Side by side
Hear, O Muses, the tale of the twin relics of earth,
fashioned in fire and borne by mortal hands
to the trembling threshold of the brine.
Side by side I set them upon the sand’s white mantle,
and the voice of Thalassa rose, vast and eternal,
summoning the children of clay to her sleepless halls.
Beneath the sway of Poseidon’s trident
and in the secret weaving of Nereid hands,
they were joined—two forms, once sundered,
now bound in the abyssal embrace of the sea.
Anima Animus _ Clay Relief Sculptures, Venice Beach, 2020
Archetypal Duality _ Video, Venice Beach seashore, 2025
Prima Materia
Sculptural Design
A letter through time
At different times, Mondrian, Klee, and Kandinsky embraced the theosophical doctrine that viewed matter as an obstacle to attaining eternal sublimation.
Each, in his own way, sought to reconstruct the “thing” by dissolving it, fragmenting it, and reassembling it into suggestive traces that pointed toward an ideal realm.
Lazzaro too aspires to reach the Eternity of things. Yet, unlike those great abstractionists, he works through three-dimensional pictorial forms, pushing beyond the very concept of painting and carrying it into the territory of sculpture.
His tension toward the Infinite arises from a refusal to allow the life of an object or material to end with its obsolescence or worn-out function. He gathers what is discarded, used, or deemed useless, and restores to it dignity and purpose through new form.
In creating the object-sculpture, he recovers an archaic meaning and sets it—better, situates it—within the historical fissures of our own time, poised to unfold in endless metamorphoses.
In the expressive candor of his youth, the artist breaks away from the dependency on myths; courageous and defiant, he resists conventional channels of distribution. Autonomous and solitary in his quest, he is not seduced by the fleeting siren calls of fashion, for his need to create is inseparable from his need to live.
Thus, his message is left like a letter cast into time, inscribed on old papers, faded posters, uneven planks, and rickety iron tables that stand like deserted squares, defending the “Assault” of a ghost city.
Gabriella Ardissone
It began in 1988, although I did not know it was a beginning then. A lump of terracotta, a drawing for which my mother had posed. I pressed the clay, expecting her face, but what emerged was a bearded man, his mouth open in something like a scream. Not theatrical—more the sound a man might make alone, in a room with the door shut. His hand, the one holding his head, looked alive. It seemed to pulse. That astonished me and also frightened me a little. From that day, I did not turn back. There was no point.
Curiosity, that undisciplined accomplice, led me into other materials: from clay to the smelting of poor metals at first, as if out of thrift, then metals people called noble; glass, molten and slow, finding its way into plaster molds; the steady resistance of Swiss pine; and the more stubborn hardness of mountain stone. There were sewn fabrics, nails holding them like threads, polychrome terracotta, mosaics, and things that refused to be categorized. Then, one day, a discarded plank of wood.
I was working for Giuliano Melioli then—Tarsie, Architecture and Furnishings, polychrome terracotta. The grinder was in my hands anyway, so I set the blade into the board, scraping away what years had left: dust, cobwebs, and bent nails. The wood blackened under the speed of the disc; if I kept my hand light, it opened itself again, showing its old warmth. I carved without meaning to, and the face that looked back at me might have been Modigliani’s invention or my own—though it is hard to tell when the work begins to lead you.
[see photo slider below]
I have almost no photographs from what I call the “junkyard period.” The Alfred Stieglitz Art Center in Modena—Gabriella Ardissone and Roberto Zambelli—looked after me in the nineties. They had the idea of gathering all the work from those years and selling it to fund my exhibitions and printed catalogues. Clever, I suppose. Not fair.
It began, as these things do, with a refusal. The art world bought my work, sold my work, and smiled at it and at me. But there was something underneath—a glaze of falsity, deceit dressed as cleverness. I was young enough then to think I couldn’t live with it. So, I decided to leave. Not quietly.
An invitation came: a museum in Mantua. I asked for the entire garden as my exhibition space. They said yes. Then I went to the municipality in Reggio Emilia, my home, and asked for a place big enough to build a garden—my own. They agreed.
I spent months in the junkyard, Severi’s yard, where the air was thick with rust and old oil. I learned to listen there, among the heaps: paint-flaked wood, rusted carcasses of machines, metal rods twisted into shapes no human hand had designed, the gaunt frames of computers, and tractor parts like the bones of some extinct livestock. From this debris, I built creatures that no longer existed, forcing the visitors to walk among them.
Those months stay with me. For a sculptor, size is temptation; the larger the work, the greater the risk. The opening day came. Everything in place. Fausto was there with me. We stood off to the side, watching. Waiting for our moment.
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. I was pretty young and I remember thinking, how can something I love so much—art, research, beauty, self-expression—be treated like it’s just another product, like a box of cereal or a bedside lamp?
A story of dissent
1984 | Terracotta, scrap metals, clothes
September 19, Carousel of Dawn
Dear Civilized Man,
what are we if not a testimony of weakness and strength intertwined
like brittle branches.
We squander that rare intensity, reached with such effort, only to uphold our illusory constructions!
Like ants, righteous, tireless.
Do you not feel nausea, watching all this energy slip into the coils and vanish into a tiny dark point within us,
instead of bursting outward in a whirlwind scream?
EREITAM
Blind; what remains for us now that we have forsaken the wisdom of our instinct?
May 19, Melting Point
Hello Matter,
you are so close to the spirit-demon that I feel the privilege of our bond, intimate.
When I sense Silence, I am afraid.
Robbed, bent, weary, used; you let yourself melt, you let yourself be forged,
you let yourself be beaten,
you let yourself be shaped, and you let us survive!
Not only that—you grant us the subtle pleasure of self-destruction.