Roberto Lanaro Biography
Roberto Lanaro (born in Molvena, Vicenza in 1946) is a sculptor of notable abstractive and creative power. Son of art, with the art of iron working in his blood, incorporated into his father's workshop, where entire generations of blacksmiths had passed, starting from the early 1700s, he was able to bring the art of iron sculpture to one of its highest and most culturally valid expressions. Above all because he was able to free this art from the burdens of easy banalization or games of aesthetic embellishment, in which a modest artisanal use of iron had, by its nature, maintained the level of formal liberations. Dissatisfied, therefore, with the circulating productions, we find him, in 1974, thirsty for new learning stimuli in the summer courses of the Art Academy of Salisbrugo, where twenty years after its foundation by Kokoschka, he was still nourishing the teachings of notable masters (such as Somaini's spatial constructivism) and where he received his first recognition prizes. Since then, fruitful and continuous, always in full personal coherence, the number of his works has grown and spread, capable of instilling, in their synthesis of concrete abstraction, in the fully dominated hard material of iron, a breath of free vitality of feeling and of the imagination. This gives rise to constructions of an extraordinary sensitive structure 166 for works that now travel around the world, enhance the spaces of city squares in Italy and abroad, modulate rooms and walls of banks and public buildings, to the point of giving, in a work like The Arc of Life, an extraordinary synthesis of the human journey, of its upward tension, in its attempt to rise to overcome the weight of gravity: all in a large modulation of Corten steel 5 meters high . Lanaro's art, in addition to the powerful functionality of large irons, has presented sculptures of free and incisive relevance of abstract figurations that have armed buildings and large squares in Italy and abroad. (D. Formaggio, Roberto Lanaro sculptor. Homage to the Year 2000, Molvena - VI, 2000)
