Julio Larraz: Valle Marineris, Viareggio

Julio Larraz presents in the splendid seafront setting of Viareggio - Piazza Mazzini- the sculpture "Valle Marineris." The initiative is a collaboration between the Municipality of Viareggio and Contini Art Gallery of Venice and Cortina d'Ampezzo, which, since 2005, is the sole representative of the artist in Italy. The work, which measures five meters long and three meters high, depicts a slice of watermelon. The fruit actually represents a device the artist uses to suggest the features of one of the quadrants of the planet Mars, whose surface is dotted with craters and inlets. Just one of these craters, the largest (in reality about four thousand kilometers long and two hundred wide) appears, transfigured, in Larraz's work. "Ever since I was a child, I would see things and try to unearth in them another meaning so that I could get something out of it that I could play with and turn it into something else," the artist says. Indeed, he has always played with reality, reinterpreting and transfiguring it according to his imaginative vision, and nature itself often serves as a pretext for his experiments. For Larraz, watermelon is, of all fruits, "the most likeable, it is like a red smile," resembling a ruby, a luminous and extraordinary alabaster, "a planet on my table."