…”If we were to indicate what distinguishes Calzolari’s work from the rest of the current international scene, I think it would be found exclusively in the fullness of his art that, quite apart from codes, genres, styles and disciplines, causes an explosion of organic and physiological forces, and confers on them historical weight and future impetus (memory and actuality), caresses contemporaneity without being influenced or overwhelmed by it, rigorously organises itself without disparaging any tool or material. In other words it is, to use the artist’s own words, an organic activity towards abstraction, one that changes together with the changes of what, once used, is transformed. Few artists since Fontana have touched on such a variety of themes, few since Beuys and Nauman have ranged with such coherence and flexibility from painting to sculpture, videos to installations and performances: Calzolari is one of these few. His monochromes of sublime materials, the neon writing and refrigerating structures, the minerals and flat-coloured paintings, the installations, the ‘living constellations’ and the videos demonstrate a poetics that links an autobiographical sense of doom to hieroglyphic lyricism, the existentialism of the absurd to material ecstasy, mystic togetherness to infinite collapse, dreamlike conditions, contamination of a childlike world and yet more. Very few other artists, though, know how to free themselves continually from the origins of vision – the effective backdrop for our profound and collective imaginary – and to transform it into a process of formation and discipline (almost an aesthetic apprenticeship) and, at the same time, escape by way of hermeneutic and allegorical potential from the menace of normalisation and trivialisation that hovers over every artistic action and of which the spectator is always aware…”

Mario Bertoni, 2002 (translated by Michael Haggerty)