Angelo Brescianini

Biography

Angelo Brescianini (1948-2016) was born in Palazzolo sull’Oglio, in the province of Brescia, as the last of four siblings. At the age of 12 Brescianni participated in his first collective exhibition while studying mechanical design. Moreover, during the late 60’s he created his first bronze sculpture, which is currently exhibited at Istituto Scolastico Enrico Fermi di Palazzolo. In 1968 he joined the military in Verona while continuing to paint in his spare time: these are the years of his first attempts of “shots” on rusty metal plates. In the same year he participated in the Padova Biennale with a painting by the title Painful Waiting (this might be a reference to finally leaving the military), with whom he gains his first recognition. At the end of his military service he was hired to control the fusion of iron, bronze and aluminium in a metal company that he left from shorty after to open a workshop for cabinet makers in the seventies. In this period he participated in art fairs and collective exhibitions, showing his sculptures of wood which ultimately lead him to join the artistic staff of Spirale Arte in Milan. In 1991 the death of his sister provoked an immense pain which influenced his artistic production of works with complex structures filled with expression and intelligence. For almost eight years the artist gradually gave up his work with furnitures, devoting himself exclusively to structural/chromatic works. The friendship and collaboration with the Argentinian kinetic artist Horacio Garcia Rossi lead him in the direction of development and production of optical sculptures in movement.

Angelo Brescianini created his masterpieces using a new instrument with great potential that differs from the means he regularly used, namely guns. The artist saw the enormous potential and the surprise effect it generated among the viewers. His dynamic visions followed kinetic patterns that the artist grasps in a continuos change of levels and forms. This is how the first creations of shaped surfaces altered by the bullets were born in the laboratory, as the result of a carefully organized ritual: trigger of the bullet, angle, and distance of shoot. Strangely, in an astonishing contrast, the alteration of the surface sometimes offers the flexuous and refined form of a breast. On the cold steel plate the artist managed to convey the light that embellish its essentiality. The shiny satin sheets in blue, white, red and yellow, are never perforated thanks to Brescianini’s great capability to measure the gunpowder inside the bullets. The use of stainless steel, a material that is capable of transmitting only to whole composition, allows him to create the “bugnature”, which proves to be a daring manifestation of beauty. These bugnatures come out of the metal, collect the light and create unexpected and sinuous paths of fleeting moments. Drawings made on the steel bases are classic and unusual geometric forms. By many critics this new technique now considered a revolution in the international artistic panorama, since nobody has ever used guns to create a work of art. Brescianini’s intent is always to aim at the idea of the expansion and spontaneity of creating the artwork.