A flying man in the Trentino skies: Cédric Le Borgne's installation for Sky Museum

For the past few hours, there has been a man flying over the skies of Trentino. It is The Flying Man by French artist Cédric Le Borgne (Paris, 1972), a work that is part of Arte Sella’s Sky Museum project. Sky Museum started in 2019 and is the result of a collaboration between Arte Sella, the contemporary art park in the mountains of Trentino, and the Municipality of Borgo Valsugana: the project involved the creation of three art installations at the historic center of Borgo Valsugana. This was the first time Arte Sella was confronted with the urban space of the town, creating a path to enhance the architectural and landscape qualities of the historic center.

After the first realization commissioned in 2019 from British artist Stuart Ian Frost, who created the work The Broken Oak with oak trunks uprooted by the storm Vaia, placed at the garden of the Istituto d’higher education Alcide De Gasperi, the second phase of the project involved Cédric Le Borgne and Edoardo Tresoldi (Milan, 1987), two authors already well known to Arte Sella visitors, who in the past years have created The Invisible Woman and Symbiosis, respectively, at the Malga Costa exhibition area.

Edoardo Tresoldi, an internationally renowned artist, investigates the poetics of the dialogue between man and landscape using architectural language as an expressive tool and key to interpreting space. The artist plays with the transparency of wire mesh to transcend the space-time dimension and narrate a dialogue between Art and the World, a visual synthesis that is revealed in the fading of the physical limits of his works. His new work is Controfacciata, a succession of metal mesh volumes, four meters high, designed by Tresoldi for the “Casa della Comunità” in Borgo Valsugana. The installation reveals within it the decorative features of four Renaissance-inspired aedicules, conceived as an inverse expression of form. Customarily thought of as ornamentation of the building, the aedicules here become the antithesis of their own function and, emptied of the material that composes them, prepare to accommodate the changing succession of natural phenomena and celebrate the landscape. In Controfacciata, the jutting tension of the installation is contrasted with an inward-facing pressure of the architecture, making the façade a place of interlocking human action and nature’s intervention.

Cédric Le Borgne, as anticipated, has instead proposed a light, floating work, The Flying Man. It, too, is made of wire mesh and is placed near the Venetian bridge, thus creating a visual continuity with Edoardo Tresoldi’s work and drawing the viewer’s attention to the Brenta River and its relationship to the horizon of the mountains, framed by the profiles of the houses in the historic center. The installation is part of Les Voyageurs, a project by Cédric Le Borgne that began in the late 1990s, when the artist began placing his first sculptures in the streets of his neighborhood, using public lighting or car headlights. Since then Les Voyageurs have traveled the world, from Geneva to Seoul, from London to Singapore, inviting us to observe everyday reality. With The Flying Man, the artist celebrates public space, staging the architecture of the historic center and highlighting how the landscape itself becomes the artistic path from which to draw inspiration. In doing so, Le Borgne offers an opportunity to observe and rethink the urban center from a new and magical point of view.

A flying man in the Trentino skies: Cédric Le Borgne's installation for Sky Museum

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