Armando Riva - Graal

The subject of the work is inspired by the legend of the Holy Grail, that is, the cup with which, according to the tradition developed especially by the epic of the Breton cycle, Christ celebrated the Last Supper and in which Joseph of Arimathea collected the blood of the Redeemer after his death. The Grail is the protagonist, in the legends around King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, as the object of a symbolic search that is the meaning of an initiatory knowledge of oneself.

The sculptures of Armando Riva always present a perfect fusion between a figurative language and an abstract conception of artistic creation. In fact, he always starts from a concrete subject that can be the human or animal figure or even an object, as in this case. The entire form is then completely transformed by the complex elaboration of the bronze material systematically carried out by this sculptor. Thus, even the chalice seems to take on its own biological, plant-like life, in the movements that shake its vibrating surface. From a formal point of view, this translates into the sketchy rendering of the forms and the decorative apparatus that is based on a predominantly expressionistic tendency of representation.

Armando Riva was born in San Floriano, near Milan, in 1947. His artistic career, mainly as a sculptor, began in 1965., but he also worked in painting, photography, and cinema. Starting from the 1970s, Armando Riva's work took on a more defined, more tormented and expressionistic aesthetic, with the more developed use of materials of different natures, also assembled together, such as bronze, plexiglass, wood, or fiberglass. Thanks to the complex elaboration made of welding, milling, and filing, Armando Riva's sculptures have taken on a peculiar theatricality identifiable in an incessant struggle between form and matter. His works have been exhibited in numerous exhibitions throughout the national territory, where the artist has always enjoyed critical and public success.

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