Nero di Atlantide

This large sculpture is in a particularly precious marble. The forms are amoeba-like but extended in their fields, chasing slowly after one another. The design is as if simplified, terse. The black of the stone absorbs every part of the incision, making the sculpture flatter. The sculptor created these surfaces not only for the clear purpose of cancelling all figurative references but also in order to free the structure from every “physical constriction” by removing depth, conferring upon it an unnatural body. Consagra was one of the most consistent, tenacious advocates of abstraction. From the outset he was part of the international abstract cultural milieu found in Paris with such artists as Brancusi, Giacometti, Arp and Pevsner. Among painters too, his friendships included the most polemical of abstract artists, such as Dorazio and Turcato. “Consagra”, writes Nello Ponente, “rejects every form of naturalism, and he takes naturalism to embrace also material trompe-l’oeil and some varieties of surreal and anthropomorphic expressionism. … What moves this artist is not a crisis of values but the determination to reaffirm certain principles, always in a language that is totally contemporary and constantly enriched”.