March 2020 | The Master Legacy comes from marble.

In Turin, a young artist works Carrara marble to reproduce sculptures of everyday objects. Nazareno Biondo had attracted our attention for several years, after having sculpted a block of Carrara marble of 15 tons to reproduce the historic Fiat 500 in full size, a work that he considers a critique of today's consumerist and crisis society.

Its marble 500 is the symbol of a time that no longer exists. To be able to recreate the sculpture of the car, he spent three months in his workshop in Cafasse, a small town on the outskirts of Turin.

Last December we met him right there, in his natural habitat: a large industrial environment, entirely covered by a thin white layer that gives every object, every furniture and every tool an aura of mystical purity, almost as if we were in the interior of a cathedral abandoned for centuries. This is precisely the power of Carrara marble, a noble material famous all over the world for its qualities and its history, from the Renaissance to today. Nazareno wisely works this material to create perfect scale reproductions of fast-consuming products, which we usually throw away and allow to degrade over time: cigarette butts, bottle caps, cans, condoms, even those masks that are never before as now among the main objects. used (and thrown away) in our daily lives.

His sculptures take a freeze-frame of the transience of these objects captured at their peak, an instant after being consumed by us, and make them eternal in marble. With this artistic approach he has created for us a perfect replica of the new MOA Legacy, recovering a scrap of that same titanic block from which his famous Fiat 500 had taken shape. Armed with his circular saw, a mask to keep the dust away. and his inseparable leather biker jacket, Nazareno began to work on the piece slowly and meticulously to get to "free" a perfect reproduction of the Legacy from its prison of white marble.

We experienced the working process as a solemn ritual that we had had the rare privilege of witnessing, then having the finished work in front of our eyes was a shocking experience. Our Legacy is now an eternal work, carved in the most famous marble in the world.