‘This exhibition comprises an extraordinary group of drawings by Henry Moore, which belong to the Moore Foundation, an institution as dear to the English as the British Museum. Henry Moore is the most significant English artist of the 20th century; his legendary works have witnessed the story of his homeland and the tragedy of the two World Wars. When Moore was asked whether art was a discrete and personal activity or a way of communicating, he replied: “Creativity is a personal activity, but its communication and diffusion cannot be equally discrete and personal… Painting and sculpture help people use their eyes better, in order to obtain more pleasure and meaning out of their lives; even a sigh or a leaf are a message”. The poetic breath of Moore’s work is born from life itself, here and now, just like the work of the great English poet, T.S. Eliot. Moore’s work shows the world as nature, as prehistoric memory, as everyday life; life as love and as a cry, as desperation and as salvation, hope and awareness of the finiteness of life. Moore sees existence as a fragment of solitude, as a tiny crumb from the relationship with love; life itself is giving and receiving, is risk and caution, is the will to work the stone and make it curved according to the type of creation that he wanted to carry out. The drawings at this exhibition are not autobiographic: everything is narration, description of his wonder, of his gaze that discovers all the time and learns and surprises. The important aspect of these drawings is the sign that Moore highlights and presents in a vision of his experience with the world and of his emotional turmoil, of his wonder and incredulity; his vacillating in front of the spectacle of the world is towards the incommensurable. Although it is often impossible to describe, it is nevertheless close to him and useful to him to picture the human condition in his work. The sign, the erasure by means of a chalk on a watercolour or an a pencil-sketch is a sign, a recall to a universe packed full of signs which lie within it… The work of Moore is not reminiscent of William Blake, as many have written, but rather of Oscar Wilde: things stand before the artist with or without a name, but they remain alone, present to themselves: they feel there is a heart in all other things, a heart that beats within the image itself. The story is narrated by Moore but it is never objective: it is the consciousness of the artist which takes it all upon him … Carmine Benincasa’