Sculpture can be,and has been,many things. If today we most often regard it as a language of disinterested contemplation, as a formal and intellectual practice, and more rarely as a public or commemorative device, in the past sculpture was deeply engaged, like so many other art forms, in a close dialogue with architecture, with life itself, and with those forms of power that shaped and governed the spaces of daily existence.

In his work, Luca Monterastelli investigates the contemporary space in which sculpture survives, often to evoke the residues of functions it has gradually lost. The exhibition Storia di un onest’uomo (“History of an Honest Man”) is no exception. Its very title reveals a central tendency in Monterastelli’s practice: the conception, development, and placement of individual works within a larger narrative framework to which the broader installation alludes. A framework that emerges first through words, even before materials and forms take shape: through texts and short compositions that sometimes bear a poetic inflection, yet never shy away from the possibilities,and the risks,of registers that veer toward farce or epic.

For the exhibition conceived for the Oratorio San Filippo Neri in Bologna, this narrative impulse,which is integral to Monterastelli’s sculptural practice to the point of being almost definable as a modelling technique in itself,took the form of a brief “story” without events but dense with inner images. I reproduce it here in full, not only because the words of artists matter, but also because they often constitute a core which, opaque or transparent in meaning, is capable,like the works themselves,of releasing resonance and fascination over time:

“I imagined transforming the oratory into the refuge of a person,any person,seeking to retreat from a collapsing world into a small safe haven. I wanted to imagine giving him these works so that he could both protect himself and feel threatened by them, ensuring that the drafts of ruin seeping in from the outside world would continue to disturb him despite his attempts to silence them. These iron sculptures, resting on their own supports, are shaped around the body. A body that, while yielding to the tender necessity of protection, forgets its former freedom of movement. I had conceived them as adornments for a ballet, but in the end I chose to leave them on their own, so that their negatives would become more memory than posthuman prosthesis. The rest of the environment is configured as a shelter punctuated by sculptures and existing elements reconfigured within the space.”

Taking the form of fragments of armour,beyond history because they have passed through it,sculpture here returns to the body as shield and protection, as a screen to ward off blows. A militarized body, then, which, under the urgent need for defense, hardly notices it has been fully colonized by power, transformed into just another instrument of attack. Sustained by a perpetual sense of alert and danger, this body,carried into our present after inhabiting other centuries,projects ghosts and threats into the outside world. In doing so, it gradually transforms the vital necessity of protection into embellishments that become increasingly offensive. The “honest man” of the title, his condition of being an “anyone,” his exclusion from decisive roles elevated to a quality, emerge as infallible, sharpened weapons in the hands of ideology.

The body,whether individual or collective, whether of architecture or of art,is always present in Monterastelli’s work, even when absent. At the center of his practice lies something the body,whether of flesh, opinion, or marble,must always confront: the persistence of history and violence in materials and forms, in spaces and beliefs beyond the circumscribed time in which both act. Through assemblages that most often appear abstract, Monterastelli selects fragments of the formal language employed by political discourse and power,from architecture to decoration, from the devices of entertainment to those of war,and presents them in a state of fracture, caught in the passage from spectral efficiency to faltering remnant. Such is the case with these weapons, at times phantasmagoric and at others paralyzing like oversized orthopedic prostheses: it is unclear when their blunt force began to turn against itself.

The steel of these sculptures is shaped around the dimensions and parts of an abstract, generic body,the volumes bent around the idea of shoulders, chest, elbows, and the face of a man who is not only honest, but at once many and no one. These are ornaments of protection that, paradoxically, demand protection themselves. Thus begins the mechanism by which the anticipation of danger and attack demands ever more space, progressing from the scale of the vitrine to that of the cockpit, of the unit capable of containing a man together with his instruments. All of these structures, in the half-light that surrounds them, are equipped with their own illumination, for autonomy of light is an essential provision in emergencies. It is an internal light more than an interior one, a service light more than a matter of personal enlightenment,the factual occurrence of an event that marks them in the dark, more autonomous cells than spiritual monads.

For the first time, moreover, the artist employs pre-existing elements found within the exhibition space as essential components of the installation. The orderly rows of seating intended for the Oratory’s cultural audiences are disrupted,some benches toppled onto their sides, raised as gentle, padded barricades. There is something in this dense, orthogonal disorder,something silently upended,that, in redrawing the space, evokes sudden jolts of history, convulsions that interrupted and shifted the nature and appearance of this place. Like all spaces, it is a body: its conversion into a military barracks in 1866 after the suppression of religious orders; its near-total destruction in the bombing of January 29, 1944; the two decades after 1953 when it became a warehouse for construction materials; until Pier Luigi Cervellati’s restoration at the end of the 1990s, which thematized the amputation of the vaults and dome,tellingly, through the device of a wooden framework that revealed a void even as it manifested it.