In Nicola Genco’s works, family and artistic legacies often intertwine, emerging and transforming throughout his creative process into new materials and techniques; his studio poetically reveals this in every corner, presenting itself as a ghostly ‘wunderkammer’ brimming with history and experimentation. It is here that his works in paper, iron, ceramics, wood, glass, or, as in the case of the warriors guarding Corigliano Castle, from woven wire – ‘nervous threads’ (to quote Pietro Marino) – just as the first large puppets for the Putignano carnival were made in the 1950s.
Genco’s works interact with the architectural elements of Corigliano d’Otranto Castle without intruding upon it; invisible yet present, they glide lightly through the spaces, like two sentinels, witnesses and guardians of a culture and civilisation lost to the fleeting – and often devastating – intervention of humankind.
