Bernard Quintin
I came across Ponzio IV by chance... after stopping in my tracks, along with my friend Gribaudo, in front of one of his paintings made entirely of material with rolled wrought iron inlays. It was in Turin, in his antique shop. Ponzio will go far, and it's a name to remember.
Paris, June 1990
Gianni Bertini
Replace a real wall with a patiently constructed grid, and you will see a dream, the one that Ponzio delivers with his torn surfaces.
Franca Barbuggiani
... Ponzio IV subsequently embarked on a personal quest that is still ongoing today and which, although sensitive to international trends, is originally characterised both from a linguistic and inspirational point of view...
The works feature grates and bolts, litter and gates, Madonnas and switches.
Everyday domestic objects corroded by rust.
Things that are past and no longer in use, emerging from a pasty magma, pacified in their colourless softness.
Ponzio IV's symbolism is poor, with Dada and Pop references and reminiscent of assembly techniques, but rich in metaphors, alluding to closed and concluded realities. Private but also epochal.
Properly speaking, at the end of a culture, as Ponzio IV says, whose beginnings date back five or six centuries to the modern age, which artistically expressed humanism and the Renaissance.
Thus, individual memory is charged with historical and cultural significance.
Not without a delicate religious sentiment. The violence of a litter marked with stirrups is ideally sublimated in the concept of the Crucifixion; the Madonnas are all recovered from private devotion, once venerated witnesses of pain and hope, of deep affection.
In this homage to the past, just yesterday of a today whose tomorrow is still unknown, to a completed cycle, to a world that is dying, there is an interesting series of four works, with a strong and evocative scenographic impact, dedicated to Mozart's funeral in the year of the centenary celebrations: in reality, a tribute to the deceased of every observer, captured by the impartial and faithful eye of mirrors - almost metaphorical thresholds discriminating between different worlds and times - symbolically illuminated by the light of many candles. Verona Fedele, 21 November 1993
Marco Rosci
... an exhibition dedicated to the twenty-year career of the artist Ponzio, originally from La Spezia but active in Turin, where he was a pupil of Pontecorvo. His rich experimentation, especially with materials, initially including metal structures, with conceptual aspects and comparisons with material and popular devotional culture, has led him to participate with excellent results in the most advanced Turin culture, with recent recognition also in Paris.
Roberto Tessari
It has happened (and still happens to many), especially during childhood, to lose oneself in a dreamlike contemplation of a damp patch or a piece of peeling plaster on the ceiling or old wall of a room. Faced with these marks – which adult reason considers with annoyance: mere imperfections to be erased, in order to enjoy the privilege of living in a completely clean space: always “new”, always “clean” – the creative imagination feels the need to pause and rest, until it discovers them to be hieroglyphics full of enigmatic meanings. Until it recognises in them an image that is all the richer in meaning and expressive energy the more its design seems to emerge unexpectedly from a neglected dimension, where mysterious forms seem to have taken refuge to remain hidden, thus escaping the banal perception of hurried everyday glances. What can happen in the confines of a room could also happen within the metropolitan spaces that modern man distractedly travels through every day: discovering shreds of walls, memories of gates, pieces of minor art, incongruous fragments of signs that emerge by surprise from the fundamentalist pretensions of an urban geometry resolved in hyperbole of pretentious surfaces and volumes: well defined and even better ‘polished’. For this to happen, however, an artist's eye is needed: the visionary gaze of someone who knows how to bring to light what is hidden and forgotten, highlighting those major or minor timeless “hieroglyphics” that the dynamism of the present tries to hide, almost shamefully, in the darkest folds of backgrounds that are difficult to penetrate. This is precisely what happens in the works of Ponzio IV: a metaphysical gallery of fragments of the ancient eloquence of things, traced with the love of a collector and the spirit of adventure of a discoverer of secrets, absolutised through shots that release all their autonomous inexpressive force (but at the same time celebrating them as “immobile engines” of an aura similar to that of the most enigmatic symbols). This is not a kind of “photographic minimalism” aimed at reproducing relics and curiosities incongruous with the rationalistic anxiety of postmodern civilisation: the artist's typical formal approach pursues rather his own personal alchemy of the lost image. It seems to want to retrace the constitutive process of many rediscovered “visual objects”. It does so through a material painting that imposes the arduous discipline of reinventing (in addition to the often ghostly colourism) the thicknesses and ripples, wrinkles and unevenness of the surfaces on which its subjects live. In this way, the consistency and fragrance of maritime relics can be reborn, even in the eyes of the viewer, imposing themselves discreetly on the “strange” but inescapable need of everyone to contemplate with a wisely childlike gaze, in order to live again in the light of poetry. Ripafratta, June 1997
Giorgio Trevisan
On his corroded surfaces, similar to walls worn down by time and rain, ‘the imprint of a window railing or litter takes on - writes Francesco Butturini in the brochure accompanying the exhibition - the value of an explicit testimony of life that perpetuates itself by transmuting active and useful tools of everyday life into symbols and metaphors that acquire another life and another usefulness of longer duration in time’.
In his works, the recognisable mark of objects allows their form to be transformed into an effigy, a brand, preserving real fragments that are inexorably expelled from contemporary everyday life because they have aged prematurely, both in their materiality and in their taste. It is in the dense, opaque and ancient matter that Ponzio IV preserves and defends his discarded materials; it is in the accumulations of dust, rust and colour that he revives the worn and mysterious imprint of those objects whose memory and presence he ultimately wishes to preserve. L'Arena, 6 October 1993