English 
Italiano 
On the wall there is a panel with many photographs: “They’re all friends”, says Pino Guzzonato, and we recognize the faces of Luigi Meneghello, Mario Rigoni Stern and Marco Paolini, among many others. On the table, the logbook, a collage of snapshots of each meeting, a collection of calligraphy, testimonies and memories.
Guzzonato chose a place full of meaning to plant his atelier: a narrow valley in the early Dolomites of Vicenza, a trench dug by the stream Acquasaliente from which come water fairies, elves and crocodiles resting in the garden. And more than atelier it is a manufactory, a home-factory where you do with your hands, where they build mobile sculptures such as the Kisses Machine, they cut stones and bake bread, they destroy rags and old books to give them new life.
Pino Guzzonato is an alchemic and pataphysician artist, but in his own way. He deals with poetry and stones, wood and steel works, decorating with wire and engraved with laser, emboss signs with photosensitive gelatin and collects mummified African insects. Then he loves plexiglas and makes transparent sculptures that contain the very existence, as transparent columns of Bosco (Wood), he boxes his artist’s books in display cases, but more importantly, creates paper and makes a work of art of it.
The procedure is millenary, the maceration of an element containing cellulose and its transformation into a thin and compact sheet, that the artist makes his own by choosing unusual materials: soft and blue sheets obtained with jeans, rough and fragrant with jute, and then bamboo, cotton, sunk books that sometimes leave their mark on new sheet the sign of some letters survived. The paper, for the artist, is support for graphics, is the soul of books adorned with texts by poets, writers, architects of the word that interact with elegant incisions, it is also moist material with which to make the casts of doors, trunks, his work gloves, in a transaction that is first of all an act of memory and re-signification of attention to the little invisible things but full of meaning. And the works, so light, they become a symbol speaking of resistance against the destruction and oblivion operated by time and man. The papers by Pino Guzzonato are deep surfaces that beg to be touched and tell stories of the past and a friendly nature of the artist.
“Here seems to be out of this world, and instead we’re in a world“, reveals this antique and cozy man – as defined by Carlo Mazzacurati – and he was quite right, it is a world populated by a rich bestiary peeping here and there, in every corner of the old factory: Pino Guzzonato, before we say goodbye, tells us with affection of guinea fowls, extraordinary and misunderstood animals, while paper lizards and steel crows seem to listen, interested.
