.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Arnaldo Pomodoro's Disco Solare was created in 1989-1990, and perfectly demonstrates the incredible, rich tension between gleaming metal surfaces and the deliberately blistered interior which characterises his greatest works. The surface of a bronze disk glows and gleams, exposing an erosion at its core which break up its seemingly perfect form. It appears as though the circle has exploded and burst from a central point, as the artist employs a highly polished surface. As a free-standing sculpture, Disco Solare encourages the viewer to absorb it in the round, discovering new lines and marks with every step they take, mirroring the unexpected nature of our everyday lives. Allusions to the natural environment is also made here in the surface marks and also as the interior of the sun-like disk appear to have ripped open, revealing its almost machine-like interior in a seemingly organic manner. Pomodoro is engaging with eternal artistic concern the possibilities and boundaries of human control over material. Disco Solare remains an important exploration of matter and void, presence and absence and, ultimately, between ideal perfection and earthly reality.
Looking at the contrast between the Brancusi-like pristine 'exterior' surface and the dark, rutted interior, filled with the signature 'writing' which so resembles modern circuitry, the viewer can appreciate Pomodoro's ability to balance idealism and realism in his work. After all, the crisp beauty of the shining disc recalls the sun as well as having its own satisfyingly geometric perfection - it is almost Platonic, shimmering and mirage-like - and yet through the fissures in the surface appear the etched elements that add such a textural, sensual wealth to the sculpture, hinting at real life, at mortality, at the human factor.
Exploring space and surface, a tension is created between the process of creation and the act of destruction as Pomodoro has sliced the golden disk. This is the tension that exemplifies much of the artist’s work: a material struggle between geometric perfection and necessary ruin and rupture. As Pomodoro wrote, ‘for me the ‘destruction’ element in form was my most important discovery, and the most authentic both in terms of myself and my times’– and he has added marks upon the surface that he refers to as ‘erosions’, these fissures add a textural element to the sculpture, hinting at modern life and the presence of humanity (A. Pomodoro quoted in S. Hunter, Arnaldo Pomodoro, New York 1982, p. 52) These material explorations led Pomodoro to first develop this motif in the 1960s, marking his artistic awakening and arrival at a signature style that he has worked in across three decades.
Looking at the contrast between the Brancusi-like pristine 'exterior' surface and the dark, rutted interior, filled with the signature 'writing' which so resembles modern circuitry, the viewer can appreciate Pomodoro's ability to balance idealism and realism in his work. After all, the crisp beauty of the shining disc recalls the sun as well as having its own satisfyingly geometric perfection - it is almost Platonic, shimmering and mirage-like - and yet through the fissures in the surface appear the etched elements that add such a textural, sensual wealth to the sculpture, hinting at real life, at mortality, at the human factor.
Exploring space and surface, a tension is created between the process of creation and the act of destruction as Pomodoro has sliced the golden disk. This is the tension that exemplifies much of the artist’s work: a material struggle between geometric perfection and necessary ruin and rupture. As Pomodoro wrote, ‘for me the ‘destruction’ element in form was my most important discovery, and the most authentic both in terms of myself and my times’– and he has added marks upon the surface that he refers to as ‘erosions’, these fissures add a textural element to the sculpture, hinting at modern life and the presence of humanity (A. Pomodoro quoted in S. Hunter, Arnaldo Pomodoro, New York 1982, p. 52) These material explorations led Pomodoro to first develop this motif in the 1960s, marking his artistic awakening and arrival at a signature style that he has worked in across three decades.