“Tensions” is a word common to all of Paolo Icaro’s work, and he has specifically chosen it for his show at Studio la Città. These are all recent works, dating at the most from the second half of the 1990s, and in them the physical and mental sense of “tension” is highlighted and manipulated. Lengths of pre-stressed steel cable casually placed on the floor, or a strip of steel bent under the weight of plaster (series of works that form the nucleus of the show), are the image – and the reality – of a tension that at once shifts from visual reality towards a metaphoric meaning; an unstable, constrained reality that aims at returning to a calm state and that searches for the best “place” to stay: these are all states of Icaro’s material and also of his – and our – existential condition. And it all comes about through tiny shifts, minimal variants, imperceptible movements, because tension is in the nature of things, even though it cannot always be seen: so the artist “makes visible the invisible” that surrounds us every day.
Marco Meneguzzo, 2013