Andreas Senoner's works navigate between two fundamental elements: his subject, the body, and his material, wood. The Italian-born artist, who exhibited at the 24the Venice Biennale and whose career is international, likes to work with what he perceives as "living materials".
Andreas Senoner studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, then in Spain in Valencia, before obtaining a scholarship to the College of Art and Design in Minneapolis, where he took courses with the sculptor and engraver Kinji Akagawa, with whom he deepened his wood carving technique.
After exploring various mediums during his training, from painting to performance, it is with sculpted wood that all his talents develop, while his thematic repertoire is established over time.
Certain forms recur from one sculpture to another (heads, legs, and feet), as if to frame the symbolism of the body in what it represents in terms of thoughts and foundations, freedoms and anchors. Nature doesn't careThe severed head, placed at rest, seems to sleep a centuries-old slumber, as if the marble of an ancient statue had transformed into wood riddled with termites. The brow and closed eyes form the expression of an oracle or prophet, seeing beyond the visible.
In Senoner's work, faces are hidden or gazes are averted, bodies covered in fur, lichen, or feathers. Legs and feet are pricked with needles or sprout branches. The natural material of painted wood—yellow head, blue legs—evokes metamorphoses and adds an air of the uncanny to the anatomical distortions. Hybridity, moreover, lies at the heart of the artist's imagination, like the mark of a certain beyond the body, a realm of occult power.
For the artist, wood is primarily used as a collector of memory, a place of history visually marked by time and environment. Wood becomes a metaphor for duration and transition, a symbol of age-old stability, that time which allows for the intersection of narratives and the building of relationships.
Thus, the work becomes the place housing a transhistorical imaginary.
