Marino Marini
Guerriero, 1958-1959
bronze, 71 × 124 × 74 cm
Among the protagonists of twentieth-century European sculpture, Marini worked in an era of returns to order and revivals of the classical tradition, especially in the field of sculpture. His synthesis of the volumes, however, borders on an approach to abstract formulas, allowing a tension to create pure volumes to emerge which cannot be reconciled with either the narrativity or the metaphysical detachment of many of his contemporaries, and which also attest to a strong dramatic component. In the 1950s the tension to define pure volumes was accentuated, and even if the artist never detached himself from figuration, he greatly reduced the indices of recognisability, as indeed happens in quite a few examples of the "Horse and Rider" cycle . The Guerriero in the collection falls into these cases: entirely developed horizontally, while we would expect a vertical figure, its structure refers to the figure of an animal standing on two legs with a thick forked tail, and this is perhaps the warrior of the title, built with extreme freedom in the distribution of volumes. The bronze here seems to want to camouflage itself with the stone, so evident are the traces of the material that make the surfaces rough, almost the development to the extreme consequences of the archaism of the first research.
from: Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro. La Collezione permanente, exhibition catalogue, edited by G. Verzotti, A. Vettese, Milano, Skira, 2007, p. 176.
