When Nature Gives Shape to Beauty

Erminio Tansini’s “Elusive Shapes” are unpredictable and free as only Nature can create, complying with plant life during its growth and development and its return to the environment at the end of its life cycle. It happens during this phase that the artist […] salvages stumps, roots, branches and trunks coming up on beaches and on pebbly riverbeds […]: smoothed by the water and rocks, whitened by the sun and wind, presenting themselves as inimitable wooden sculptures each gifted with a message. […] The shots […] place Tansini’s sculptures in landscapes and rocky sites, cliffs, castles, and archaeological places in Italy, Switzerland, France and Monaco.

The photographs show plots, superimpositions, muddles of masses and layers; they are the creations obtained by the artist when he assembles the natural evidence, after restoring the wooden material. Shapes and volume – put in relation to places even those usually ignored by cultural exhibitions – read according to aesthetic messages suggested by the onlooker’s sensitivity: real and true photographic sets built, ‘recreating’ and taking into account light, vegetation, terrain, the presence of water, altitude and background elements.

The lens capturing the fleeting moment of these situations enlivens with surreal tones that are emanated by flooring and unusual combinations between sculptures and surroundings, not deprived in some cases of symbolic accents. […] The creation of wooden sculptures has been flanking Tansini’s pictorial sphere for thirty years. However he has intimately hidden them; their first public exhibition goes back to 2017, to the 57th Venice Biennale.

Marina Arensi

Taken from; “Il Cittadino”, Lodi, 219, CXXX, 2019, p. 40. Translated from Italian by Lorna Rossi.