Galleria Anna Marra is pleased to present “Short Stories”. A solo exhibition of works by Aron Demetz, curated by Claudio Libero Pisano. The exhibition brings together a group of works that have never been shown before. Most are rather small in size, but they mark a moment of profound synthesis in the research of the artist from South Tyrol, a passage toward abstraction. Here he deprives matter of human form and makes it pure narration of time and natural cycles.

The title of the exhibition establishes a parallelism with the work of the writer Raymond Carver. Just as this American writer sounds his every day of characters, eliminating any lyrical ornament to reach the naked truth of their “short story”, just so Demetz works on the wood with his millimetric carving.

The artist does not limit himself to sculpting his material, he studies it, bringing out its essence: its growth rings. In these sculptures the formal reduction is the result of refined conceptual research. Demetz separates the spring (lighter coloured) rings from the darker winter ones. He works on the grain and the transparencies, transforming the wood into a calendar without time. Each work becoming a fragment of memory, a short story that encapsulates in a few centimeters the power of an entire creative universe.

Wood from sequoia trees is the protagonist of this exhibition. This monumental tree comes from North America, but for more than a century it has been an integral part of the Italian landscape. Demetz has used wood from trees that were struck down by Xylella, a disease that is bringing about their disappearance. He has simply opted to use that which nature has provided: the tree’s lives have ended, but the life of their wood has not.

Wood is the constant in his poetica, an identifying choice linked to the artist’s roots in Val Gardena. Through a study of the phloem – the innermost layer of the bark and the one which transports the sap – Demetz reminds us of the vital function of consciousness: which, like sap nurtures the plant’s growth, in the same way art and culture nurture human emancipation. In this perfect circle the end corresponds to the beginning, and sculpture becomes the link between Nature’s action and the language of Art.