Art and science are not alien notions but communicating vessels, exchangers of sense and energy which share the same interest towards the hidden structures of reality. This volume, dedicated to the work of Ivo Soldini, bears concrete witness to his interests. The artist’s research, his journey, his questioning of matter, his investigation into the very identity of contemporary man is essentially taken apart in Rémy Steinegger’s sequence of photographs. An analytical eye deconstructs the creative process so as to restore the whole breadth of experience, which is simultaneously human and aesthetic, theoretical and artistic.¬ It is said that nothing is more memorable than a picture, and one thinks of two dimensionality, but when pictures had to perform an important role in communication – for example for evangelisation – they were often represented in three dimensions. This trend became evident for example during the Counter-Reformation, when a return to sculpture, particularly the hyperrealistic sculpture that we find in the Sacri Monti (Sacred Mountains) between Northern Italy and the Ticino region, took place in order to bring the figures of worship closer to the people.Therefore, the third dimension offered tangibility and reduced without being excessively structuralist – this reoccurred a century ago with the addition of a new third dimension, time, to compose moving pictures, but the expressive force of sculpture persists even today, and therefore so does its role. If the sculpture is figurative, moreover, there is probably greater closeness to any kind of public, and this is, all things considered, the main goal of a work of art place on the street. For 75 years, Illustrazione Ticinese has nurtured an intense relationship of information and communication with a broad readership: practically every reader in the canton of Ticino receives this magazine at home or reads it in public places. Since its early years, and even during the autarchic straits, the magazine sought to bring awareness of the artists who worked in or came from the canton of Ticino even to the readers in the furthest valleys of the region. Therefore, it was natural to celebrate its anniversary by choosing a Ticino artist, Ivo Soldini, who is well-known in Switzerland and internationally. His sculptures made of bronze and other materials are very recognisable because of their characteristic deeply grooved surface and because in his extensive output he has produced rather homogeneous groups of works. Next to towering vertical figures and heads, even large ones, we often find leaning figures, as if caught in a struggle against the universal law of gravity. These are figures whose statics seems to originate from an interior will, a nervous force which is evidently manifest also externally. On this occasion, Soldini indeed devised an inclined figure inserted in a representation which is highly dynamic due to the “tail” constituted by plates which represent in summary and in a modern style the pages of a newspaper. The material chosen, aluminium, also is more contemporary than bronze and appears highly adequate in representing the swiftness of information. The main figure of the sculpture evidently represents a reader: this is a less problematic configure, less traversed by the lines of tension that are the distinctive marking of Ivo Soldini’s sculptures. The entire sculpture is easily recognisable and performs the task of communication that the magazine has chosen for itself now for three quarters of a century. This time, in the transition from the drawing to the finished sculpture, Ivo Soldini decided to experiment: for example, by choosing not to patinate the aluminium and instead apply gestural coloured aniline markings on the plates that represent the pages of the magazine. The resulting work is certainly unusual and capable of amazing and of being seen by a broad audience. An aluminium sculpture such as this one requires the lost-wax casting process, the same process used for many centuries for bronze works. Despite being such a time-honoured practice, there are few books which illustrate clearly this interesting and spectacular casting technique. An excellent reason to do so on this occasion: that is why a skilled news photographer, Rémy Steinegger, was asked to document each step of the birth of a sculpture starting from its design and its first scale model. In this volume, over 200 pictures explained by simple descriptions illustrate the seventeen steps into which the process was divided: from the preparatory drawing to the placement of the sculpture where it will be on show, which in this case is at the entrance of the headquarters of the Illustrazione Ticinese, which thus commemorates its history and imagines its future.