A metal base plate, a lead rod, bent into curving letters like a neon sign, and a freezer that cools this lead rod until ice crystals condense on it – the basic production details of Pier Paolo Calzolari’s Impazza Angelo Artista (Crazy Angel Artist) are as simple and technical as the impact of the work is poetic and unfathomable. The title, alluding to an artist-angel gone mad, adds an almost mythico-religious dimension to the sparse installation arrangement. 

Calzolari, one of the main representatives of Italian Arte Povera of the nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies, repeatedly deployed cold and ice as artistic media alongside organic materials, just as he did in this work, which formed part of what was known as the Casa ideale, (“Ideal House”), a kind of imaginary idealised typical art interior. In adopting this approach, the artist underlined the temporality and precarious nature of his works, yet also imbued them with something akin to existential tension, for he only considered them to be works of art in the strict sense of the term when they were activated, i.e. cooled.