Carlo Pedenovi

As a child, he demonstrates the predisposition to art by shaping small animals with clay and following the work of two elderly painters in Tuscany when he was seven or eight.^[2] A little more than twenty years, between 1949 and 1951, began to attend the Genoese study of Antonio Maria Morera, sculptor and decorator with a twentieth-century approach, active in Genoa during the years of the fascist regime, from whom he learned the fundamentals of the trade, the modeling and sculpture techniques that allowed him to create his first significant works. After this experience and following the meeting with Giancarlo Marchese, another young man from Tortona, a sculptor by vocation, together with whom he opened a studio in the premises of the former Sironi spinning mill, Pedenovi enrolled in 1957 at the Brera Academy, where he attended the classroom of Luciano Minguzzi, former teacher of Marchese, and appropriated those languages of modernity, in particular the neo-Cubist one, which had established themselves in the lively post-war period Milanese context.^[3][4]

In the mid-1960s, his other great passion for mountain and voyages of exploration led him to participate in numerous expeditions, often within the framework of the initiatives of the Tarpaulin CAI, in remote regions of the earth and to make climbs on some of the peaks of the highest mountain chains, from the Caucasus to the Himalayas, from the Andes to the Alps, the most famous of which was the rise, in 1971, in Viva absolute^[1][5]

Tied to the commune of Volpeglino for family roots, he chose to live in the country for love of nature and the various surrounding landscape.^[2]

He was professor of art history at the scientific high school Giuseppe Peano in Tortona.^[1][6]

Upon returning from his journey he realized works that represented local populations, Nepalese carriers, Argentine gauchos, the campesinos of Bolivia and Peru, the nomads of the Dogon tribes and Tuareg of the Mali desert, caught in their daily activities and in their difficult and suffering conditions of life. With his personal style, he was given in particular to sculpture, with themes such as the female figure, through the search for the beauty of lines and forms, and sacred sculpture like the panels of the stations of the Via Crucis, the Madonnas with child, the Saints, the Crucifixes and the monuments of cemetery destination.

It is also circulated with large sculptures that have found placement in public spaces of Tortona ("Monument to the Alpino", "The water nymph" and "Don Orione") of Alessandria (relief for the falls of the Resistance) and Castelnuovo Scrivia (“The mother of the fallen of all wars”). In the last period of his activity, he had rediscovered color in painting, after the substantial monochrome of previous periods, and the pointillist drawings, of pointillist origin, and in sculptures in terracotta or cast in bronze he had favored naturalistic subjects and human figures exposed to the force of the wind.^[3]