The work was designed, by Tresoldi, to be part of “A POP Saga,” in “Dante. The Eyes and the Mind” third exhibition series at MAR. Tresoldi drew inspiration from the Noble Castle of Dante’s Inferno, a symbolic place inhabited by the souls of those who left honor and fame behind after death.
“They are the great souls of antiquity – philosophers, poets, scientists and writers – with grave and slow-moving eyes. People who were great in their earthly lives because of their moral qualities, but who are destined to eternal suffering because they lack the theological virtues.”
Edoardo Tresoldi
Sacral, installed in the cloister of the MAR, allows visitors to physically enter the work, observe a fragmented dome massing, representing the Noble Castle and, as if in a performance, to retrace Dante’s journey, an “extremely imaginative experience, and fully interactive with the surrounding landscape.”
“An archetypal image is capable of creating a dialogue between past and present, using a language comprising of meanings that recur over time. In the 16th-century cloister of the MAR, Sacral acts as the memory of a somewhere we have already been, a familiar image that introduces the visitor to the exploration of Dante”.
Edoardo Tresoldi
The contemporary art section of the exhibition explores various themes in Dante, such as souls, journeys, women, dreams and light, which have been selected to guide visitors through the exhibition. One or more artists have been chosen for each theme, to reinterpret people and place in Dante’s Divine Comedy through their work.
Sacral is the latest in a series of wire mesh installations by Tresoldi. In 2018, the artist designed three cathedrals for the Coachella festival in California, one of which was subsequently put on display in Rome in 2020. In July of last year, Tresoldi designed a series of 46 pillars forming a colonnade along the Italian seaside town of Reggio Clabria. In 2020, the artist unveiled a large-scale wire mesh sculpture suspended from the ceiling of the Cathédrale restaurant in New York City. Also in 2016 his reconstruction of the early-Christian Basilica of Siponto, which won the Gold Medal for Italian Architecture.
