“In these historic times, when we’re bombarded with images which we’re continually swiping through on our phones, transforming an image into a sculptoral form means that it can no longer be pushed to one side and you’re fixing it in people’s collective memory”.  Dozens of  incredibly modern, viral thoughts such as these, offered up by Jacopo Cardillo a.k.a. Jago, punctuate Luigi Pingitore’s documentary Jago: Into the White, which is dedicated to the 37-year-old Italian artist, outlining his philosophy, and which has just enjoyed its world premiere in the Spotlight Documentary section of the Tribeca Film Festival.

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From the blinding light of a marble quarry in Carrara, where Jago chooses blocks for sculpting, we follow him to New York in December 2019, before the Big Apple’s skyline fades into the narrow streets of Naples, where his father Antonio has bought the artist the most beautiful studio imaginable: the Church (abandoned for years) of Sant’Aspreno ai Crociferi, a magnificent building in the Baroque style in Rione Sanità. “In Naples, I learned that sculpting is about knowing how to communicate”. And there’s no doubt that Jago communicates brillliantly through his art. “Is it possible to help people understand what it means to create? Probably starting with the material, with marble. Understanding what the first step is when you use your imagination”. And opening his studio up to everyone.  “Works that we release into the world belong to people, and they should be given back to people”. For Jago, relationships with others are fundamental: “communicating helps me to better understand what I’m doing and adds value to the work”.

Pingitore, who’s also responsible for the film’s screenplay and photography, shows us how one of Jago’s best known works came about: a “Pietà”, which reverses Michelangelo’s world-famous original to depict a man in the depths of despair, holding up the lifeless body of a woman. Jago isn’t attempting to be subversive by reversing classical representations. He recognises the sublime, and measures himself up to it. At a TEDx talk in Genova, he admitted that Michelangelo, Bernini and Leonardo were his reference points as a child, when he wanted to be “even bigger than they were”, in order to stress that every little boy should aspire to excellence. He drew inspiration from Antonio Canova for his sculptural technique: sketches, then a plaster model and the use of tacks positioned symmetrically and at precise distances from one another, which would then be recreated in marble with the help of a pantograph.

It’s fascinating how an experience involving taking a hammer and a scalpel to a block of marble comes courtesy of a youngster who is so well versed in social media (we see one of his live streams drawing in 43,600 participants) and who goes beyond the cliché of the artist with his head in the clouds. When a group of kids kick the living daylights out of his work The First Baby – a gigantic, “abandoned” foetus in the middle of Piazza Plebiscito in Naples – and post the video of it on TikTok, he invites them into his studio and lets them play around with his tools. He has also been attacked for his use of social media, on the grounds that it could detract from the poetry of his art. “But my work has grown freely in a shared space. It was essential”. He has lived and worked in Italy, China, America and the UAE, but sharing is his motto. His words are studied, controlled; they’re those of an exemplary contemporary artist who manages himself, who wants to be at one with his work. The director’s filming technique involves him composing impeccably classical paintings around Jago and his sculptures, placing his subject centre stage. Then the camera draws nearer, with thoughtful but also detached confidence, perhaps to “find the model’s shape within the block of marble”.

Jago: Into the White is produced by JCJ while international sales are managed by Nexo Digital, who will distribute the movie in Italian cinemas as a special event on 18 and 19 June.