Arcangelo Sassolino

What I am trying to capture is the change of state, that instant in which something is becoming something else.

Italian sculptor Arcangelo Sassolino uses technology and mechanics to reveal the inner life of his raw materials. Extreme force, tension, speed, heat and gravity are all harnessed to bring about dramatic transformations, to test the physical limits of matter, the fragile balance between control and surrender. Why, he asks, cannot sculpture flow like time instead of being cold, rigid and devoid of the vital energy that produced it?

Change arrives, as it must, but Sassolino often engages our anticipation for what’s about to happen. His sculptures act as ‘psychological traps’, he says, drawing us in as spectators, igniting our suspense as we watch and wait.

As you move through the exhibition, you will see various industrial materials put through their paces. Working through a great pile of wooden beams, a hydraulic piston methodically forces each piece to splinter and break. A suspended sheet of glass bows under the weight of a boulder, alongside a truck tyre squeezed and distorted under immense pressure. Twin metal discs, coated in thick industrial oil, spin slowly while gravity does its work. And, from the ceiling of one entire gallery, steel heated to 1500°C showers down as liquid metal and firelight in the darkness. ‘When steel melts, its energy becomes light,’ Sassolino explains. At the Venice Biennale in 2022 he used fiery droplets of molten steel to evoke the dramatic chiaroscuro of Caravaggio’s seventeenth-century paintings, specifically the brutal Beheading of Saint John the Baptist. There was darkness, then light, then darkness returned. But here and now, Sassolino seems to look more to the future than the past, playing with fire as a destructive and regenerative force in our rapidly changing world.

Maybe mine is, at its core, a work about the open wound that is life.

Arcangelo’s experiments with physics bring with them a reminder of our own impermanence. His art is a metaphor, perhaps, for our own flash in the dark—for change that is as inevitable as our end; but where even destruction can bring forth further transformation and renewal.

Curated by Sarah Wallace, Jarrod Rawlins and Olivier Varenne

Image: diplomazija astuta (detail), 2022, Arcangelo Sassolino
Steel, water, induction and electric system