Sfera con perforazione

Lacerations, excavations, and geometric furrows crack the pristine surface of Arnaldo Pomodoro’s Sfera con perforazione (1977). The seemingly infallible bronze orb has been split through to its core, revealing an otherworldly interior. Where Pomodoro’s early works were high reliefs, by the 1970s his practice had been completely taken over by explorations of three-dimensional geometries. Following a trip to the United States in 1959, he had begun to explore more dimensional forms, casting discs, cubes, and spheres in polished bronze. His quest to sculpt space resulted partly from his own encounter with the country’s vast land, which he said produced a ‘different way of seeing because American landscape is space itself’, but also from the art he saw during his visit (A. Pomodoro interviewed by A. Rigamonti di Cutò, Studio International, 12 April 2016). While studying Constantin Brâncuși’s works at the Museum of Modern Art, Pomodoro began to see geometric perfect as ‘outmoded’: ‘This realisation,’ he recalled, ‘led me to probe geometrical shapes to discover their inner turmoil, the mystery they concealed and their compressed vitality’ (A. Pomodoro, ibid.).

Long captivated by the scientific advancements of the era—specifically the Russian satellite Sputnik and the space race—Pomodoro’s enthusiasm can be seen in the futuristic, almost celestial tracery of Sfera con perforazione. Despite this fascination, he eschewed mechanical processes in his art, casting sculptures such as Sfera con perforazione using the traditional lost-wax technique. To create his sculptures, he first carved into a plaster or clay block, with these elements forming the jagged fissures and architectural incisions of the final work. ‘I set up a contrast to their smooth and polished parts a discordant tension, a completeness made out of things that are incomplete,’ Pomodoro has explained. ‘Sculpture for me is a process of excavation and relief, without defining a space, and without establishing a centre’ (A. Pomodoro, quoted in G. Carandente, Arnaldo Pomodoro, exh. cat. The Hakone Open Air Museum, Japan 1994, p. 24).

In contrasting smoothness and texture, weight and absence, works such as Sfera con perforazione are profoundly enigmatic. Their internal ‘writing’ seems at once ancient and futuristic: is this a Rosetta Stone or a beacon from a future civilization? Atemporal and otherworldly, Pomodoro’s Sfera con perforazione is nevertheless decidedly human. Beyond the languages of Modernism and the open spaces of America, his grammar is rooted in his home landscape of Montefeltro, in its craggy rocks and cliffs, the architecture of the earth. Luminous and solar, the present sculpture charts new frontiers, offering a hopeful, determined reach through time.