Movimento in piena aria e nel profondo

This gigantic, complex work is crammed with hostile-looking, bellicose fragments; it is a menacing world adrift in a galaxy of the most unbridled imagination. The wall we see is monumental, Pomodoro’s preferred scale. The work, commissioned by the Bank of Italy for the vast spaces of the Donato Menichella Centre in Frascati, which was inaugurated in 1999, is a diptych, joined in the middle by a sort of hinge. The two panels present large round forms placed in the central part, one a full, polished surface, the other consisting of a series of interrupted circles which, intersecting each other, impart a sense of rotation. The round forms are like great targets pierced by sharp, serrated arrows and lances ensnared in the tangle of signs. The composition is filled with cutting and comb-like elements, oriented in different directions, superimposed and grouped in series, that evoke the convulsive, pounding movement of a battle. The vitality of the abstract image recalls the animated germination of signs and segments typical of the first Informal works. In the words of Renato Barilli: “The whole ‘Pomodoro system’ turns on the dialectical clash between ‘being’, i.e. pieces, moments of inert, massive matter, and the ‘nothingness’ of consciousness, a sort of principle of emptying out that introduces pauses, voids, moments of alleviation in the counterpart, keeping it from suffocating from a surfeit of fullness”.