Giuseppe Spagnulo

Neither inert material nor its static completion exists in the imperative of a creative Form. Right from the moment he started, each work of art of Giuseppe Spagnulo seems to incarnate this assumption, and it is in this forces which transform and overturn any form of evidence that the force of a thought or an ideology strikes with immense epic and tragic power, a sort of “mental excitation” that represents the stamp of the artist manifested in the creation of his work. “The pressure of the forge”, Spagnulo remebered, “is used by factory workers to give form to an object. To me as a sculptor, it is used to extract form from an object. I differ from the worker as he beats the iron and presses it; I act on these tremendous pressures, which, when all is said and done, are also useless, because I use all that force against itself”. Sculpting is not just an act af moulding but above all a positive action, one that identifies the forge with the site of active thought, the space in which physical and alchemical transformations take place, and the struggle between matter, space and the Void occurs. Whereas art critics rightly identify Spagnulo’s work as being intimately connected with the action of fire, it is also true that the incarnation and representation of universal force of Fire both fascinates and serves the artist. He is not overawed by the supremacy of fire but he is in continual dialogue and dialectical relationship with it; there is tension and at times he offers up an absolute challenge. Residing in the infinite vitality of every material, of the molecules of clay, earth and steeel, is experimentation, the definition of a space, the natural aggression of gravity and the Weight of the material both on itself and “in the Void”: the Void that is the basic ingredient, the material of the sculpture itself…