A unique large ceiling light, 1952

Active as a painter and sculptor in his native city of Turin prior to his move to the United States in the late 1950s, Franco Assetto had been critically regarded as having anticipated the utilitarian iconographies of Pop Art: his bronze casts of bread loaves, exhibited at the Galleria del Bussola, Turin, 1952, pre-dated the bronze beer cans of Jasper Johns by some eight years. Associated with the post-war Informalist group of Italian artists that was to also include Alberto Burri, Assetto’s paintings of the 1950s reveal stylised whiplash motifs and bold strikes, features captured in the structure of this unique ceiling light. Of artisanal, handmade construction, the scale is mobilised by aesthetics suggestive of dynamic movement – elongated boomerang reflectors appear to contra-rotate, issuing spiked satellites of ambient luminosity. With textural acknowledgements at once suggestive of American popular architecture, flash automobile styling or the promise of astral fantasy, the composition can be interpreted as an exercise of style over purpose, a rejection of the Mies-ian proposition that ‘less is more’. With this unique, anti-minimalist construction – boldly dramatic, improbably elaborate yet assured in its expressive certainty – Assetto again reveals himself as an early and prescient pioneer, guiding the way towards Post-Modernism.