Antonio Sant’Elia

A sculptor certainly, but trained in a chiseling workshop. In his long working life Eli Riva always worked directly on the material, without the use of sketches or preliminary drawings. For this reason he had a profound sense of being “heir of the Comacine Masters.”In addition to his technical knowledge, he was possessed of a historical and aesthetic awareness, leading him always to aspire to the “production of not-before-seen images. Starting out in the 1950s from a figuratively essential, monumental and massive production he steadily moved towards a kind of figural naturalism, to then go on to dematerialise this during the years in which the European “informal” movement emerged. From the mid–1960s he felt ready to take on the absolute freedom afforded by abstraction. The Portrait of Sant’Elia arose from his very close personal affection for the visionary architect who died prematurely. Riva, kept the bust for some years in his studio, decided to donate the work to the Pinacoteca in 1999. This homage to Sant’Elia is symptomatic of the great value he placed on the futuristic thought of this architect who was for Riva the personification of the contemporary architect par excellence. He portrayed him in his hat, an inseparable part of his look, using the wood that Riva inherited from a magnolia fallen at Villa Olmo, for which he promised a second life. So it was that the magnolia came back to life as “Sant’Elia,”(G. Riva)