PHILS - WITHOUT WORDS, WITHOUT NOISE

Cold, inanimate bodies, without the breath of life to revive them. Or not, living bodies.

The moment you look at a sculpture of Phils, you are immediately enraptured by a shiver of conflicting emotions and a question immediately arises inwardly: how do steel bodies create an emotional wave of such magnitude?

It is as if the material of which they are made, immediately ends up in the background, overcome by the desire to investigate these figures, such poses, these facial expressions. You want to look at them closely, these people like robots, but at the same time, they are light years away from them.  You want to put your face very close to one of them and ask: who are you? Talk to me! Open your eyes!

They are not even whole bodies; they are pieces of bodies! Pieces of steel and plaster bodies, without color except the cold blue of the faces. Yet alive, it is undeniable. With the works of Phils, art reveals one of its greatest mysteries, enclosed in the way (in the infinite ways) with which inanimate matter comes to life and literally begins to interact with those who observe it. No words, no noise.

And so, walking during these presences, one breathes silence and peace, mystery, announcement of precious moments. All these being released by soft lines to which Phils bends his material that softly becomes a word of material poems. They are incomplete figures, solitary or in pairs, with the face looking elsewhere to something that perhaps we cannot see: the eyes are closed as if to demand intimacy, respect for something private.  Or they simply allow themselves to be observed, not involved by the modesty and hesitations of the world.

The faces express sweetness, affection, perhaps love.

His steel hugs are soft, the poses of his solitary women are inviting. They seem enclosed in an eternal emotion, as if they were real people kidnapped by their most intense moments to be transformed into plaster and steel figures.  It is essential to add: with their consent! Because we do not see suffering but at most a slight melancholy of those who have chosen to give up something to go further.

Incomplete, the human forms of Phils, look like ghostly apparitions in a contemporary version, as if they were composed of pixels that come and go based on signal strength. Signal that does not come from a modem with a switch, or from the mosaic of antennas and satellites that inhabits the globe and its atmosphere. It is a signal that comes from an elsewhere as impalpable as it is alive... An invisible elsewhere not because it is far beyond our galaxy, but because it is hidden in the depths of those who conceived these sculptures.

The seed of each figure is in the plaster cast molded on real people that the artist chooses. And the position of his works derives from postures that have excited him, involved him in the life of flesh and blood, and that he now makes, with a load of "magic" not measurable, through the materials of his art. Eternally immobile, these figures are a storm of emotions that has nothing to do with immobility.

The figures of Phils are not human, yet it cannot be said that they are not, perhaps in some respects they are more human than us, inviting reflection, gentle abandonment to pleasant thoughts and sensations. In the age of robotics and the dematerialization of everything (at any cost), these material presences seem to be the bearers of multiform and contrasting messages. Do they represent a way of saying that nothing is inhuman if it is born from human artistic inspiration? Is there any nostalgia for the soft human body in their being made of cold matter? I don't think so: is there anything softer than those steel forms? The vital breath of art breathes in the artist's mind and through his hands the material takes shape and life. A mysterious life, of mysterious figures of mysterious worlds that we are not given to see, only imagine, starting from the elegant and soft clues of this discreet and gentle steel.

Miriam Fusconi