Pinuccio Sciola: the man who made the stones sing

It was the man who made the stones sing.

Pinuccio Sciola had discovered the stones as a child, tearing up the fields around San Sperate, in Campidano.

At the age of 17, when a friend, unbeknownst to him, presented three of his works to an exhibition held at the La Rinascente club in Cagliari, the jury declared him a winner, with the motivation that in his work he recognized

the imprint of a strong personality that could have revealed an unknown talent to Sardinia.

He was offered a scholarship to attend the Cagliari art school.
With his diploma in his pocket, he attended the Florence School of Art and the International Academy of Salzburg where he attended the courses of Minguzzi, Kokoschka, Vedova and Marcuse.

In 1967 he enrolled at the University of Moncloa in Madrid; the following year, however, he is in Parigi.

In May of 68, he was in the square with the students, then he traveled to Mexico and Peru, to Easter Island and the Congo forests.

He had seen so many things, and not having words to describe them, he decided to whitewash the mud walls of San Sperate and paint the world as he had seen it. Thus inaugurating muralism in Sardinia, better known and advertised in Orgosolo.

Today the village is an open-air museum, where the inhabitants have made their habit of using walls to express their emotions.

The sound stones were only the most recent stage of the journey of a great artist.

He had hands as big and strong as stone and gnarled like olive wood, born in San Sperate in 1942 and recently passed away.

Despite having lived in many cities of Europe, he had returned to Sardinia, his island-continent, apparently so peripheral in the art world; as he repeated, quoting Rimbaud

he fed on air, rock and mud.

In fact with stones, and its stones, is strewn the village of San Sperate, in the fields, among the olive trees, oranges, among the tangles of prickly pears there are its laboratories.

San Sperate thus becomes an unexpected navel of the world of culture where the home of Pinuccio Sciola, who has continued to look at the world through the eyes of a child, remains as open as his heart and mind were.