Arte Povera - Gallery 6

The use of frozen elements is one of the distinguishing elements of Pier Paolo Calzolari’s process-based artworks. When the freezing unit is switched on, the humidity in the air condenses on the copper sheet, thus creating frost. The build-up of frost over the course of the day transforms the metal surface into an ethereal layer of icy crystals, suggesting an act of alchemy. The white frost has symbolic associations with the absolute but also expresses the precarious conditions of form.

Senza titolo (Omaggio a Fontana) is part of a group of works that reference Lucio Fontana, the Argentine-Italian artist who was influential to Calzolari, specifically with regard to the dimension of the sublime.

The process-based nature of this work requires a durational experience rather than instantaneous visual perception. Viewers can feel the chill of the frost and encounter the work through a multi-sensorial experience, as we might encounter a living work. Viewers are encouraged visit to this work at different times of day to see how it changes from morning to evening.

In the late 1970s, Mario Merz returned to painting, the medium he began with in the 1950s. In his paintings and assemblages of this period, Merz often referenced the imagery of his Arte Povera years: the igloo, an archetypal habitat Merz associated with nomadism; tree branches, recalling natural growth; and neon tubing and bottles, which together represent the flow of energy into the space of everyday life. The dome and the cone on the canvas are two recurring images in Merz’s work.

The dome symbolizes the igloo, and the cone denotes a vortex, the spiral movement that suggests an energy force. The vortex evokes the development of the natural world. The bundled branches—fascine in Italian—evoke natural architecture and kindling. They also recall the Italian fascist symbol of the fasces, a bundle of sticks with an axe head that originated in ancient Rome.

A member of Italy’s anti-fascist resistance during World War II, Merz seems to have displaced the axe blade with the blade-like vortex, thereby calling to mind the power of nature. The glow from the neon light illuminates the branches, highlighting the power of the natural world and the flow of energy out into it.

This untitled work consists of a canvas, a sheet of granite, and a cable tied in a slipknot. The suspension of the stone conveys a certain lightness to the heavy material, while the juxtaposition of the rock with the canvas initiates a dialogue between sculpture and the space of painting. Giovanni Anselmo frequently uses granite in his practice. Its juxtaposition here with materials traditionally associated with painting subverts our expectations for representational, two-dimensional form on the canvas surface. Anselmo both refutes and literalizes historical conception of painting as “a window on the world.”

The opacity and physical presence of the stone refuses access to the space of representation, where we might expect to see an illusionistic image of the world. At the same time, the natural material literalizes painting’s presentation of the world for the viewer. Subverting traditional conceptions of artistic authorship, Anselmo presents the viewer with a massive stone; he asks us to contemplate the literal weight and gravitas of the work of art. The work is an example of Anselmo breaking with artistic conventions and their limitations—a characteristic gesture of Arte Povera.

Giovanni Anselmo often explores the physical forces underlying our experience of space and time. The artist’s use of photography questions the relationship between our experience of the real world and the space and temporality of the photographic image.

In Qui e là, we see a view of natural terrain framed as a landscape. Before taking the photograph, Anselmo set up an aluminum frame to cast a shadow onto the ground in front of him. He then printed the photograph on a light- sensitized canvas, such that the depiction of the frame, aligned with the edges of the canvas, would be the same size as the actual frame. Finally, he placed the same metal frame around the top half of the canvas.

The result is such that the metal frame in two forms—the actual material frame that is here, with us, and the life-size photographic image of the frame when it was there, in the natural terrain—frame the image. The frame physically connects what is on one side (the reality present “here”) with what lies on the other side (the photographic representation of “there”). Together, the actual and depicted frames ask us to contemplate how we perceive space and time.

Penone grew up in the Maritime Alps on Italy’s northwestern Ligurian coast, not far from Turin. Part of the artist’s ongoing engagement with nature, Penone began his now iconic Alberi (Trees) series in 1969.

Through a process he defines as debarking, Penone carves into the wood follow- ing knots created by the earliest branches of growth. For Penone, this process allows for the trunk and branches of the earliest form of the tree to re-emerge. “The tree is a being that memorizes its form in its structure,” explains the artist; “it is the perfect sculpture. Every year of his growth is present within him. The memory of his existence is conserved in his substance: my task is to reveal it.”

In this work, Penone worked with a dead tree he found. The discovery of the grenade shell and barbed wire, visible near the base of the resulting sculpture, speaks to the embattled history of northern Italy during World War II, and especially of the anti-fascist Resistance, which often consolidated in rural areas around urban centers under Mussolini’s regime and German occupation. Alongside Penone’s other works and actions, the Alberi exemplify Penone’s deep interest in nature and our connection to it.

Perhaps best known for his igloos, Mario Merz began his artistic career as a painter. In the 1980s, Merz completed several large canvases that revisited his painting from the 1950s. For Merz, painting was associated with speed, an idea that recalls languages of movement, technology, and energy first associated with Futurism.

Merz often used the Fibonacci sequence in his works. Here, the spiral pattern of the series is echoed by the circular turbine form, seen elsewhere in his use of the shell motif.

Turbina is also reminiscent of the artist’s works made with neon tubing, which he first experimented with in the 1960s. Here, the neon light tube extends out of the raincoat—a recurring element throughout Merz’s oeuvre. It suggests the body of the artist in absentia. The work thus emphasizes the artist’s mobile body, which is constantly on the move, leaving behind enigmatic clues.

The ambiguously entitled Rapsodie inepte is, like many of Calzolari’s works, distinguished by its poetic, lyrical, and transformational qualities. Calzolari’s work combines natural materials with metals and industrial devices, including copper, neon signage, and refrigerator motors.

The artist uses complex machinery to replicate a simple natural process of transformation. As a modern “alchemist,” Calzolari plays with nature and artifice and refuses the mechanical perfection of industry by incorporating nature.

The artist has long been fascinated by naturally occurring as opposed to artificial hues of white. The neon light, which composes the words of the title, and the frozen structures together expose different conditions of whiteness by opposing warmer and colder hues.

In With usura contra naturam, Pier Paolo Calzolari uses tobacco leaves as sculptural material, drawing upon their tactile and olfactory properties as well as their organic form. The artist has always been interested in poetry. He treats his materials as a poet treats his words; through the assemblage of ordinary, familiar elements, his materials resonate with new sensibilities.

The neon comprises two verses from Ezra Pound’s famous Canto XLV (1936) of The Cantos: “with usura” and “contra naturam.” Despite his support of fascism, Pound was widely acknowledged in the late 1960s as a vanguard, engaged poet. Calzolari’s work, like Pound’s Canto, features multiple styles, quotations, and references. By addressing usury as a practice against nature and integrating natural materials into the work, Calzolari created a sculpture that also functions as a poetic statement against capitalism.