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Lot Essay
This work is sold with a photo-certificate signed by the artist.
Asse Spezzata (Broken Board) is an important early work made by Gilberto Zorio in 1967. From this early period onwards much of Zorio's work has been rooted in his alchemical fascination with the symbiotic relationship between energy and material and the impact and echoes that these have on and within the human mind and body. As he explained in an interview with Germano Celant, Asse Spezzata belongs with a number of important early works in which energy and material are used as a chemical metaphor for human experience.
Gilberto Zorio:' The fury with which I attempted to imprison the energy of Torch (1967), whose flames were obtained by throwing dalmine tubes against the wall... followed a childish, almost liberating impulse of personal energy - the one that brings children to destroy things by throwing them on the floor. It was a violent, but extremely delicate gesture, almost an inner heat that I tried to externalize.
Germano Celant : 'It was like freeing a bird of energy, where the surge of animal but human intensity is transformed into image. The sculpture melts the sensitive waters, makes them flow into its bed and unites them. It supplies an amalgam and a golden fixity. But to coagulate energy means to discipline the abundance of ideas and figurations to save only those that possess a solar spark; it is the point at which the eye finds a contact with the vital, human and natural energies.'
Gilberto Zorio: 'I would place the Broken Board 1967, which I later called Lightning Bolt in this sphere. It originates in a violent tug which, exerted on the aluminium tube breaks the board. It is the same image, a combination of violence and softness, that gives shape to the arch; it is as if the rubber had managed to bend the tubular structure. Giovanni Anselmo viewed it at the time as a powerful muscle: personally I saw it as a rebellion of materials in which a weak material bends a stronger one, creating a ring or a belt. Here once again is the relationship with the body that is physicized, whereas at the time Emilio Prini tended to intellectualize his Steps. This inner vision of the body comes to me also from viewing it in chemical terms. Each human is a container of minerals and water: his veins, lungs and organs are an extraordinary chemistry lab made of tubes and alembics.' (G. Celant and G. Zorio: 'A Passage in the Crucible of Artistic Tradition' in Gilberto Zorio exh. cat. IVAM, Valencia, 1991, p. 37)
Asse Spezzata (Broken Board) is an important early work made by Gilberto Zorio in 1967. From this early period onwards much of Zorio's work has been rooted in his alchemical fascination with the symbiotic relationship between energy and material and the impact and echoes that these have on and within the human mind and body. As he explained in an interview with Germano Celant, Asse Spezzata belongs with a number of important early works in which energy and material are used as a chemical metaphor for human experience.
Gilberto Zorio:' The fury with which I attempted to imprison the energy of Torch (1967), whose flames were obtained by throwing dalmine tubes against the wall... followed a childish, almost liberating impulse of personal energy - the one that brings children to destroy things by throwing them on the floor. It was a violent, but extremely delicate gesture, almost an inner heat that I tried to externalize.
Germano Celant : 'It was like freeing a bird of energy, where the surge of animal but human intensity is transformed into image. The sculpture melts the sensitive waters, makes them flow into its bed and unites them. It supplies an amalgam and a golden fixity. But to coagulate energy means to discipline the abundance of ideas and figurations to save only those that possess a solar spark; it is the point at which the eye finds a contact with the vital, human and natural energies.'
Gilberto Zorio: 'I would place the Broken Board 1967, which I later called Lightning Bolt in this sphere. It originates in a violent tug which, exerted on the aluminium tube breaks the board. It is the same image, a combination of violence and softness, that gives shape to the arch; it is as if the rubber had managed to bend the tubular structure. Giovanni Anselmo viewed it at the time as a powerful muscle: personally I saw it as a rebellion of materials in which a weak material bends a stronger one, creating a ring or a belt. Here once again is the relationship with the body that is physicized, whereas at the time Emilio Prini tended to intellectualize his Steps. This inner vision of the body comes to me also from viewing it in chemical terms. Each human is a container of minerals and water: his veins, lungs and organs are an extraordinary chemistry lab made of tubes and alembics.' (G. Celant and G. Zorio: 'A Passage in the Crucible of Artistic Tradition' in Gilberto Zorio exh. cat. IVAM, Valencia, 1991, p. 37)