Silvana De Stefano works in both the United States and Italy and is considered one of the most influential personalities among international artists. After graduating in Architecture at the University “La Sapienza”, Rome, Italy, De Stefano moved to New York City where she met Leo Castelli, an art dealer and connoisseur, who recognized her potential and encouraged her to be a commissioned artist. Combining sculpture, paintings and architecture into superb synthesis, De Stefano creates suspended pieces of artwork where lightness and strength contrast. Because of De Stefano’s architectural training, these are real pieces of special architecture giving birth to unique blending of artistic and architecture.
De Stefano’s works are geometric and wide chromatic drawings which seem to challenge balance and stability: compositions that reinvent space because of the way forms are created. The artist goes to the extreme in pictorial art by considering the canvas as a tool and reversing the arrangement by means of building – dismantling first colours and then forms. De Stefano’s works in sculpture and architecture are planned the same way she plans a painting on canvas. These compound works are more than just paintings: pictorial and extra pictorial materials meet on the surface of the painting and painting becomes a process of gathering different elements, figurative and abstract, explicit and allusive combined together.
An upended column, eleven meters high, installed within a courtyard, suspended at almost four meters from the ground and held up by four steel cables fixed to the top of the building interrupted by a diagonal dividing it into two independent column-capital elements seemingly supported by water.
“…she enacts her own Copernican revolution, introducing movement as pre- established, using all the resources of sheer chance, and maximising duration as the astonishing, decisive component.”
“…in Revelations, the column is considered as a religious symbol, representing strength and steadfastness of spirit; subsequent lay readings modified this into fortitude and constancy. All these qualities, however, are exploited fully and subtly in Silvana De Stefano’s installation in Palazzo Poli.”
“…the lightness of the concept contrasts with the heaviness of the making – without the one interfering with the other: the Suspended Column rises above earthly impediments and pulses with its own life thanks to the water running inside it. Only the perfect union between the divinity of ingenuity and the material nature of doing, makes it possible for an eleven-metres column to hang suspended four metres above the ground.”
“…the installation, it will now be clear, comprises a number of different but complementary elements which open to the gaze, while the suspended column, in its peremptory physicality, never ceases for a moment to dominate our attention as the paradigm of categories of expression. At the same time, the column never colonises the space it belongs to, shedding any excess in the lightness of the water’s transparent membrane. The water, in its turn, then challenges the object with the induced circularity of an emblematic value endemic to a thought-system like that of the language of art.”
“…water as transparency and illusion. Water has the role of continuity and flows between column and capital. Water as unifier, as inner purity, regeneration, transparency, which hides and illudes, which evokes and blends; water which marks the work of art, from clay to plaster for moulds; water to depict the emotions of a form; water for the immortality of the soul.”
Technical specifications Suspended Column Project : It is a thirty-six feet inverted column installed in a courtyard hanging about 13 feet above ground by four steel cables fastened to the edge of the building, cut diagonally into two parts: column-capital seemingly held by water. The column diameter is 110 cm and is 11 meters high. Placed at about 3.60 m above ground and held by four steel ropes of 12 mm each, it clings onto a steel plate attached to the edge of the building, weighing a complex 1700 KG. The capital was modelled in clay with a single plaster cast for a positive print made of glass resin divided into four different two by two side pairs sections. The entire capital and column surfaces were created by layering three different colours: white, yellow and grey were successively and repeatedly applied in order to obtain cohesion and final uniformity. The circuit, located in the lower part of the column, is a prototype made of a steel cylindrical diffuser of 85 cm of diameter and 80 cm high. It has on its lower face two thin circular concentric buttonholes shaped with a bronze lathe in order to obtain two cylindrical veils of water 6 cm distant from one another to maximise the precision and the continuum of the water. The water flows at around 600 litres per minute.
Technical specifications Suspended Column Project : It is a thirty-six feet inverted column installed in a courtyard hanging about 13 feet above ground by four steel cables fastened to the edge of the building, cut diagonally into two parts: column-capital seemingly held by water. The column diameter is 110 cm and is 11 meters high. Placed at about 3.60 m above ground and held by four steel ropes of 12 mm each, it clings onto a steel plate attached to the edge of the building, weighing a complex 1700 KG. The capital was modelled in clay with a single plaster cast for a positive print made of glass resin divided into four different two by two side pairs sections. The entire capital and column surfaces were created by layering three different colours: white, yellow and grey were successively and repeatedly applied in order to obtain cohesion and final uniformity. The circuit, located in the lower part of the column, is a prototype made of a steel cylindrical diffuser of 85 cm of diameter and 80 cm high. It has on its lower face two thin circular concentric buttonholes shaped with a bronze lathe in order to obtain two cylindrical veils of water 6 cm distant from one another to maximise the precision and the continuum of the water. The water flows at around 600 litres per minute.
Technical specifications Suspended Column Project : It is a thirty-six feet inverted column installed in a courtyard hanging about 13 feet above ground by four steel cables fastened to the edge of the building, cut diagonally into two parts: column-capital seemingly held by water. The column diameter is 110 cm and is 11 meters high. Placed at about 3.60 m above ground and held by four steel ropes of 12 mm each, it clings onto a steel plate attached to the edge of the building, weighing a complex 1700 KG. The capital was modelled in clay with a single plaster cast for a positive print made of glass resin divided into four different two by two side pairs sections. The entire capital and column surfaces were created by layering three different colours: white, yellow and grey were successively and repeatedly applied in order to obtain cohesion and final uniformity. The circuit, located in the lower part of the column, is a prototype made of a steel cylindrical diffuser of 85 cm of diameter and 80 cm high. It has on its lower face two thin circular concentric buttonholes shaped with a bronze lathe in order to obtain two cylindrical veils of water 6 cm distant from one another to maximise the precision and the continuum of the water. The water flows at around 600 litres per minute.
Six steel spheres forming two triangles which cross in mid air for nearly the whole of the building height. Each moves in space with a slow, different and continuous movement around a central bronze sphere suspended ten meters from the ground, with a continuous wavy external band situated nearly four meters from the ground, highlighting the base.
Movements
sculpture-installation, Rome, Italy
…while Suspended Column, plays on lightness/heaviness, in Movements the contrast is between the present and infinity. On the one hand, the column, vertical architectural element, load-bearing, symbol of stability and equilibrium, expression of upward tension and at the same time anchorage to the ground. On the other hand, the sphere, symbol of the terrestrial globe, like the astrolabe of Eratosthenes, a concentration of wisdom and virtues, beyond time. (Umberto Vattani)
…item quod inane repertumst sed locum ad spatium, res in quo quaesque gerantur, prevideamus utrum finitum funditus omne constet an immensum pateat vasteque profundum. (Lucrezio, De rerum natura)
…and so in the imagined emptiness and void, where the spheres move, we wonder whether it has a limit, or whether it opens up to the immensity of infinite space. (Lucrezio, De rerum natura)
…there is a “marvellous” component in the installation, as in the Baroque period, together with an efficiency and technical lucidity that competes with our present culture and is focused on essential features and results that are immediately understood and assimilated. (Claudio Strinati)
…the work Movements seems to submit to the gravitational absence of dead weight and silent sound.With its complex mechanism, the installation confirms the need for contemplation that activates all our attention, placing the observer before a spectacle in which lightness dominates absolutely. (Achille Bonito Oliva)
…lightness, “weight subtraction”, “subtracting, not adding”, has inspired sculptors from Michelangelo to Bernini, from Brancusi to Picasso, from Giacometti to Calder. Silvana De Stefano’s sculpture is inspired by the same principles. (Costanzo Constantini)
…the artist constructs her works, always aiming to space and light, to perfection, a sort of techno-artistic perfection based on lightness and strength: her main goal. Achille Bonito Oliva
…the movement, and the apparatus producing it, becomes the breakthrough element that relates the interior space to the exterior space, and the static time of the work with the real -not the potential- time that precedes it in the past and anticipates it in the future. Achille Bonito Oliva
…Silvana De Stefano is an exterior artist who introduces a hybridization of materials and genres into the inner workings of daily life, going beyond the static conformity of painting and sculpture. Achille Bonito Oliva
…Silvana De Stefano’s mentality is definitely neo-Platonist, since she understands that the essence of every object is its lightness, the materialization of every normal weight and the transfer of every reality into the excellence of artistic forms. Achille Bonito Oliva
Silvana De Stefano works in both the United States and Italy and is considered one of the most influential personalities among international artists. After graduating in Architecture at the University “La Sapienza”, Rome, Italy, De Stefano moved to New York City where she met Leo Castelli, an art dealer and connoisseur, who recognized her potential and encouraged her to be a commissioned artist. Combining sculpture, paintings 
and architecture into superb synthesis, De Stefano creates suspended pieces of artwork where lightness and strength contrast. Because of De Stefano’s architectural training, these are real pieces of special architecture giving birth to unique blending of artistic and architecture.
De Stefano’s works are geometric and wide chromatic drawings which seem to challenge balance and stability: compositions that reinvent space because of the way forms are created. The artist goes to the extreme in pictorial art by considering the canvas as a tool and reversing the arrangement by means of building – dismantling first colours and then forms. De Stefano’s works in sculpture and architecture are planned the same way she plans a painting on canvas. These compound works are more than just paintings: pictorial and extra pictorial materials meet on the surface of the painting and painting becomes a process of gathering different elements, figurative and abstract, explicit and allusive combined together.
