Artist Statements and Concepts

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Not long after I started to make art professionally I realized that my sculptures are incorporating and resembled in their implied meaning clearly the basic elements of nature. As the wind spins the air blows into the open volumes of the rock which has become a very important element of creation. Likewise, the water that is modeling the stone by rotating it in the rapids of the rivers. I want to give meaning to the matter, after being guided by the natural elements, such as the inspiration and substance of my artistic path. As a matter of fact, the research I have been making, through different scientific disciplines such as geometry and anatomy, has been giving me rather interesting results in the territory of an experiment. I found that a combination of geometric laws and anatomical truths, is not destroying the conditionality in art, but rather creates her.                                                                                          

The results of my thoughts that I mentioned above are visualized through the series of Temples, Arches, and Columns. This series of different public sculptures, which I have been making in different places of the world in particular: “Temple of the elements” (Italy, 2012), ”In the maternal womb” (Italy,2014, Israel, 2017), ”That future is hiding in a past harmony”(Israel,2015), "Mental Curves"(Romania, 2017) “Four genetic gates"(Italy, 2013), “Floyd column”(Germany,2013), “Floyd column 2”(Italy, 2014), “Floyd arch”(France,2015) and “Internal movement”(France, Germany 2016). Internal movement of Floyds and substances in the interior volumes of the stone or the wood are visualized through simple geometrical waves inside the archetypical structures such as the column, the arch, and the temple. I am using monochromatic colors in some of the sculptures to distinguish visually the interior from the exterior, which is an important issue for my works. The void spaces inside the mass have more importance than the exterior contour of the block in this series of works.

The project called "Nature always finds its way“, which is a particular composition between the Platonic solids and sea animals, such as the sea urchins and sea barnacles. The synthesized forms of the sea animals are emerging from open craters inside the perfect shape of the regular polyhedral solid. The first generated public sculpture from this series is on a monumental scale and it is called the “Organic cube”(South of Korea, 2015), which I realized from 14 tones of a single block of granite.

In 2016 a series of sculptures with the conceptual name “Dissolving” have begun their life. In this project I am interested to make visible some hidden processes for instance: the separation and dissolving of the specific mass of stone from the inside and at some point pausing this process in order to leave minimal contact between the splitting parts. The sculptures which are following this concept are: “Dissolving” (Italy,2016), “Dissolving out” (Germany,2016), and “Dissolving tensions” (Chili,2016).

In Dissolving tensions, there is a paradox, between the main concept and the force of the physic. Putting almost three tonnes of solid material like a stone into the "air" it makes the game of re-composing the form even more sophisticated. The paradox is in the internal separation of the form that brings it to its physical extremity of three points of contact.

The concept which I had successfully accomplished in 2017, through the realization of three public sculptures, was related to musical instruments and in particular the wind horns. The winding horns are ancient and archetypal musical instruments that had been in use in the first human civilizations. The first of my sculptures that is associated with this idea is inspired by the Scandinavian Vikings and their mythology - “Kattegat Horns” (Denmark, 2017). The following project created for the city Sevlievo in Bulgaria again resembles of the curved horns, but this time the sculpture “Music box” (Bulgaria,2017) reminds more of a music jukebox emerging from a rock. Furthermore, in the next sculpture of this series called “Sound the horns” (Turkey,2017) I had the attention to create an abstract multi-horn instrument, which reminds me of a nonexisting church organ. 

In the spirit of the forms that associate visually and conceptually with the music and the sound, the sculpture "Radio killed the video star" (Turkey 2019) was made from hard diabase granite.

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In the "Cubes and volumes" series the main topic is the motions and dynamic dance between geometrical cubic forms and raw volumes carved from the stone mass. These objects are mutating one from another while they are intersecting into their diagonals inside the block of stone. The sharp 90 degrees angles are representing the formal consciousness and rationality of humans. On the other hand, the chaotic forms that are penetrating the cubes are representing the unexpected unconscious and also the chaotic asymmetric structure of living nature. Some public sculptures from this series are: “I’m free from Pandora”(Israel,2018), “Dancing cubes and volumes ”(Italy,2019), “Dancing cubes and volumes 2”(Germany,2019), "InSideOutSideIn" (Bulgaria,2020), “I’m free from Pandora”(France,2022),

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In the sculpture project that I called “Formations”(Canada,2018) I had a challenging provocation, which was to use totally unformed granite blocks. However, studying the form of the natural rock I manage to come up with a solution, which basically keeps 60% of the original natural shapes untouched and the rest of the mass that I had to sculpt has associated me with ‘formations’ or ‘re-formations’ of the material from which the rock it is made off. Therefore, in this sculpture, I managed to follow the ‘casually’ shaped rock, which has given me the intuition on how to move forward with the project.

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"Formations" (China 2022) is a project for monumental sculpture with highly aesthetic values of form and consistency. The major topic of the sculpture is the re-forming of the usual geometry of the parallel prisms, which can be seen in modern and post-modern architecture, into new dimensions of the form. The new form which is arriving is through organic forms that are participating in the transformation. The sculpture has the goal to show this process and to take the visitors to this visual spectacle between sharp lines, raw exterior walls, and organic volumes inside.

Most of the projects that I made are from natural stone, bronze, wood, and stainless steel, but there are no limits to the variety of materials for my ideas. Since I started sculpting I’ve worked with all classical material and I’m open to discovering and experimenting personally with unconventional new materials and matters.

Works of Raffò are situated in private or municipal urban spaces and gardens in different countries like Italy, Bulgaria, Israel, Costa Rica, South Korea, Chile, Germany, Turkey, Canada, France, Taiwan, China, Romania, and Denmark.