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Lot Essay
This work is registered in the Arnaldo Pomodoro Archives, Milan, under no. 176.
Il Cubo appears to be the result of a gleaming science fiction dream that has crashed against the rock of reality. Its pseudo-technological guts have been rent and revealed through the holes that Pomodoro has sculpted in the surface. Like a hidden world escaping its bounds and spilling into our own reality, this more detailed dimension, lurking beneath the uniform flatness of the cube's implied original state, hints deeper levels of existence and understanding in this world, as though through the intervention of hazard we have suddenly become able to perceive the strings that control our world.
The contrast between the textures of Il Cubo, which was executed early in Pomodoro's career as a sculptor and dates from the period in which he discovered the visual idiom for which he has become renowned, owes much to the artist's own background, as well as to the wider backdrop of Europe during the 1950s and early 1960s. For Pomodoro had originally been an architect involved in the reconstruction of the battle-scarred Post-War Italy. In Il Cubo, then, the texture of the new architecture of hope is evident as much as its own mortality, its exposed guts, the violence that necessitated new buildings in the first place.
In this sculpture, Pomodoro deliberately explores the tension between the sheen of the shiny flat surfaces and the tears that reveal the strange and intricate innards of Il Cubo. Like the inside of a piano or of some strange and impossible machine, these painstakingly-created elements reveal Pomodoro's interest only in science and technology, in the new machines that had made space exploration and skyscrapers a shiny reality. Il Cubo also allows the artist to explore the more formal aspects of sculpture. With their tooth-like formations, the small elements make use of the space that they pierce and cut into as much as they do of the metal itself. Likewise, the large 'tears' that reveal this supposedly hidden surface themselves show the sculpture incorporating and even, on some level, devouring the space around it. In this way, Pomodoro makes use of the negative space that so fascinated him as a medium in the construction of his work.
Il Cubo appears to be the result of a gleaming science fiction dream that has crashed against the rock of reality. Its pseudo-technological guts have been rent and revealed through the holes that Pomodoro has sculpted in the surface. Like a hidden world escaping its bounds and spilling into our own reality, this more detailed dimension, lurking beneath the uniform flatness of the cube's implied original state, hints deeper levels of existence and understanding in this world, as though through the intervention of hazard we have suddenly become able to perceive the strings that control our world.
The contrast between the textures of Il Cubo, which was executed early in Pomodoro's career as a sculptor and dates from the period in which he discovered the visual idiom for which he has become renowned, owes much to the artist's own background, as well as to the wider backdrop of Europe during the 1950s and early 1960s. For Pomodoro had originally been an architect involved in the reconstruction of the battle-scarred Post-War Italy. In Il Cubo, then, the texture of the new architecture of hope is evident as much as its own mortality, its exposed guts, the violence that necessitated new buildings in the first place.
In this sculpture, Pomodoro deliberately explores the tension between the sheen of the shiny flat surfaces and the tears that reveal the strange and intricate innards of Il Cubo. Like the inside of a piano or of some strange and impossible machine, these painstakingly-created elements reveal Pomodoro's interest only in science and technology, in the new machines that had made space exploration and skyscrapers a shiny reality. Il Cubo also allows the artist to explore the more formal aspects of sculpture. With their tooth-like formations, the small elements make use of the space that they pierce and cut into as much as they do of the metal itself. Likewise, the large 'tears' that reveal this supposedly hidden surface themselves show the sculpture incorporating and even, on some level, devouring the space around it. In this way, Pomodoro makes use of the negative space that so fascinated him as a medium in the construction of his work.