Born in La Spezia and a long-time resident of Turin, Ponzio IV developed his artistic career through a process of gradual approach: drawing courses, frequenting painters and galleries, and direct experience with engraving and printing techniques. Figurative art initially presented itself as a panorama of still indistinct possibilities, a territory to be explored following an inclination that only over time transformed into a defined and indispensable expressive necessity. A decisive factor in his training was his frequent visits to the Pontecorvo studio in Turin.
The turning point came around 1968, when his interest shifted from traditional academic landscapes to an unusual material: zinc sheet metal. This led to his first sculptures, which were small in size — no more than thirty centimetres — and in which the rhythm of the lines took on a central role. A precise stylistic choice was already evident in this initial phase: the welds were deliberately left rough and imprecise, sacrificing smoothness in favour of a more direct and immediate visual impact. This production received its first public recognition at an exhibition at the Dea, dedicated to Guttuso.
From this moment on, experimentation with materials became the leitmotif of all his subsequent research, a never-ending investigation into the expressive possibilities of materials and their references. Until the mid-1970s, his sculptural work expanded to include wood, iron, copper and bas-reliefs in laminated wood. The dimensions varied from small to large, but the focus on line — understood as pure harmony or as a trace of the figure — always took precedence over the attention to detail.
Meanwhile, painting was not abandoned but reworked through mixed techniques. In 1974, a solo exhibition at the 'Il Mandracchio' Art Studio in San Benedetto del Tronto, featuring twenty-five paintings and fifteen folders of oil-coloured zinc engravings, represented a turning point: it marked a definitive departure from traditional painting and paved the way for more radical research.
In the same year, the bubbles were created, which constituted the first real attempt to delve unreservedly into the soul of matter. The technique involved spreading a mixture on raw linen, from which the bubbles were obtained through the controlled action of a flame, suspended when the result approached the imagined one. It was a task that required a balance between control and chance, between intention and accident. Production during this period was limited — no more than eighteen pieces — and was presented in 1976 at an auction at Sant'Agostino, before being exhibited the following year at the MTEP in Turin.
The material research continues in a direction that intertwines art and memory. The pieces are born: worn fabrics, threadbare and mended sheets, recovered from old wardrobes in the Piedmont countryside. These materials carry with them the weight of a peasant culture in which a sheet was not only an object of use, but a repository of nostalgia, the defence of a dream or an experience from which one could not separate oneself, at a time when the future seemed more uncertain than the past. This phase continued until 1987, accompanied by growing visibility in exhibitions: exhibitions in La Spezia, Turin and Cuneo were joined in 1982 by participation in the peace poster competition in Moscow, while between 1983 and 1987 the works were presented at Art Expo in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Atlanta, marking her entry into the international exhibition circuit.
The walls emerge from the same rural horizon. In some works, the research focuses exclusively on the material; in others, fragments of everyday life are assembled — coloured ropes, power switches with cut wires, grates and bolts, litter and gates, votive images — common objects that marked a time not so distant from the collective memory. As Francesco Butturini observes, through these walls the artist 'imprints the memory of time: here are the corroded traces of these railings emerging like substantial shadows, and with them we seem to see the domestic stories that these traces touch and evoke'. It is not a question of painting or sculpture, but of a strong artistic impression that arises from a new grasp of sensations.
The language that is defined in this phase is what Marco Rosci traces back to the 'most advanced Turin culture', emphasising its 'conceptual aspects and comparison with material and popular devotional culture'. A poor symbolism, with Dada and Pop references, reminiscent of assembly techniques, but rich in metaphors alluding to closed and concluded realities — private but also epochal. Individual memory is thus charged with historical and cultural significance, not without a delicate religious sentiment: the Madonnas are recovered from private devotion, once venerated witnesses of pain and hope.
These walls are both internal and external: they move between open fields and votive chapels built at the crossroads of paths, then return to domestic walls, in devotional paintings where the value of a simple and deep-rooted faith still circulates, still tangible.
The 1990s saw a further expansion of exhibition activity. In 1990 and 1991, two solo exhibitions at Galerie B in Paris brought the work into a new European context. In 1991, the project Requiem per Mozart, presented in Magliano Alfieri and later in Turin at the Department of Culture, represented a moment of synthesis between material research and symbolic dimension: a series of four works with a strong scenographic impact, where mirrors — metaphorical thresholds between different worlds and times — are illuminated by candlelight, in a tribute that transcends the celebration of Mozart to become a universal meditation on memory and loss.
In 1993, the Promotrice delle Belle Arti in Turin hosted an anthological exhibition that retraced his entire artistic career. This was followed in 1996 and 1997 by two solo exhibitions at the Landon Gallery in New York, confirming his now well-established recognition overseas.
The series of doors, which became a symbol of humanity's journey from the Second World War to the war in the former Yugoslavia, is part of this journey. The door is both a closure and a possibility of entry, a denial of the reality that lies behind it and an opportunity to discover alternative geographical areas, places of memory and underlying emotions.
The passage between inside and outside is ultimately symbolised by gates, an element that recurs continuously in his most recent works. As Roberto Tessari writes, Ponzio IV's formal declination 'pursues his own personal alchemy of the lost image', retracing the constitutive process of rediscovered visual objects through a material painting that reinvents 'thicknesses and ripples, wrinkles and uneven surfaces'. A rigorous, extremely measured work, marked by an inner vision of the surrounding reality, the passing of time and the renewal of the seasons.