Thaddäus Salcher
∗1964, Italy
lives and works in Ortisei, Italy
Thaddäus Salcher make the sculpture apprenticeship with his father Richard Salcher. Studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich with Prof. Ladner. Worked as a freelance artist in Munich until 1997, then moved to Ortisei, where he now lives and works. He has been a member of the South Tyrolean Artists' Association since 1998. Thaddäus Salcher seeks the roots of pure and essential form in his inventions, which are cast in iron and depicted in large dimensions.The sculpture Waiting by Thaddäus Salcher aligns, in both its title and conception, with the “Spatial Concepts” that Lucio Fontana created at the end of the 1950s and called “Expectations.” Both artists create cuts. Fontana marks them clearly, long and vertical, on his paintings, while Salcher guides them across the surface of the iron in serpentine, gentle, and soft lines. The meaning they confer upon the sculpture is the expressive value of silence, or of spiritual calm and hope, as the artist himself says—qualities he seeks within his own soul and within the soul of his works.
He shapes the fissures with refinement and joy which, as the title itself suggests, fills every expectation. Yet they also emerge as primordial and abstract signs, absolute in formal elegance and essentiality. They imprint a measured movement upon the surface, interrupt its plastic continuity, and almost painterly adorn the sculpture with light, establishing a passage between what lies on this side and beyond the work. In this way, Salcher materializes a space that is everywhere, that surrounds and permeates the sculpture.
In the dialectic between fullness and emptiness, light and shadow, the artist emphasizes the value of the surface. He accentuates its physicality to such an extent that the distinction between sculpture and painting is almost dissolved, thereby declaring the conceptual—rather than mimetic—nature of his creation. Even the veil of rust that he deliberately allows to emerge from the iron represents not merely a chromatic note that softens the hardness of the material, but also conveys the feeling of a reality laden with memory and lived experience, which ultimately finds its redemption in the beauty of the creative gesture.
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