TAMARO. Pietre e angeli. Mario Botta Enzo Cucchi (1998)

Swiss architect Mario Botta and Italian artist Enzo Cucchi worked for several years on the Santa Maria degli Angeli chapel on Mount Tamaro (Ticino, Southern part of Switzerland). First came the shell for the stone building, to which the art reacted in turn, and which in its turn influenced the interior space, in its colors above all. Finished in 1996, the work is a synthesis in which the two art forms interact. Their investigation is centered on a spirituality with a Christian orientation, corresponding to its time and expressed in the architecture and painting, as in the case of the two white hands on a blue ground, carved into the inner wall of the apse, filling it with their monumental presence. Interspersed in the chronological account of the construction are views of the mountainous landscape, sometimes visible in the distance, sometimes enveloped in fog, as well as digressions on Cucchi's origins in the coastal city of Ancona, or on the tradition of stone inlay, practiced in the XVIII century in Ticino and in southern Italy: such cross-references and brief allusions blend objective reporting with poetic fable. The grandeur and harmony of the site are highlighted by the music by Paul Giger, Swiss composer and violinist, who recorded a brief oratory, an archaic mass 17 minutes in length, in the chapel as yet in construction.