Padua, 8 June 2026 · Ph. Barbara Pigazzi
Pierpaolo Consigli, sculptor known by the art name PICO48, photographed in his studio in Padua holding Rebecca, one of his latest creations. The shot, taken by Barbara Pigazzi, also documents other works by the artist — Anemos, Elara, Alice, Inanna and Aya — created for the website and the new catalogue dedicated to his sculptural production. An authoritative presence in the Important Faces section of Studio Animica.
There is a point where contemporary art stops being mere image and becomes body, weight, manual gesture again. That is where the work of Pierpaolo Consigli belongs, a sculptor who found in ARTE PICO48 a framework able to give his path renewed conceptual depth — and who now joins the Important Faces gallery signed by Barbara Pigazzi for Studio Animica.
Pierpaolo Consigli came to sculpture in 2010, after his first experiences modelling clay in the workshop of sculptor Alessandra Urso. He went on to enrol at the Pietro Selvatico Art Institute in Padua, specialising in plastic decoration and sculpture, where he earned his Maestro d’Arte diploma.
His training continued through a series of formative encounters: with Maestro Sergio Rodella he deepened his study of human facial anatomy and marble sculpture; in Sergio Capellini’s workshop he refined the wax modelling technique; with Roberto Tonon, within Area 48, he turned to wood sculpture; with Simona Ragazzi he worked on portraiture from life. A layering of different techniques and sensibilities that still coexist in his work today.
The human face has always been, for this Padua-based sculptor, a subject of deep interest — a privileged ground for the introspective exploration of emotion and feeling, even before being a formal subject. In his works, Consigli seeks to evoke pleasing sensations, leaving the viewer room for personal interpretation of that universal, unspoken language inherent to every form of artistic expression. As Shakespeare’s Prospero put it in The Tempest, art deals in “such stuff as dreams are made on” — and it is precisely that delicate, dreamlike substance that Consigli’s sculpture seems to give shape to.
He currently works in his studio in Teolo, set against the landscape of the Euganean Hills.
The project’s name is no coincidence. The reference to Pico della Mirandola carries the legacy of a humanism that sought synthesis between different fields of knowledge, between seemingly distant philosophies and traditions. The number 48, in the collective’s own reading, becomes instead a symbol of balance: a meeting point between the material and the spiritual dimension. Together, these two references define PICO48’s ambition: not a simple showcase of works, but a space where different artists engage in dialogue through geometry, number and symbol, attempting to make visible what usually remains hidden within the structure of things.
Within this context, Consigli’s sculpture holds a distinctive place. Marble, bronze, wood: materials that demand time, physical effort, and technical knowledge built up over years — the same knowledge built workshop after workshop, mentor after mentor. Yet the way he treats them speaks of something beyond mere craftsmanship. The same piece often holds opposing surfaces together: areas polished almost to the point of losing physical density, alongside others deliberately left rough, jagged, unfinished. It is a duality that becomes narrative — the passage from chaos to completed form, from silent matter to something that seems to breathe.
His figures retain an organic, recognisable origin, yet increasingly lean toward geometric lines, almost entering into dialogue with the mathematical language so dear to the PICO48 project. Recurring themes include introspection, an upward tension readable in the verticality of many sculpted bodies, and the bond — never obvious, never taken for granted — between the human figure and nature.
When these sculptures enter the ARTE PICO48 circuit, something happens that goes beyond a simple joint exhibition. The three-dimensionality of Consigli’s work gives physical weight, almost gravity, to a project that elsewhere often expresses itself in digital or two-dimensional forms. It is stone, bronze and wood that remind the collective — and the viewer — that even the most abstract thought needs, at some point, to touch the ground.
Barbara Pigazzi’s photographic portrait, part of Studio Animica’s Important Faces collection, captures exactly this: not just the artist in his studio, but the precise point where sculpted matter meets the photographic gaze — two different languages recognising themselves in the same need to give form to the invisible.
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