from the Dizionario del Fare Arte Contemporaneo Universale Sansoni – Lara Vinca Masini 1992

Fogliati Piero (Canelli, Turin) Italian artist. Since the 1960s, he has explored the physical and expressive limits of perception. In experimenting with sound, movement, optics and light, his objective always is to reach what can be poetically expressed in the unexplored corridor between science and art. He works «on the knife edge of the most precarious hypotheses of science», manipulating his instruments until they are transformed into provokers and evokers of dreams. His art has often been described as an “immaterial art”, which «cannot claim to regenerate matter itself: and it is this project that Fogliati often thinks of reconstructing while he thoroughly enjoys building mechanical and electrical devices to be put on display like so many deus-ex-machina in a theatre» (Tomaso Trini).

Through his work, Fogliati has always aimed to involve the environment, to make it a tool and a means of fantastic explanation; so that the use of technical devices and experimentation, and ‘scientific discovery’ itself, mediate a specific desire for the total transformation of the visual structures in man’s everyday environment.

From the “Complesso per strutture a luce tridimensionale e mobili” (a sort of three-dimensional materialisation of moving luminous elements, of great evocative force and environmental engagement) to the “Complesso di luce pura”, the “Strutture sonore a molle” (Fleximofoni), the many urban- and territorial-scale projects such as the Sound Auditorium, the Building-Structures, correctives of environmental noise, the “Liquimofono”, the “Boomerang acustico”, through to the ideas for the city, which also appear to be an attempt to recover and reinvent some of Yves Klein’s dreams (the transformation of winds into wind sculptures, the colouring of rain). These projects are the power and the pleasure of an inexhaustible imagination that transform Fogliati’s vast scientific knowledge and his passion for the possibilities of vision and sound into artistic and aesthetic potential.