Metal and Stones If we do not take into account the fact that ambiguity is the obligatory path to positive values, further developments are not seen in the 1997 production. The complexity of the new works, even if it is not accentuated visually as in the previous ones (full of signs and shapes), becomes more hidden and essential. We see it in the two very different cycles: "Metals“ and „Stones“. It is as if the artist had isolated and zoomed in on the details to penetrate the substance, and to present the material both processed and left in its natural state. But even metals are not just matter: they enter cosmic life as that which is hidden, to be brought to light, to be worked. It is the life of the subsoil that is only partially revealed as the intricate and stratified subsoil of human interiority. "Metals". Aluminum, zinc, lead, copper as regular and non-polished slabs, glossy or opaque but also tar, wood chips, sand, felt (it is not a tribute to Beuys), glues, pigments. In any case, the artist is far from any illusionist effect, and does not pretend the pictorial materials with the extra pictorial materials. The need for reality is the greatest resource of inventing. "Stones". We have already mentioned their symbols. The works of the cycle represent stones cut and vertically furrowed by incisions that have a regular rhythm in which the color also takes part: ocher, light green, white.The weight that roots the large overlapping boulders on the ground is matched in a sort of staircase that leads up endlessly. The will, the planning and the action of man is in question with respect to a material waiting for architectural interventions to build the "new world". Not only in the most remote cosmological interpretations but also in the artistic creations of Hofstetter „Stones“ are not in contrast with "Metals", works far from informal solutions, even in the accentuated heterogeneity of the materials and their treatment. The regular shapes that highlight the type of metal are very frequent, confirming the strong constructive character of the entire production of the artist. The space of things, with the means of painting, becomes space for thoughts and emotions. Generally the symbolic interpretation is extensive, it accepts many contradictory meanings. We must not insist on not overwhelming the more properly artistic values. Certainly the advantage of being on the path of symbols is the discovery of a continuity between things that are not only different but opposed. And so the metals have cosmic events like natural or man-made stones.
But we risk putting the artist on the background of the life of symbols. Instead, the style, in which the original expressive quality is summarized, is of the artist and not of the symbols.
