Nino Longobardi

 

 

From the very beginning of his work at the end of the Seventies Nino Longobardi displayed an obsession with representation of the male human body. Reduced to a kind of filigree, Longobardi’s male figure displays the legacy of the traditional academic use of plaster, of its capacity to be both an ideal form and a point of departure for any type of figurative representation. Sensing the links and relationships between the signs that synthesize the
human body, Longobardi created a technique that avoids all abstract, rigid planning, but instead comes to terms with the accidental and the unexpected inherent in manual work. The final result is a work which is both linear
and material, but made up of matter which appears to be dried, condensed, coming straight out of its mould, just as in the casts of Pompei the human form appears when the empty spaces left by the bodies when they liquified in the incandescent matter are filled.
The works entitled Terrae Motus were all created following the 1980 earthquake in Irpinia. Longobardi was the first artist to answer the appeal of the gallery owner Lucio Amelio, who asked all the international artists with whom he collaborated to create works capable of transforming the tragedy of the earthquake into an opportunity for cultural rebirth for the city of Naples and the whole region.