Tent, Column

Gilberto Zorio’s works are unending fields of physical and mental energy. One of the leading figures of the Arte Povera group, since 1966 Zorio has directed his investigations toward the processes issues that make each work continually mutable. Setting up chemical or physical reactions, the artist enters his works into a life cycle in which he is present as a spectator. Time is often an important component, in that only the natural passage of hours and days makes fully tangible the transformations to which the works are subjected.
In Tenda (Tent), 1967, the evaporation of seawater and the resulting traces in the form of salt crystals delineate the dynamic of a natural landscape. The salt lake that forms at the viewer’s eye level corresponds to the anthropocentric dimension that Zorio celebrates in his works. Even the installation’s metal tubes on which a cloth rests are conceived by the artist as within a human dimension, and he compares their function to that of the veins and skeleton in a body.
Zorio renews the language of sculpture, freeing it from the fixity and heaviness with which it has traditionally been associated. In Colonna (Column), 1967, a tube of heavy asbestos cement rests on an inner-tire tube, almost as if it were an overturned column. The tube thus remains in precarious equilibrium, and its weight causes the inner tube to harden and the rubber to lose its flexibility. The juxtaposition of the two materials erodes the apparent nature of each, suggesting the image of a rising architecture.