L’immaginazione ci salva, Federico Cantale’s second solo show at Triangolo, is an exhibition of sculpture – of sculptures, to be precise, seven in all. Reflecting on this medium, I find myself drawn back, almost unwittingly, to something Hidetoshi Nagasawa once said, sometimes in the 1970s: «the sculptor does not work on what he sees, but on what must happen. » I believe that statement holds, within the spell of a vision at once light and faintly paradoxical, certain questions that touch the very heart of what we have understood– and, I imagine, still understand – by sculpture. So then: where is sculpture? And what space is properly its own, and its alone?

Cantale’s practice, it seems to me, intersects these trajectories and turns them into a principle. I would like, then, to speak of the works on show not as objects in the strict sense, but as objects despite themselves: bodies that are at once gesture and image, playing out that ambivalence in ways neither symmetrical nor…