The works of Ugo Schiavi are a confrontation. His studio a battlefield. His struggles with the raw materials invariably hold a symbolic punch.

His works – installations and sculptures – are built upon fragments that he gleans from an image-saturated world. There is something iconoclastic about the way Ugo Schiavi handles an image. If sculpture is an image that refuses to submit to its two-dimensionality, then the artist’s commitment to this transition is a very physical one. His works are the product of these often brutal transformations.

Schiavi’s relationship to statuary is almost archaeological: beyond the high-definition veneer of his recent figurative sculptures accident and ruin remain. His works provoke a visual shock: a compelling sensation of a clash between the antique and the contemporary.

Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques