Maurizio Mochetti: Studio Casoli.

Since the mid '60s Maurizio Mochetti has often used technological means to define space in surprising ways. Although he has resisted all attempts to identify his work with arte povera or Pop, Mochetti has exhibited objects including a reproduction of the conical point of Lockheed's F-104 Star fighter and an image of the Nazis' Natter rocket. His intention in these works, however, was not to engage in a critique, but rather to set up paradoxical situations. Similarly, during the '70s, when he launched a rocket that self-destructed after ascending for two kilometers, or constructed a sphere that had to be preserved at a tem-preserved at a temperature below freezing, he was addressing the relationship between the content of the work and the object itself, between the artwork's immateriality and materiality.

Since the early '80s Mochetti has used laser beams to create spaces that are at once impalpable and very precise. Whereas during the '60s he experimented with natural light under controlled conditions, or used projections to define forms that appeared solid, in this show - Mochetti's first in a number of years - he exhibited two pieces in which a point of red light was as much a metaphysical element as a physically concentrated beam. A "pendulum," which consisted of a long, oscillating metal bar, was suspended from the gallery ceiling so that it almost reached the ground; the movement of the bar generated an ellipse of light on the floor. The second piece consisted of an arrow suspended in the air, as though it had been shot from a bow; the arrow's trajectory was emphasized by the laser beam that passed along it, exiting the gallery window and dissolving in the daylight outside.

These works consisted of three elements: the tangible materials; the laser beam, at once material and immaterial; and finally an unspecified but inescapable element - time. In effect, time is what unifies Mochetti's work; in the end, almost all his pieces have involved its visualization. Many works also invite one to complete a form in one's imagination, or to conclude a trajectory. These actions are not merely destined to unfold over time: they allow the sensation of having perceived time and its transformation into invisibility. His arrow thus has no target, only a direction.

- Marco Meneguzzo

Translated from the Italian by Marguerite Shore.