When a Sculpture Becomes a Gesture. There are moments in contemporary art when the boundary between object and action becomes so thin it suddenly dissolves. Gio Montez’s Azione n. 6 – Sublimazione is one of those moments—an event that is less a performance than an eruption of meaning in a precise place and time.
It begins with a block of local peperino stone, intended to become a sculpture. Instead of carving a figure, Montez removes the figure itself, leaving only a pedestal inspired by Michelangelo’s David. And then, in a gesture both vulnerable and defiant, the artist steps onto that pedestal—nude, exposed to the Tuscia landscape and to the centuries of history embedded in it.
Facing the valley of Bomarzo, Montez reenacts the tension of a mythic hero confronting his monsters. The gesture sparked debate, fascination, and, eventually, recognition: what some saw as provocation was soon understood as a clear act of sublimation—the transformation of instinct into symbol, flesh into thought, scandal into art.
In that instant, the pedestal becomes a stage, the body becomes language, and the entire landscape becomes the artwork’s frame. Montez’s “Sublimazione” is not just a performance; it is a meditation on courage, vulnerability, and the power of turning human impulse into creative revelation.