I was working as an assistant for the artist Giuliano Melioli, founder of Tarsie, Architecture and Furnishings in Polychrome Terra Cotta and Mars Stones. I grabbed the grinder that I regularly used to smooth the surfaces of breathtaking terracotta panels and sank the blade into that seductive wood. First to clean it and make it a surface to paint on, removing years of sediment that had accumulated outside the workshop, the cobwebs at the corners of the frame, the nails that were sticking out halfway. Maybe once it was a door, or a part of a huge wardrobe. As the blade sank into the wood, its speed of rotation burned the surface, blackening it. If I stayed light on the piece, however, the true nature of that gentle wood emerged, restored to its pure splendor. So, I began to lightly ‘carve’ that abandoned piece of wood. The result was an astonishing ‘Modiglianesque’ portrait.

Sadly, I have very few photos of the majority of the artwork from the "junkyard period." The curators of the Alfred Stieglitz Art Center in Modena, Gabriella Ardissone and Roberto Zambelli, represented me in Italy in the 1990s. They had the brilliant idea to collect all of my work from that time period in order to fund my exhibitions and publications. Not fair.

Here's how things went down.

As an action of dissent against the art industry and its intellectual hypocrisies, I came up with a strategy of how to make an exit from that world that, yes, sold and bought my art, but was so full of deceit and falsity that as a young creative I could not tolerate.

First, I earned an invitation to participate in a very important exhibition that was held in a museum in Mantua; I decided to ask for the whole garden as the exhibition space and it was granted to me. Then I asked the municipality of my hometown, Reggio Emilia, to let me use a space large enough to design and build an installation in the form of a “garden”, precisely. I worked hard for months with the technique used at that stage of my quest: engaged entire days at the junkyard Severi in a feverish search for whispers and clues that would help me write this new chapter.
Paint-encrusted wood, immense metal carcasses, twisted iron rods and squat metal allegories, old PC skeletons and stringy tractor parts. Everything would have been used to erect this surreal composition of extinct creatures that the audience would have to walk through.
Those were unforgettable months. For a sculptor, tackling large works is the most coveted challenge.

When the long-awaited opening day arrived, we were ready. My friend Fausto and I. We watched from afar waiting for the right moment to act.

The installation was disturbing and seductive at the same time. The prehistoric garden was crowded with dystopian reptiles and the crowd paused under their mechanical limbs to glimpse those jaws full of metal teeth that threatened them from their three meters of height. Chests of sharp armor and wings made of a dense web of welded iron; those mythical creatures were alive.

After the stroll in the garden of giants, the cultured public took the marble steps of the museum to go to the upper floor where the rest of the artists were exhibiting. Here the mayor of the city and the high-ranking exponents of the art circle would introduce the cultural event with their usual pompous speech.

It was time, the mayor kicked off with the sermon and we, in agreement with the gardener (who had become our accomplice) entered the garden with an open van and bam!

With a sledge-hammer and a grinder we demolished three months of grueling work. The gathering of onlookers crowded at the windows of the museum with their noses glued to the glass. Incredulous, immobile, helpless.

In little more than ten minutes the pile of ‘scrap’ had been loaded onto the van and in less than an hour it was piled up in a scrapyard not far away on the outskirts of Mantua.

A loud and clear message.

This is the main reason for the photographic 'memory gap' of my artworks of the period. I never saw again the art that the curators had accumulated in those years.

You will tell me that it was an exaggerated and childish reaction. Maybe, I was very young. But when you deeply love something and live for it you cannot conceive the idea that this thing, Art, Research, Beauty, Self-Expression, is treated as a simple commercial product. Like toilet paper or bedside lamps.