Pietro Scampini

Work on the Enigmi series commenced in the early eighties and is still in progress today. It is an attempt to explore all that is elusive and invisible, a non-entity that shrinks, swells and spreads ceaselessly, a place where everything and nothing happens. The outcome is purely symbolic; what matters is that the solution becomes a fresh enigma. This is true from the moment in which Oedipus meets the Sphinx just outside Thebes and solves the riddle up until today, when the modern-day Oedipus encounters sphinxes in his daily life. The marble sphere in Scampini's sculpture moves beneath the drapes, but remains suspended, almost as if to disclose that the mysterious nucleus of obscurity, namely the enigma itself, will never be lost. Though not imprisoned as such, the sphere will always remain concealed within and free to move about.