Giò Pomodoro
Tensione, 1959
bronze and black marble, 74 × 168 × 39 cm
Despite having changed materials, from metals to stone to marble, during the course of his activity, Giò Pomodoro has always been faithful to his own language, to his stylistic code. Sharing with his brother Arnaldo the idea of a sculptural work as the co-presence of tensions, the artist chose the surface as an object of plastic intervention until the end of the 1960s. He intervenes on it to obtain a plastic development through flexions of the material, recesses and protrusions that give thickness to the surface, making it almost an elastic body. Plastic development is, so to speak, reconquered, after the all-round has been denied by flat development, as if originating from the latent force in matter. This dialectic between different properties becomes more marked with the presence of a base on which the sculpture is installed, as in the work in the collection, which further subtracts visual "weight" from the mass, already elaborated with folds and recesses that cross it in horizontal direction.
from: Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro. La Collezione permanente, exhibition catalogue, edited by G. Verzotti, A. Vettese, Milano, Skira, 2007, p. 178.
