A Bic pen cap becomes a small bronze: Valerio Pisano's work transforms the ordinary into myth
October 12, 2025, 12:05 PM Michela Girardi
Valerio Pisano's work
Pisano, about a year after his solo exhibition at the Ferrai Museum in Lanusei, explains how his journey through bronze continues "inexorably," transforming everyday objects into sculptures that seem to have emerged from an archaeological dig of the future.
A simple Bic pen cap, cast in bronze and placed on a red porphyry base as if it were a Nuragic artifact. This is the latest surprising creation by Ogliastra-born artist Valerio Pisano, who continues his journey through irony, memory, and matter with a new work from the "Pop Art Arcaica" series.
Pisano, about a year after his solo show at the Ferrai Museum in Lanusei, describes how his journey through bronzes continues "inexorably," transforming everyday objects into sculptures that seem to have emerged from a futuristic archaeological dig. After the "self-portrait pens," the "hourglasses," and the "living pens," now comes a "rain of corks"—bronze reinterpretations of his drawings, fixed on porphyry stones and imbued with symbolic meaning.
“My intention is to reproduce in bronze all the drawings I made a while ago. The further I go, the more I realize that it seems they could all be reproduced. This worries me and amuses me at the same time,” explains the artist.
The cap, in Pisano's language, becomes a metaphor for ambiguity and censorship. In his work Ambiguitàppo, the small object that usually “protects” the pen becomes the symbol of those who, in attempting to protect, end up stifling creative freedom.
“The cap protects the tip of the pen from falls or stains, but it also prevents the pen from writing, from expressing itself, from creating.”
A poetic and corrosive gesture at once: taking a fragment of the most banal everyday life and making it eternal, like a Nuragic bronze statuette of the present. Pisano anticipates that new, unpublished works will soon be arriving, always poised between archaeology and contemporary pop. And if his bronze caps could speak, perhaps they would say that true art—even today—is born when one manages to give weight to the light.
