Stefano Scheda was born in Faenza in 1957 and graduated at Bologna’s Academy of Fine Arts in 1980.
He lives and works in Bologna.
He has been lecturer in decoration at Brera’s Academy of Fine Art. He first exhibited in 1972.
Histories esemplifies an important group of works realized by Stefano Scheda since 1999, several of them having been carried out in the years 2000 and 2001. A process of selection that lasted almost one year had made possible the articulation of the works in a sequence which offers to the observer transversal approaches and connections between each work.
They were realized during the summer months on a beach or in a context of industrial, sometimes futuristic landscapes, building sites not yet dismantled in the outskirts of Bologna: places where Stefano Scheda was wholly free to stage his conception of the nude in the space – a freedom that is not to interpret as a situation of released sexuality or eroticism. Therefore, not what you could so often find in many presentations of the male nude, but the liberty of an integrate, not fragmented corporeity fortuitously inserted in a space. As a matter of fact, Stefano Scheda does devise a systematic-existential theme: for himself, the nude is expression of an identity that has remained unchanged in centuries. Since a long time, this is even the enduring key of the artist’s “histories”, his narrations with figures. There is a dialogue, as a matter of fact, a dialectic between the rules given out by the artist and the spatial interpretations by the models, so to institute a condition of unstable equilibrium and variability imperceptible by the spectator.
The human being in the work of Stefano Scheda is “the man”, the male body in the space, if you like Leonardo’s “homo in circulo”, and simultaneously the mutual dialogue between the bodies is relevant for him. The models have neither biographical nor other links whatsoever. They met often – for the first and last time – in the tableaux vivants staged by Stefano Scheda, besides being unaware of the body language they articulated under Scheda’s direction. He is uninterested in the professional models so often encountered in contemporary photography. In Scheda’s choreography the physiognomical aspect gives totally way to the body in the stage-designing of his suggestive compositions.
Lately, Scheda inserts in his works props, such as frames or mirrors to create a refined play of “images in images”. All the rules of behaviour proposed by Scheda are individually interpreted and expressed by the models, and it is precisely this play of cognitions and intuitions, of feeling and reflection that guarantees the quality of Scheda’s works.
Peter Weiermair, Histoires, 2001