Page 69 - The Documenta issue of World of Art magazine (2002)

ARTIST PROFILE
ARTIST PROFILE fact. Nor should we ignore the dimension where time (feared
fact that glass is probably the and given) silently dissolves and
most difficult of materials to where it seems possible to grasp
manipulate. However, in parallel a nascent, hitherto inexistent,
terms, and with equal deftness visual event. The plastic vision, in
and just as much skill, Seguso has fact, adheres to a Weltanschauung
also attained a level of technical that gives unity to an event that,
and expressive mastery in the at the same time, is capable of
art of fashioning metals such as manifesting form and material,
steel, of engraving different types substantiating light and poetry
of wood and sculpting marble and and consequently attributing
stone. What definitively marks these to a definite context. And
him out as a superb sculptor yet, once more, it is still every bit
is a rare, exquisite sensitivity, the artist who moves us along
which enables him to transform towards these sensations in that
the associative use of these he is able to innervate creations
different, antithetical materials that are extremely difficult from a
into a perfect synthesis, making technical and executive point of
them co-exist with a mastery of view with a powerful yet delicate
measure such that no sensory poetry - in a word, delicate. From
perception is ever disturbed. what is Arp’s, Brancusi’s and
What, in fact, an artist like Seguso Fontana’s and-statuary and anti-
is interested in is eliciting new symmetrical quest (without for
(continuous, ineffable) sensations all of this ignoring Henry Moore’s
in anyone who wants to initiate a admirable lesson), Seguso’s
dialogue with his works. sculptures have drawn and further
enriched a lyricism and gentleness
Almost as if he were a modem that almost touch on the heights
alchemist, Seguso experiments of the sublime, infusing the viewer
with the chemical reactions that with a sense of accomplished
take place between multiple serenity, peace and satisfying
elements, and in making his calm - almost as if the viewer
sculptures he deploys countless had been plunged into the oneinc
tools, apparatuses, machines equilibrium of one of Matisse’s
- rods, chisels, compressors, dances.
blow torches, ribbons, syringes
and even the surgeon’s scalpel. Glass annuls within light and
As if he were wildly thumbing transparency a physicality from
through codicils detailing the which no material is able to free
molecular peculiarities of each itself, as Pierre Restany once put
of the materials he uses, Seguso it. However, once we reach these
studies, calculates geometrical heights, glass becomes something
and mathematical dispositions else, and glass sculpture goes
and then configures the intimate beyond itself. As if they were ritual
relationships that come into being objects plucked by imagination
between form and space so as not from universes parallel to our
to contradict the laws underlying own, Seguso’s sculptures tell us
rules that, for an artist, might about his love for the things that
well be described as “harmonious surround him. Ideas, concepts
proportions”. and thoughts surface and extend
Livio Seguso
3 to the rhythm of the apparition
of forms, while the unconscious,

Seguso’s entire plastic like the deepest of sensations, is
made lighter thanks to a process
work seems to be imbued of rarefaction issuing from an
with an aura of metaphysical entirely spiritual light transmitted
suspension, absorbed within by the artist’s soul.
an “otherworldly”, still, sidereal WORLD of ART 67