As part of the ninth edition of the Lerici Music Festival, from July 25 to Aug. 8, 2025 Villa Marigola will host Fratture Armoniche, a solo exhibition by Arcangelo Sassolino curated by Carlo Orsini and produced in collaboration withGalleriaContinua. The exhibition project is part of the program Music, Image, Movement, the central theme of the 2025 edition of the Festival, and represents the second appointment with contemporary art within the music event.
Fracture Armoniche proposes a reflection on the relationships between image, sound and movement, without any of the components prevailing over the other. The path is developed through about ten works, including installations and graphic works, arranged in the indoor and outdoor spaces of Villa Marigola, the Festival’s historical venue and the place chosen to host this intermedial investigation. The aim of the exhibition is not to offer a unified synthesis between artistic languages, nor to aspire to the ideal of gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art, but rather to activate a dynamic dialogue between sound and image, in which the viewer’s perception continually oscillates between visual reality and sound suggestion.
The art project develops from the thought of Dave Higgins, an exponent of the Fluxus group, who formulated the notion of intermedia as a theoretical foundation to guide the selection of works and the conceptual structure of the intervention as “a non-prescriptive term (...) but a possibility wherever the desire exists to merge two or more media.”
Sassolino’s works fit into this context as outcomes of a personal sculptural quest that combines art and physics. The artist is known for using industrial materials, often taken to the limit of their structural possibilities, in order to highlight conditions of tension, fragility and risk. In his installations, matter seems to take on an almost performative behavior, visually restoring states of suspension or collapse. Sound, generated or evoked by these physical dynamics, in turn becomes a structural element of the work, contributing to a reading that simultaneously engages the viewer’s eye and ear.
The exhibition thus offers an experience in which the environment of Villa Marigola becomes part of the project, activating perceptual and spatial relationships. The works dialogue with the surrounding architecture and landscape, amplifying the effect of estrangement that characterizes Sassolino’s practice. Each installation becomes a point of friction between natural and artificial, balance and subsidence, silence and resonance.
The Vicenza-based artist’s work has been internationally recognized for the originality with which he manages to combine aesthetic dimension and mechanical experimentation. His focus on technology and engineering is functional to a broader reflection on the human condition and never an end in itself. The unpredictability of his installations, the concrete possibility of failure or sudden transformation of matter, become metaphors for the instability that accompanies existence. In this sense, the notion of failure is seen as a constitutive and inescapable element of the artistic process.
Alongside the exhibition, the Lerici Music Festival is offering a series of morning conversations dedicated to the theme of the relationship between sound, image and movement in art and music. The meetings, scheduled between late July and early August, are designed to engage different audiences, with the aim of fostering a broader understanding of contemporary languages. There will also be guided tours of the exhibition, even outside the Festival’s evening program, with the possibility of organizing specific tours for groups.
Fracture Armoniche will be accompanied by the publication of a limited edition catalog, printed in one hundred copies. The volume, conceived as an artist’s object, features a metal cover engraved by Sassolino himself and a steel insert, capable of producing sounds through movement. The editorial choice aims to extend the experience of the exhibition beyond physical space, while keeping intact the sensory dimension that characterizes the entire project.
The public opening of the exhibition is scheduled for Thursday, July 24, at 6 p.m., preceded by a press preview at 11 a.m. On the occasion of the evening opening, the panoramic terrace of Villa Marigola will host the concert Una sera a Hollywood: the magic of music in cinema, starting at 8:30 p.m. The program will feature well-known pieces from the American film tradition, performed by soprano Melinda Hughes, baritone Rodney Earl Clarke and the LMF Quartet.
Born in Montecchio Maggiore in 1967, Arcangelo Sassolino lives and works in Vicenza. His artistic practice stems from the encounter between art and physics, with an abiding interest in mechanics and technology. Through the use of forces such as pressure, heat, acceleration and gravity, Sassolino pushes matter toward the limit, exploring its thresholds of resistance. His works, often made from industrial materials, result in machines that bring inorganic performances to life. These devices stage tension, risk and collapse as an integral part of experience. Sculpture thus becomes a field of unstable forces, where failure always remains a real possibility, a metaphor for human frailty.
He has exhibited in institutions such as the Museum of Old and New Art (Hobart), Contemporary Art Museum (St. Louis), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Frankfurter Kunstverein, Museo MACRO (Rome), Villa Medici (Rome), Z33 (Hasselt), and in galleries such as Galleria Continua, Galleria dello Scudo and Repetto Gallery.
His work has been presented at the Venice Art Biennale (Malta Pavilion and International Architecture Exhibition), the Jeddah Biennial of Islamic Art, Fondation Carmignac (Porquerolles), Grand Palais (Paris), Kunstmuseum Bonn, Tinguely Museum, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, ZKM (Karlsruhe), MART Rovereto, and many other international venues.
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| Arcangelo Sassolino brings his live sculpture to Lerici Music Festival |
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