Davide Rivalta's works at the XXII Triennale with the exhibition Animalia/Umbracula

The Soprintendenza Archeologia Belle Arti e Paesaggio of Milan is participating in the themes of the XXII International Exhibition of the Milan Triennale 2019 with an Animalia/Umbracula installation featuring animal sculptures by Davide Rivalta (Bologna, 1974), one of the most appreciated contemporary Italian sculptors: an aluminum Rhinoceros and three bronze Buffaloes placed in the garden near the entrance to the Triennale Palace in Viale Alemagna 6.

In the previous edition of the Triennale (the XXI) in 2016, the Soprintendenza had participated with the Umbracula Pavilion, designed by architect Attilio Stocchi, a kind of perforated pergola inspired by the Sala delle Asse in Castello, but elliptical in shape. Umbracula had then housed Fausto Melotti’s sculptures of the two Saviors, a modern edition of the Saviors of Athens, and screens inside the pavilion had projected images on the theme of man - architecture - sculpture.An anthropocentric, but bicentric, dialectical logos (the Saviors were two and back to back) consistent with the Ellipse of the two-center pavilion, the fires of the ellipse, in a philosophical dialogue about the becoming of architecture, was highlighted.

This goal was partial, the idea was in fact to devote a second stage to animals, to the other realm with another gaze, precisely to highlight the partiality of the anthropocentric view congenital to Western thought. The auspicious occasion came with the XXII Triennial on the theme Broken Nature.

Just as Broken Nature “studies the state of the bonds that unite humans with the natural environment, some of which have been compromised throughout history,” so Animalia rediscovers animals in the city, those we don’t notice (carved into facades and adorning squares and streets). Brera High School art students, led by their professors, ventured out on this treasure hunt in search of the Stone Fauna in Milan.

Inside the Umbracula pavilion, the four screens housed in the pillars show the images, photographed by the boys in their patrols in the city, of animals carved in the buildings, churches, and gardens of the city, to discover that animals driven out of the city return in the guise of stone, an invasion of which we are unaware, a presence to be rediscovered as in a treasure hunt.

And of course at Animalia/Umbracula the sculptor Davide Rivalta, who prefers animals in his production, is exceptionally participating: gorillas, lions, buffalos, horses, leopards, eagles, the sculptures of his personal contemporary bestiary. Animalia in Milan at the XXII Triennale prepares for a peaceful invasion: as mentioned above, an aluminum Rhinoceros and three bronze Buffaloes by Davide Rivalta approach the entrance, arriving from Sempione Park. They are expressive, large sculpted animals that cross Umbracula’s eye sockets, a little bit intrigued, a little bit indifferent, to move away from it and beyond.

The life-size Rhinoceros relates directly to the Umbracula pavilion it is facing, crossing the metal orbit drawn in the lawn. The three life-size Buffaloes cross the Umbracula area and go beyond in the direction of the Triennial thus marking an arrival, a return of the animal. They follow an autonomous trajectory but are not indifferent to the encounter with the Rhinoceros. Their representation and presentation have the effect of unbalancing anthropocentric gravitation - man the measure of all things - and provoke the epiphanic emergence of an otherness, not so much oppositional as pacifying.

Davide Rivalta(Bologna, 1974) is a mild artist whose work never has an invasive character and always seeks to relate to the context in which it temporarily or permanently takes place. Never embellishment or decoration, never illustration or allegory in relation to the environment that welcomes it, his work stands as a form of dialogue with what is around it in terms of both cultural-historical and ongoing practice and experience. The techniques, which Davide Rivalta prefers from his beginnings, are sculpture and graphite wall drawing, primary media that date to the origin of art itself as the exclusive prerogative of the human species. His subjects have always been animals, caught in their specificity as species and individuals, and as such different from the human.

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Source: press release

Davide Rivalta's works at the XXII Triennale with the exhibition Animalia/Umbracula

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