Biography

At the centre of Maicol Borghetti's work there is always the human figure: in bronze, in photography, in matter made of metal, light and time.

The beginnings — Photography and cinema

Borghetti was born in Pietrasanta in 1976, a town of marble and bronze where sculptors from all over the world still come to shape matter with their hands. He grew up among artists, with photography as a first language: at first on film, with a Hasselblad 500CM that taught him to slow down and to understand light not as something that reveals a figure, but as something that creates it. At the same time he was building three-dimensional figures on screen, with the first digital tools for sculpture. His visual imagination was formed as much by the formal rigour and dramatic light of Stanley Kubrick as by the sculptural and erotic power of Helmut Newton.

He belongs to a generation that still knew both worlds, analogue and digital, and learned to move between them as a single language. In 2005 his photographic project Immagini Zero won the national MarteLive competition in Rome, followed by exhibitions in Rome, Milan and Paris. From 2007 he turned to the moving image: he directed his own short films and in 2009 co-founded Studio Sumatra, the first Italian production company to own a Red 4K digital cinema camera. He worked as director of photography for Franco Battiato, Jovanotti, Laura Pausini, Nesli and Nina Zilli, and authored three science-fiction short films, Acronos, Ison and The Liw, the first of which was selected at the Trieste Science+Fiction Festival and at the Galactic Film Festival in Los Angeles. It was in those years that he felt the pull towards a more intimate practice, one in which the distance between thought and form grows shorter. From there his figures were born.

The archaeology of the future — Mythos and Protos

Borghetti calls his research the archaeology of the future: an imaginary archaeology. Through the Mythos and Protos series he gives life to bronze figures that appear at once ancient and unrecognisable, as if brought back to light by a civilisation that ran parallel to our own and left behind nothing but its beauty. Other humanities, lost in time; proto-myths, forms that existed before us and that will remain after us.

The process begins with three-dimensional scans of real people, or with figures modelled from scratch, and continues in the physical world up to the casting in bronze. In the way he works, sculpture is photography in three dimensions, light that builds volume instead of surface, and bronze and photography become two ways of safeguarding the same thought. Beneath the forms remains a constant question: what it means to be human not as a single life, but as a long arc, the whole carried forward by each individual, and each individual made significant by the whole.

The bronze — Exhibitions, institutions, foundry

Since 2019 the archaeology of the future has expanded through exhibitions and institutional dialogues. The Mythos and Protos series made its debut at Lu.C.C.A. Lucca Center of Contemporary Art, curated by Maurizio Vanni. In 2021 it received the Michelangelo Buonarroti sculpture prize in Seravezza. Two dialogues with archaeology followed: in 2022 Il Trionfo della Luce, at the Santa Scolastica Archaeological Museum in Bari, and in 2023 Exploring the Ego of Times, at the Versilian Archaeological Museum in Pietrasanta, where the figures stood alongside Etruscan finds as objects of a parallel civilisation. In 2024 came Lumen, in Viareggio.

Since 2025 Franco Senesi of Liquid Art System has represented his work internationally, presenting Mythos and Protos at Art Miami 2025 and Art Palm Beach 2026. In the summer of 2026 the project Capri Verdemare brings a new chapter to the island of Capri: a sculpture immersed in the sea, from which a new patina of bronze is born, the Capri Verdemare Patina. Maurizio Vanni has written about his work; he is currently followed curatorially by Alessandro Romanini.

Borghetti lives and works in Viareggio. Each sculpture is cast at the Fonderia Artistica Versiliese in Pietrasanta, a few kilometres away, a foundry with over fifty years of history. His figures bear no titles, no dates, no explanations: only a code, a certificate and a photograph. It is enough. The rest is yours.

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