"OLIVO BARBIERI, VIRTUAL TRUTHS" par Paola TOGNON. Editions Silvana Editoriale, Milan. 2001. Petit in-4, couverture toilée bleu nuit sous jaquette photo. 136 pages. Texte trilingue italien / anglais / allemand de Hubertus von Amelunxen, John Bird & Paola Tognon, illustré de 83 reproductions couleurs pleine page d'Olivo Barbieri.

"Looking at Olivo Barbieri's works is like contemplating gigantic animals with complex, expanded forms: legs antennae, claws and prostheses joined to the protuberances of bellies and jaws. Heads and backs, eyes and teeth, are articulated in the structural movement of living complexities with a behaviour that is singular yet at the same time universal. An amplification of invisible single-cell animals, radiant or stellar, immobile or fluctuating, silent or croaking, which are units in transformation, susceptible to persistent vitality. It is the sensitive and intellectual recording of the flowing of time measured by the primary rhythms of sleep, of light, of hunger, of the spiritual, of capital, of building, of embellishing, of functioning, of digesting, of camouflaging, of expelling. It is thus a personal index that mark the temporal flown, seen as the representation of a persistence toward survival (the same that links micro to macro, human to animal, nature to human environment, belly to beehive, tower to shack, stadium to monastery) and which includes, in its flowing, the presence of mortality along with the presence of the ephemeral..." Ref LPB0333