It is as if the studio from which he observes the human condition before transforming it into sculptures, scale maps placed before us for our contemplation, is concealed high in the clouds. As though from the vantage point of a space-craft or a captive balloon, the blind human struggle is reduced to the scale of a stupefied, ridiculous, anguished, tortured nest of termites. From this sublime and detached aerial perspective, the proud planetary theatre reveals its calcined depths, the vain and cruel reality of a blind and monochrome mineral traversed by monochrome, insensate forms, defirious swarms of insects, crushing solitude, aberrant hordes. From above the fray, no sounds, no voices are heard; a sidereal silence enfolds the incongruous repetitive gestures of the minuscule actors, their antennae, their elytra, feverishly intent on their miserable mistakes, picking their way through wretched labyrinths of vanity. From on high, scrupulous as a scribe, Soravia translates into sculpted hieroglyphics the salient features of this absurd spectacle which its sorry protagonists call history, progress, civilisation, the path to redemption.

Domenico Porzio


The protagonists in the grand theatre of Soravia are the meek, the poor, the threatened, the defenceless but, above all, the crowd viewed in its collective manifestation, as a natural defensive circle. These images help to understand the artist's poetic mood. By looking down on human affairs from on high Soravia shows us that he wants to enclose all creatures great and small in a single affectionate embrace. To see them in a crowd, when they are bound together in the same action by the threads of their existence is to understand that being together, holding hands and sharing the same ritual are instinctive methods of guaranteeing our survival.

Luigi Carluccio


As Matisse said, simple things are always hard to explain. Indeed, it is no easy task to formulate a succinct definition of Soravia's work, which encompasses sculpture in the first instance but also springs from an updated symbolic neo-Platonism underpinned by artistic expression, in which aesthetic techniques are employed to make a moral point. In the sense of an astonished contemplation of the sublime and, perhaps, viewed from a religious angle, of the Unattainable.

Germano Beringheli


Sandro Soravia entrusts to his mini-characters the interpretation of his fundamental concept: that the universe which awaits us in no way excludes the spirit that dwells within each and every one of us and which guarantees that we remain individuals even when absorbed into the «mass» of a crowd. And it is with this individuality that all myths and collective scientific discoveries must come to terms.

Gian Franco Venè