It has always been rare to find an artist able to surprise and to give us back joy and anxieties, wonders and amazements through his/her quiet and strong artcraft. In these days of planned irreverences and constricted transgressions Terenzio Pedini's rough powerful sculptures demonstrate a creative state of grace almost unconceivable. But, as we cannot deny the happy results reached by the artists while forging his images of love and nightmare, we cannot but take into consideration a survived strenght of the art and of the single person who believes and creates in solitude as if he/she were praying. I cannot - thinking of Pedini and his secluded bottega marchigiana (shop in the Italian region of Le Marche), where he has been beating iron for years creating simulacres of obstinate dreams and maybe even ghosts of is allucinations - I cannot get free from the idea that even serenity could belong to this period and that sometimes the joy of doing could overcome the conscience of pain and passion, vivid in this artist. It is certainly true that Pedini does not belong to the cursed artists by vocational attitude, but even serenity has a right to its nightmares. So there is no lack of monsters in the angelic bestiary of this master of iron who repeat, in the shapes of a confident modernity, the path followed by tradition in classic Italian sculpture and the primitive one. It will be easy to observe in Pedini's work the arcaic memory of Wiligelmo and of the Metope's master, of Nicola and Giovanni Pisano. The darkened gothic stops the image of the archibishop Turpino and it melt in the powerful and vaguely byzantine elegance of Orlando's horse. Elks and Elphants, the shooting Greyhound and the types of a singular zoomorphous range crowd together, grinning and gentle as in one of Rabelais' pages, and they testify a culture which is aulic because it keeps inside itself the vigour of vulgarity and the concrete sense of the sublimate being in the metaphors of the monumentum. It is quickly understood that Pedini's immagination pushes and forces the limits of the quiet well-doing revealing himself also in the overbearing handycraft colouring the human sublime of the martyr-Christ. It is the miracle of the craft, of the aestethic dignity presented without negotiations as a moral dignity. We could describe Pedini, with the whole charge of denunciation of his works, as an artist of consecrations, a sincere moralist. That is where he found enough heart and discretion to work joyfully like an anchoret, keeping himself at the borders of, but not outside, the circuits of beauty and ugliness, the good and the bad of art.
(Franco Solmi)

I like to remember the day when Terenzio Pedini unloaded his sculptures from a van near the front door of the editorial office of a periodical I was directing at that time. We had agreed by the phone. Pedini had asked to meet me: "I would like to show you some works of mine" he said. And I thought he intended to bring me photos and slides of his works, maybe together with a pair of his sculptures of small dimensions. On the contrary, in a few minutes, the small garden right outside my office door got transformed in a small plastic museum "en plain air". Pedini had unloaded about ten sculptures of big size and very heavy. And he stood there, sweating and almost trembling, waiting from me to judge his work. I met Terenzio Pedini and his work in this way. A sculptor who works iron as we used to do very long ago, with an acknoledged skill, using his arms strength and the mallet/hammer and transforming almost alchemically the "vile" metal into shapes of exceptional expressive strength. It seems very important to me to underline his skill in joining together, almost paradoxically, a very strong sense of synthesis and a vibrating and often lyric taste for analysis. I mean that Pedini's form is almost always strongly condensed, sometimes almost congealed in its own "pondus" (see, for example, a very essential figure of a bishop), while some other times his form is analytically investigated in the anathomical detail (a head, a torso, a limb) or in the decorative detail (the minute graphics of elk horns, the hair and the swarming skin of a seated woman). And these two aspect (summerizing and concise, the first, fragmented and diffused the second), by definition dicothomical, in Pedini's artistic expression, in his magic attitude to create visual metaphors, cohabit as if complementary parts of a perfect osmothic union…Pedini works in an extremely dinamic way into the physical space, as his sculptures are not pure contents put inside a pure container; on the contrary his plastic works are linked to the space, interact with it creating a lively area uniting and melting to the surrounding space. The space comes to be the page where to write the words of a short story, or the natural setting for an event to take place. That's why Terenzio Pedini has to be considered a narrator and his sculpture should take the characteristics of a visualized short where human figures, things, animals, and space live together, in a perfect symbiosis, as on the stage of a theatre or even on the stage of life.
(Armando Ginesi)

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