Alessandro Twombly: Works on Paper Like Ocean Waves Cresting on an Invisible Shore
by Richard Milazzo.

First edition deluxe hardback: April 2025.
Designed by Richard Milazzo.
120 pages, with a 4-colour gatefold jacket, a black and white photograph of the artist on the frontispiece by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, 36 color essay illustrations and 26 full-color Plate reproductions.
13.3 x 10 x 1.75 in. (33.7 x 25.4 x 4.4 cm.), printed, sewn, and bound in Italy.
ISBN-10: 1-893207-57-9.
ISBN-13: 978-1-89-320757-8.
Published by The Villa of Ten Dogs, Ronciglione, Italy, April 2025, on the occasion of the exhibition: Alessandro Twombly: Works on Paper, 2025, at the Tristan Hoare Gallery, London.

RETAIL PRICE: $75.00 (includes postage and handling)

Alessandro Twombly: Works on Paper Like Waves Cresting on an Invisible Shore is published on the occasion of the artist’s third exhibition, Alessandro Twombly: Works on Paper, at the Tristan Hoare Galley, in London, April 3 - May 10, 2025.

The exhibition presented two bodies of work: the Inner Waters series, 11 works on paper, executed in Ronciglione, in the Provence of Viterbo, in the region of Lazio, some 60 kilometers north of Rome; and the Bay Series, 15 works on paper, made in Alessandro’s studio in Gaeta, the fabled coastal town overlooking the Bay of Gaeta as it flows into the Gulf, and, in turn, into the Tyrrhenian Sea.

The author’s essay is divided into 4 parts: Part I provides a the history and cultural context of Alessandro Twombly’s Works on Paper; Parts II and III offer analyses of previous works on paper, including interpretations of the poetic dimension the artist’s titles; Part IV analyzes closely each of the 25 works on paper in the present exhibition.

The author writes: “My hope is that the approach of addressing the cultural context of previous works, as well as the present works, will function as a magnet to draw us more intensely into Alessandro Twombly’s works on paper – hurtle us more deliberately into the sudden and more impulsive threshold world of the artist’s hand racing magisterially across these sheets of paper like ocean waves cresting on an invisible shore, as if bearing the signature of the sea itself.

“No matter the energy expended with fingers and hands swirling in a thousand directions, and despite the light of the stars flowing like milk into the mouths of poets, there is almost nothing more this artist, or any artist, can do to restore our tongues lost in the desert, lapping futilely at the void. Yet, into the desert, which he so loves, he voyages. And somehow, metaphorical tongues and mouths, physical protuberances and enclaves, he finds, among echoes and shadows, so abstract, yet so near, so intimate, yet so remote – only de Kooning might have understood what forms Alessandro has conjured, the colors he has invented, the energy he has managed to invest in our destiny, in Modernism’s redemption.

“The syncopated internal and external energy of Alessandro’s work is not unrelated to the cosmic teleology in Roethke’s poem, ‘The Waking’: ‘I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. / I learn by going where I have to go. // We think by feeling. What is there to know? / I hear my being dance from ear to ear. / I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.’

“There are forms inspired by irises in Alessandro’s work, but there are also mountains and mountain ridges expressed abstractly – the Dolomites, but also the many mountain ranges of Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, and the many other countries he so loves in the Middle East. Like Courbet, Alessandro’s work is steeped in the forces of nature, in the vital forces that shape our world. He is able to lend monumentality to the smallest leaf or outcropping, to express the monumentality that is already inscribed in nature.

“Each of the images in the Inner Waters series contains a passage of sea-blue-green or green-blue color, as if to remind us of the sea as an overriding trope of fluidity, whether in the more floral works in the Inner Waters series or the more creatural ones in the Bay Series, which are all evocative of an ever-expanding, uncontainable energy –undeniably hungry or aggressive in their gestures, and even fierce. The colors, like the forms, are indescribable, particularly when they convene in combinations that only the fingers and brushstrokes of the artist can comprehend. But even these syntheses are, or must be, intuitive, as the artist has learned to trust the energy and the spontaneous and irrational emotions of the moment.

“I admire mightily these expressions – ferocious and all-consuming. Rather than turning exclusively inward or solely outward, how brave, how courageous Alessandro Twombly is to turn the internalized or inner workings of these forces into outward ones and the external or externalized forces into the internal ones in these magnificent syncopations which have found their most deft and radical expressions in these two series of works on paper, Inner Waters and the Bay Series. Internalizations and externalizations that have become syncopated manifestations of unruly miracles and sublime disarray.”   

Alessandro Twombly was born in Rome in 1959. He graduated from the London School of Economics, then attended the New York Studio School of Art. One-person exhibitions include: Sidney Janis, NY, Paul Kasmin, NY; Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires; Aurel Scheibler, Cologne; Blondeau Fine Art, Geneva; Lefevre, London; Thomas Ammann, Zürich. His work has been included Art Basel, Basel; Amalfi Quadriennale, Milan; Lucio Amelio; Spoleto; Laura Carpenter, Santa Fe; Palazzo Zen, Venice; Clark University, Worcester, MA; Yoshii, NY; Akira Ikeda, NY. He recently had a major one-person exhibition of paintings and sculpture, Radici dell’Essere (Roots of Being) at the Fondazione Ghisla Art Collection in Locarno, Switzerland, in March 2023; and a one-person show, Etruscan Painting, after nearly a twenty year absence, at the Amanita Gallery in New York City. His books include With Grass Ropes We Dragged the World to Her in Wooden Boats, with works on paper by the artist and poems of Jordan, Syria, and Egypt by the author (2010); and Alessandro Twombly: Sculpture (Berlin and Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2018). Forthcoming is the major monograph, The Unquiet Sun: Paintings, Sculptures, Works on Paper by Alessandro Twombly, 1986-2023.