From the exhibition catalogue Piero Fogliati: l’immagine nella rêverie – Alessandro Pancotti 2014

Piero Fogliati’s career eludes all categorisation, all labels. It began in the 1960s and developed through to the new millennium. I agree with the idea that his work should be regarded as the work of a pioneer, in just the same way as the early experiments of Meliès, Moholy-Nagy, Harold Edgerton and Yves Klein were. Among contemporary artists, James Turrell and Maria Nordman seem to share the greatest affinity with Fogliati in their research on light and space. Nevertheless the significance of his innovations for the sublimation of natural phenomena is without parallel. The fact that it all originated in a small laboratory, where Piero Fogliati has spent most of his life, brings us necessarily to the idea of a journey. A journey that the true artist takes with his mind, rather than physically with the hustle and bustle of a tourist. This is a patient exploration of self-discovery. Fogliati’s work needs to be observed with trust – because someone who succeeds in giving form to dreams opens up their world to other people. And makes further intuitions possible. The feeling of astonishment we experience in front of his work should be replaced with the awareness that we are observing a new language: we are the ones who still have to learn to be contemporaries of Fogliati.