Signorelli visualized in the “Resurrection of the Flesh” in Orvieto Cathedral, a great series of frescoes to which even Michelangelo paid homage. Or, they are just bodies destined to vanish, emotionally depicted in the very last moment before death, along that line between being and nothing, whose length is unknown to us, extremely fine or indefinitely long, the transient line of being in this world. Pugliese's work achieves other results, too, as remarkable and extremely beautiful; the series of the “Guardians”, for example, is a theory of grandiose, almost hyper-realistic, sculptures, even the small ones and not only when they are full-sized: samurais, warriors and shamans, from all races and cultures, perfect creations in their armours, shells and jewels, imposing in their frontal and solid being.