Piscitelli sculpture finds home
in front of Langford C building

From inside and outside of his newly installed sculpture, “In Between the Lines,” artist Paolo Piscitelli, an assistant lecturer in Texas A&M’s Department of Visualization, has provided new views in front of Building C of the Langford Architecture Center.

Piscitelli created the sculpture at the college’s Architecture Ranch at Texas A&M’s Riverside Campus as part of its spring 2008 Artist-in-Residence program.

He made the piece to help him experience what at the time was a new landscape for him: the Brazos Valley of Texas.

“It was a way for me to look at the landscape in Texas that is flat with strong light,” he said. “The sculpture is really working as a modulator of light.”

Born in Venaria, Italy, he is one of a small number of Italian artists involved in overturning the logic of sculpture as the image of an object designed for visual consumption. Instead, he sees sculpture as more of a negative than a positive; that is, he creates sculptures with empty space inside that viewers can experience from inside looking out.

“I usually use empty space as the matter of the work,” he said. “My sculpture is closer to the idea of architecture than traditional sculpture, which is a positive, and this is more of a negative,” he said.

He used his body to determine the size of the piece, creating a shell made of thin wood slats with enough separation between them to see the outside world through the piece.

To build the piece in the spring 2008 semester, Piscitelli, during his second stint as an artist-in-residence, worked with six students to prepare the material, then began to create the piece, working from the ground up, always from inside the growing shell he was creating.

“I wasn’t able to control the form from the outside,” he said, “but I was controlling it from the inside. The shell outside was my blind point.”

“Each level in between the lines, the boards,” he said, “was a way to see the different part of this horizontal landscape with a different tone of light during the day,” he said.

Since Piscitelli’s debut solo exhibition in 1996, “Nuovi Arrivi,” at Galleria San Filippo, Torino, he has exhibited widely throughout Europe. He has participated in one-man exhibitions at Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Torino; Tucci Russo Studio per l’Arte Contemporanea, Artissima 10, Torino, and Galerie Paolo Boselli, Brussels.