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The MACS Museum is pleased to announce the acquisition of The Whispered Kiss (2023–2024), a sculpture in Carrara statuary marble created by artist Michelangelo Toffetti, into its permanent collection.

This acquisition enriches the museum’s collection with a work that, through the purity of its form and the expressive quality of its material, offers a poetic reflection on the themes of encounter and human connection.

In The Whispered Kiss, the permanence of marble and the universality of the gesture converge in an essential synthesis. The artist abandons any anecdotal description, entrusting the construction of meaning entirely to the relationship between forms, allowing emotion to emerge directly from the material itself and from its carefully balanced harmony.

The polished surfaces and the reduction of volumes to their essence convey the impression of a form emerging naturally from the stone. While retaining its inherent monumentality, the marble opens itself to an unexpected sense of lightness, revealing an inner movement that flows through the sculpture and defines its rhythm.

The composition unfolds through a gradual convergence of forms that appear to seek one another without ever surrendering their individuality. It is from this dialogue that the poetic strength of the work arises.

The kiss is captured here in its most archetypal dimension: not as the narration of a fleeting moment, but as the expression of a relationship that transcends time. Reserved and measured in its presence, the sculpture suggests an intimacy that requires no declaration. Through the essentiality of its composition and the refinement of its craftsmanship, the material opens itself to a contemplative dimension, offering the viewer an elemental and enduring image of human encounter.

BIOGRAPHY Michelangelo, a sculptor from Bergamo who relocated to Carrara, has developed an artistic practice rooted in an archaic dimension of form, where matter precedes and determines every narrative possibility. His work occupies a territory that eludes the definitions of movements or trends, favoring instead a direct dialogue with the deep history of sculpture: from prehistoric monoliths and totemic forms to ritual masks of African traditions. His early explorations, often translated into painting, evoke a primordial tension that finds resonance in the great megalithic complexes such as Stonehenge, as well as in the volumetric synthesis of tribal sculpture. In this sense, the human figure is never described but rather evoked as an ancestral presence: a mask that persists through time, capable of capturing the viewer in an almost physical relationship, as though the artwork itself could absorb them. A comparison with the history of modern sculpture reveals several significant affinities. The drive toward primary form and essentiality recalls the research of Constantin Brâncuși, while the inner vibration of matter and the sense of restrained energy find a parallel in the work of Henry Moore. At the same time, the attention to the mask and to an archaizing form of figuration indirectly recalls the imagery of Amedeo Modigliani, particularly in his sculpted heads. Michelangelo works primarily with Carrara marble, Rosa Portogallo marble, and related stones, yet it is in marble that his research reaches its highest expressive intensity. His intervention is never violent but progressive: he softens edges, refines volumes, and gradually leads matter toward a state of dynamic tension. The surface comes alive, bending and twisting in a continuous movement that transforms sculpture into a fluid organism capable of expanding into space. Through this process, matter seems to emancipate itself from its own rigidity, giving rise to a formal vortex that engages in dialogue with its surroundings. The sculpture does not merely occupy space; it envelops and redefines it, establishing a sensory and immersive relationship with the environment.